By Dan Cederholm
Review by: Alex
Sometimes browsing the internet can become a depressing sight, so many error messages, so many under construction pages, so many irritating errors which make sites either impossible for you to view or compatibility issues which make you want to throw your monitor out of the window. Unfortunately due to the ever evolving internet we work in, there is no one way which can future proof our sites against the onslaught of new browsers, different standards and poor quality design work. Bulletproof website design does not try and future-proof your website however what it does do is use standards and flexible coding methods to try and weather proof your website... the difference? Well as we cannot tell the future there is no way we can know when a new wave of browsers or code will wipe our sites off of the map. However if we weather proof our code, it may not last the storm but it has an increased rate of at least having basic functionality even, if god forbid, everything else crumbles beneath our feet. This book aims to help you to protect against worst case scenarios and does this with elegance. In these 9 chapters you will learn some good techniques for making your website hold out from the incoming storms of flexibility and durability. The advantages of this book are that by the end you will have a better knowledge of flexible development and will understand the reasons why putting up some safeguards is necessary. However this book is not the most comprehensive book on CSS design which may make you want to consider getting something else alongside it such as a CSS cookbook or perhaps Meyer's collection. Overall, this book is a great way to get past the nitty gritty bits of website design and will help you hold down the fort as new browsers pop up from all around the internet.
The chapters are as follows... Chapter 1 helps you to make your text more flexible so that it will have increased durability within different web browsers. Chapter 2 explains how to make your website navigation scalable so that it will work in almost any browser and resolution your users throw at you. Chapter 3 describes expandable rows and how to produce bulletproof ones which will not affect how they are displayed. Chapter 4 shows you how to work with creative floating through CSS. Chapter 5 mentions how to make indestructible boxes in CSS which won't get displaced or dismissed by browser bugs or visual errors. Chapter 6 explains how to make your website work even if there are no images or CSS or scripts available to the browser so that even in (almost) plaintext format the site will still work effectively. Chapter 7 describes how to work with tables when they need to be used and how to make them work properly. Chapter 8 shows you the dynamics of making a fluid layout and how this can be achieved with style. Finally Chapter 9 helps you put all of the previous steps together to make a finished layout which will be as bulletproof as you can hope to achieve.
This book is suitable for the following types of people interested in website development:
- Website designers who want to make their website as "future proof" as today's technology can offer.
- People who are CSS developers who want to know some "best practices" for visual development.
- Designers and developers who want to produce websites with standards based code in mind.