I don’t like programming books. My own small collection has a lot of snoozers, and only a couple cloudy gems. Lucky for me, the last time I visited the local Barnes and Noble, I discovered Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook by Dan Cederholm. The book is published by Friends of ED, a name I keep hearing, but I hadn’t taken a look at any of their titles yet. After reading this one, I’ll be sure to check out any others I see.

A typical tech book fails for one of the following reasons:

• The subject matter is only useful to a complete newbie.
• The writer wants to cover a ton of information, but never gives the reader enough details.
• The subject matter is sufficiently focused, but the content is extremely dry and doesn’t flow.

Web Standards Solutions focuses on a single, focused subject. Dan Cederholm tells his readers about web standards, the reasons why they should be used, and the best methods for using them. Don’t expect a manual for learning XHTML or CSS. You’ll find many overlooked and underused aspects of these ubiquitous web development tools. Each chapter focuses on a single item, such as headers, lists, tables, or forms. In a particular chapter, Dan gives several methods for creating the item on a page. The first two or three methods usually look pretty familiar, and they get the job done. The reader should expect to see markup choices he or she has made in the past. The final method (though sometimes there are two) does the job using only XHTML and CSS as they were intended. The best part of each chapter is when Dan gives the reader specific reasons why he thinks it’s best to use the solution with web standards. Generally, he points out that the pages are much easier to style and that the method makes markup more structured, readable, and maintainable. In many cases, he adds that the code helps with accessibility since it can be handled better by screen readers or other non-standard browsers.

My favorite sections are where Dan admits that sometimes best practices can’t give a developer what he or she is trying to create. He tells the reader about some specific challenges he has faced in the real world, with examples. He shows how he minimized the impact on the markup without creating too many maintainability hassles. Likewise, I found the “Extra Credit” section at the end of every chapter very useful. He usually shows a few different ways to style what he covered in the chapter. If the web standards method renders differently by default than the non-standard methods, he shows the reader how to change the style so that it looks the same.

Dan’s insights provide many great ideas that I’m sure will make me code certain aspects of webpages differently. He covers a lot of HTML tags that aren’t often used, and I fully intend to pepper my markup with new and interesting tags that I know will be useful. Web Standards Solutions will be off the shelf often and it won’t collect as much dust as a good chunk of my programming book library seems to do.