PREFACE
Hello and welcome to the third edition of Learning Web Design! When I first started writing it, I figured, “It’s just an update... I’ll just make a few tweaks and it will be done in a jiffy.” I couldn’t have been more wrong. As it turns out, pretty much everything about web design changed since I wrote the second edition four years ago. Most significantly, web designers as well as browser developers are finally abiding by the standards for writing and styling web pages set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). You’ll learn a lot more about these standards throughout the book.
What it means is that using HTML markup for visual effects is out—HTML for describing the meaning and structure of content is in. Table-based layouts are out—style sheet-driven layouts are in. And the font element, spacer GIFs, and other clever hacks of the past... forget about it! They’re all history.
This edition has been completely rewritten to be in compliance with the standards and modern web design practices. The markup chapters emphasize using HTML to describe your content accurately, not as a tool for formatting the appearance of text. And now you will find seven chapters on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), where the second edition had just one.
But like the first ...
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