Eases the Transition

OK, so you really know that you need to move on to Style Sheets and the new version of HTML. But you've put it off. The books on XHTML and CSS are long and tedious, and written for beginners so they contain a lot of fluff that you already know.

This book is different. It starts with the presumption that you are already an HTML programmer. In fact you are probably running a site that has a few hundred pages on line and you don't want to go redo the whole thing. This book starts with a fictional web site that uses good HTML 4.0 as was proper in the late 1990's. It's a typical site with lots of tables within tables as was the style of the day.

The first thing that he does is go re-write the HTML into XHTML, removing the commands that handle the style of the presentation. Going to XHMTL is a pretty straightford thing, but without the style aspects you have a pretty dull page.

Second he says let's use CSS to make the page pretty once again. Since you've seen the pages. And you've looked at the HTML that generated them, the task is a conversion, not a design the page problem. This probably matches your real problem a lot better than the way most books cover the subject.

Third is the first word in the title: Accessible. There are now laws coming into effect that say a web site should be accessible to people with various disabilities. What does this mean, and how must you think about page design to make the site accessible?

Finally there is a chapter on what's coming. The web is dynamic and the rules are still changing. This chapter covers the things that are being considered, designed, or discussed about in the committees that make the rules. This is what you will be having to learn next.

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