HTML Mastery: Semantics, Standards, and Styling

Review

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Paul Haine might not be well-known in the web world as a book author, but his work nevertheless provides a very good overview of what to care about when writing standard compliant markup. After laying out the foundations (elements vs tags, block vs inline, XHTML vs HTML etc) in Chapter 1, he continues with going through HTML markup elements and explaining when and where to use them (”Use the right tag for the right job”).

Chapter 3 is entirely devoted to tables—how to create a basic markup, what to add to enhance accessibility and how to use JavaScript to provide an even nicer User Experience (e.g. table sorting). Chapter 4 is the same, except it is dedicated to forms. Again, Paul goes into markup, how to use CSS to style them and where JavaScript comes in handy to improve bits and pieces here and there.

The following Chapter provides an introduction into Meta data and an overview of Microformats. Paul also explains at this point whats behind XOXO and XFN and gives a brief introduction into the Semantic Web. Chapter 6 deals with methods how to rewrite your old markup and give it more semantic meaning using the right element for the right job—and subsequently avoid things like divitis, classitis and span-mania. The last chapter gives an outlook towards new developments to come, such as Web Applications 1.0 and XHTML 2.0 (at the time of writing).

From my perspective, this book targets the intermediate front end developer, who might want to transition from table-based markup to using proper, semantic markup—and then use CSS to style the document. It gives a great overview of what kind of markup elements the web developer has at his disposal and when and where to use it. He also provides some quick introductions to things that were and kind of still are “hip” in the web industry, like Microformats.

Even though I already knew most of the stuff Paul writes about, it is good to have some kind of reference at hand when you are not absolutely sure if it might be appropriate to use this or that element in your markup. There were also a handful things that I was not aware of or I did not know about in that detail. Some of his examples also provide a good (if not best) practice for a certain problem and I would consider using them in my own work.

Bottom Line

This book is definitely for people trying to write proper semantic markup. And for people who are already that advanced, it has a couple of things in there that you might not have heard about in detail before, so even the pro can get something out of it.