Testimonials
“The Bible of web standardization”
Being a web designer from the birth of the web, I am well aware of the browser inconsistencies and implementation issues of technologies caused by the lack of consensus. In my opinion, “Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML” is the most comprehensive book on web standards, because most books with a title containing “Web Standards” usually provide technology descriptions only that are often limited to the discussion of markup and style sheets, thus oversimplifying web standardization to writing valid HTML and valid CSS. In fact, there are far more web standards than the ones that speficy markup or styles, as described in the book in detail. Full standard compliance also covers proper serving, accurate settings for character encoding, valid news feeds, valid metadata annotations, valid XML, valid implementation of objects and scripts, as well as browser and resolution independence. Even the markup should meet additional criteria on accessibility, document structure, semantics, and interoperability. “Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML” covers the UTF-8 character encoding, the MIME types, HTML5 APIs, CSS3 modules, SVG, MathML, RDF, XML serializations, Semantic Web standards and machine-readable metadata, accessibility, and standardization concerns. The book has a dedicated chapter on validation, which is a fundamental task in website standardization, however, it is still missing from all the similar titles I've read so far.
The reader gets a wonderful mixture of theory and practical techniques. The book provides not only a review of web standards, but also a huge number of sample code to demonstrate coding from scratch. The code listings benefit from the hand coding expertise of the author. Moreover, the logical structure makes it easy to find any code, making the book ideal for daily use. The author compares web standards by category, and contrasts the competing ones.
The chapters on Semantic Web and web accessibility are extraordinary, and are better than many books written exclusively about these fields.
Undoubtedly, “Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML” is the best book on web standards. I can recommend it to any developer, researcher, and enthusiast interested in web development and especially standards-compliant development. Even web browser vendors could learn a lot from it.
Since the references are precise and the W3C specifications can be retrieved through permanent URLs, the book might also be an excellent university textbook and ideal for web design courses.
A web designer without a copy of “Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML” is like an IT pro without a computer. The importance of web standards is unquestionable, and web developers have to face the inevitable differences of rendering engines on a daily basis. The book helps web developers deal with these challenges.
In my opinion, “Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML” is the ultimate book of web standards and deserves the honour of being called the “Bible of web standardization.”
A review from Amazon.com
“Theory and code of web design”
“Well written with fresh up to date content on web site standards for development. Helped me quickly understand important design techniques and aspects for web design, which is important for development of professional websites for mass viewers. Useful for study as well as quick reference to subjects. Contains easy to read theory and code examples, with lots of things I did not know.”
Michael van Diermen, Web Designer
“Sikos includes here several important topics not covered in many of the other books on Web standards, including internationalization, server configuration, and Web syndication.”
Will Wallace, Association For Computing Machinery
“This book was useful and made it easy to incorporate new features into my existing code.”
P. Vandenberg