Bulletproof Web Design

Anyway, now to the actual topic of this review: Dan Cederholm's "Bulletproof Web Design - Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS". As the topic already says: The reader will get to know some tricks about how to prepare a website for visitors that have their own ideas about how to browse the web. To help you get a small overview here a few of the topics :

• Flexible text: How to make it possible to design your site with the font size you like and still making it possible for all users (incl. IE-users) to change the font size.
• Boxes and how to keep them as flexible as possible
• Fluid layouts
• Horizontal navigation elements

... and many other interesting topics.

Each of these chapters have a fix structure. First Dan describes how the same problem was solved before CSS was widely adopted or before people thought about doing something for the visitor. Then the author describes in detail the problems involved with these old approaches and how to do it better using CSS and lean markup.

Everything is done on a highly practical basis were the reader always sees some photo about what should be achieved first (some real-life examples are also in there featuring for example the homepage of Lance Armstrong) which makes it really entertainment to let Dan guide you through making the presented design possible using CSS. The whole process is described with many code snippets which are well documented so there's now way you can get lost in there.

One many occassions the author uses some already well established techniques like the voice-family-escpae trick to confuse some browsers CSS parser and also explains them just to understand why they are there. On the other hand I thought it a little bit strange that this technique is used in chapter 1 but in other chapters, where the same thing should apply, the the author doesn't use this nor any replacement for it anymore. In my opinion a small note for example in one of the very informative sideboxes used throughout the book to give additional information would have been nice. If I have overlooked it, I apologize :)

I have to say, though, that this was actually the only disturbing thing I've noticed while reading this book. The rest of the book has taught me quite a few tricks I haven't known so far so it was well worth the money :)