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Reviewing books about web and computer related books

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Cascading Style Sheets: The Designer's Edge by Molly Holzschlag

Author: Molly E. Holzschlag
Publisher: Sybex
Publish Date: March 2003

CSS, the designers edge. One of the difficult aspects of web standards for experienced web site developers is making the actual transition. With too many developers with lots of experience in the amateur methods, the market is crying out for a decent handbook to guide and teach new web standards methods.

Structured Markup

Molly Holzschlag's Cascading Style Sheets: The Designers Edge fills this gap. It starts off talking about structured markup, focusing on the practical aspects as well as dabbling with the theory, introducing XHTML. With that foundation in place, Molly dives into a step by step explanation of stylesheets.

Stylesheets

The text is easy to follow and concise. Each facet of style sheets is introduced one piece at a time. From typography to fonts, through to colours and positioning. Molly explains each piece along with numerous examples and demonstrations.

The bulk of the book explains and teaches CSS, and its a pleasure to read. But it doesn't stop there. Molly wraps up with a superb step-by-step illustration of taking an existing tables based 'old-school' design and converting it first to a simple table layout with practical use of Cascading Stylesheets. Once the look and feel is similar to the original, she then migrates towards a pure CSS layout. I found the actual journey insightful and instructive.

Finally, there are a few case studies of web standards based designs, including the famous Wired redesign. Also, the reader is guided through a few Eric Meyer CSS showcases which points to the future potential of CSS as a capable design language.

A few oddities

There are a couple of errors in the text that cause a little confusion (for example some examples the style rules don't match the explanatory text: 'Styling the body element' p69, the body rule doesn't set all margins to 20 pixels). I felt there was a page missing between pages 113 and 114, where the topic jumps from a list of text-decoration values right across to text-shadows values plus examples - it felt like examples of text-decorations was missing. It may be just that the book flows so smoothly, and this section just hiccups a little.

Page 58 contains the only technical hitch: in the shorthand method of setting all four margins, the order is incorrectly listed. This has been picked up in the errata page for this book, and the correct order is detailed later on page 71 in the Note box. The error did throw me into confusion for a bit.

Recommendation

But still, this book is an excellent and practical guide about modern professional web development, just a handful of tiny flaws. If you are an experienced web developer or ecommerce developer that's worked with nested tabled layouts and you want to learn about web standards, give this book a try.

Sunday, April 02, 2006

Color for Websites by Molly Holzschlag

Author: Molly E. Holzschlag
Publisher: RotoVision
Publish Date: October 2001

Colour for Websites For a web developer colour is one of those elusive qualities that's difficult to use. It seems like either you understand it completely, or you don't. The problem with using colour on the web is that its different to how colour works in print and in real life. This difference is one of those mysteries that makes being a web developer difficult.

In my current job I've had to deal with branding experts who talk about tints, harmonies and palettes, about emotive cues and high-net worth designs. And I never really understood what they were talking about. I bought a book about colour harmony a few months ago, and every great combination of colours I found looked absolutely awful when displayed onscreen. Colours looked completely different, and some combinations of colours resulted in an ugly black line between the two colours.

Although written in 2001, Molly's book Color for Websites explains how colour works in nature and print, and how differently it works on computers. It explains the difference between the natural world's Additive model of colour and the computer's Subtractive model. By explaining the differences, Molly eases a web developers path towards understanding how to work with colour online.

Molly explains the theory of colour, talking about colours that complement each other, colours that cause conflict, colours that work together in harmony. Each concept is detailed not just in notes, but using tools like colour wheels and pictures. Molly explains how texture can change a colour - I don't think I've ever read a better explanation of what a luster is on fabrics like silk.

With the theory comes some practical examples from Molly's own portfolio of customers. Molly covers how she uses colour to highlight or complement pieces of artwork. Explaining why its necessary to draw attention in some pieces, and not to draw attention in others. Images from line drawings, right through to photography are discussed, leaving the reader with a better understanding of some of the techniques of using colour to complement content.

There's a chapter that covers image file formats, what to use and when. Molly talks about the different types of images - vector and raster, and how image compression helps or hinders the image.I found the discussion interesting and inspiring. I'm tempted to spend some time right now playing around with colours and see if I can't better my understanding of what makes a good colour scheme.

For web designers with formal qualifications in design, there's probably nothing in this book you haven't covered before. For a web developer with a more technical background, Molly's book is an intriguing discussion into colour as well as a fascinating exploration of how to use colour on the web.

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