Book

Web standards

Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML

Sikos, L. F. Web standards – Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML. Apress, Inc., New York, USA, 2011, ISBN 978-1-4302-4041-9 (Print)/ISBN 978-1-4302-4042-6 (eBook)/ISBN 978-1-4302-4043-3 (myCopy); 528 ps.

Create optimized, browser-independent websites using web standards

The book cover

Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML is a comprehensive guide to current and future standards for the World Wide Web. It reveals techniques to obtain standards compliance in development and redesign through step-by-step guides, along with the most common web standards problems and their solutions.

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A Web standards bestseller

#2 bestseller on Amazon in XML programming, 2012
#3 “most wished for” book on Amazon in XML programming, 2012
#37 bestseller on Amazon in network programming, 2012
Rated 5 out of 5 stars on Amazon

At a glance

Step-by-step guides to hand coding
Common problems and their solutions
Practical tips and tricks, best practices
Significance of website standardization
Theoretical background of web standards
Standardization bodies, events, and resources
Web technologies from the standardista point of view
Fundamental web design principles and Web Quality Assurance
Major specifications of the Open Web Platform
- CSS3 modules and features (Web Fonts, CSS3 transitions, etc.)
- Web accessibility, WAI-ARIA 1.0, WCAG 1.0, WCAG 2.0, and U.S. Section 508
- HTML5 APIs (Canvas, Geolocation, Web Storage, Web Workers, WebSocket, etc.)
- The Semantic Web, machine-readable metadata, RDF technologies, RDFa, HTML5 microdata

Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML provides solutions to the most common website problems, and gives you a deep understanding of web standards and how they can be applied to improve your website. You will learn how to create fully standards-compliant websites and provide search engine-optimized Web documents with faster download times, accurate rendering, correct appearance and layout, lower development cost, approved accessibility, backward and forward compatibility, and easy maintenance and content updating. The book covers all major Web standards, focusing on syntax, grammar, recommended annotations, and other standardization concerns.

Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML is also a comprehensive guide to current and future standards for the World Wide Web. As a web developer, you’ll have seen problems with inconsistent appearance and behavior of the same site in different browsers. Web standards can and should be used to completely eliminate these problems. Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML describes how you can make the most of web standards, through technology discussions as well as practical sample code that you can use for your own sites and web applications. It also provides a quick guide to standard website creation for Web developers.

Learn techniques and best practices to achieve full standards compliance
Write valid markup, styles, and news feeds from scratch or standardize websites by redesign
Restrict markup to semantics and provide reliable layout, separate content from presentation and behaviour

What You’ll Learn

The importance and benefits of Web standards
How to write valid markup from scratch
The most up-to-date standards, rather than non-finalized specifications
How to provide meaningful semantics and machine-readable metadata
How to restrict markup to semantics
How to achieve full standard compliance reasonably

Web standards are not fixed sets of rules but a constantly evolving list of finalized technical specifications of web technologies released by standardization bodies such as the W3C, the WHATWG, the ERCIM, the IETF, the Ecma International, the Unicode Consortium, the DCMI, the IANA, the OASIS, and the ISO. This is why it is crucial to learn how to distinguish those specifications that are under development from the ones that already reached the final development status (in case of W3C specifications, the highest maturity level).

In website development, there are competing specifications and formats you should know. By reading this book, you will be able to choose the more advanced technologies, standards, and techniques between the two or more options. For example, two popular formats are used in web syndication, Atom and RSS, however, Atom is the more advanced between the two formats due to its IANA-registered Internet Media Type, Relax NG support, XML namespace, and other features, and thus it should be preferred.

Who This Book Is For

Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML provides a complete reference of Web standardization resources for website developers. It can also be recommended as a university textbook for web development courses.