Icon Web Design in a Nutshell Icon
A Desktop Quick Reference 
Book Review

by Dale Farris, President, Golden Triangle PC Club
May 2001

This O'Reilly book on web design, from the same author of the two super titles, "Designing for the Web" and "Learning Web Design," both also from O'Reilly, contains the nitty-gritty on everything you need to know to design web pages. Here you will find all the good stuff, without the fluff, written and organized so that answers can more quickly be found.

Written by veteran web designer Jennifer Niederst, this title provides quick access to the wide range of front-end technologies and techniques from which Web designers and authors must draw.

This is an excellent reference work on HTML 4.0 tags, and covers how to build tables, frames and Cascading Style Sheets, with special attention given to browser support and platform idiosyncrasies. The HTML section is more than a reference work, as it details the sometimes strange behavior in tables, and gives ideas and workarounds for using tables and frames on your site. Also covered are multimedia and interactivity, audio and video, and emerging technologies like Dynamic HTML (DHTML), XML (Extensible Markup Language), embedded fonts and internationalization. You will even find an explanation how HTML files load inside the WebTV browser.

While this title is not necessarily designed for those just beginning to learn how to design Web pages, Ms. Niederst's work definitely will be of great value to more experienced Web designers. This work is also one of many titles now in O'Reilly's rapidly growing lineup of works on web design.

With so many advances in Web technology occurring so rapidly, Ms. Niederst frequently found herself wishing she had a book to refer to when needing to quickly find answers to her technical questions regarding Web design techniques. This means she eschews the additional explanation found more often in introductory titles, and has organized the information so it can be found quickly. Her content is based on the wish-lists and the contributions of both professional and hobbyist web designers, and focuses on the front-end aspects of Web design -- HTML authoring, graphics production, and media development.

This is not a resource for programming, scripting, or server functions, but whenever possible, she provides enough background information on these topics to give designers a level of familiarity with the terminology and technologies. While beginners can of course use this marvelous addition to the growing Web design genre, I suggest beginners instead first start with Ms. Niederst's equally super later title, "Learning Web Design."

"Web Design in a Nutshell" presents a more comprehensive approach to learning HTML coding. With the detailed explanations, this makes it very appropriate for intermediate-level and professional web designers.

With her focus on more experienced Web designers, "Web Design in a Nutshell" assumes a reader knows their way around a computer and has a strong familiarity with the Internet. The many chapters and the super collection of appendixes are organized around the major topics of The Web Environment, HTML, Graphics, Multimedia and Interactivity, and Emerging Technologies.

With her many years of experience with HTML, and her extensive teaching experience with all levels of students, this entry by Ms. Niederst on how to create web pages has more credibility and reliability than many. The author's extensive experience with Web designers from the high-end, highly professional level, to first-time beginners looking to just get a start in Web design, has enabled her to develop a successful method for teaching that is clearly evident in her excellent organization of this nifty book.

Content Features

Discussions of the web environment, monitors, and browsers
Complete reference to HTML and Server Side
Browser support for tags and attributes
Creating GIF, JPEG, and PNG graphics
Designing with the Web palette
Multimedia and interactivity design tips
Using audio, video, Flash, Shockwave, and JavaScript
Detailed tutorial and reference on Cascading Style Sheets
Appendix of browser compatibility information
Detailed information on HTML tags, deprecated tags, proprietary tags

Table of Contents

The twenty-seven (27) chapters include the following.
  1. Designing for a Variety of Browsers
  2. Designing for a Variety of Displays
  3. Web Design Principles for Print Designers
  4. A Beginner's Guide to the Server
  5. HTML Overview
  6. Structural HTML Tags
  7. Formatting Text
  8. Creating Links
  9. Adding Images and Other Page Elements
  10. Tables
  11. Frames
  12. Forms
  13. Server Side Includes
  14. GIF Format
  15. JPEG Format
  16. PNG Format
  17. Designing Graphics With the Web Palette
  18. Animated GIF's
  19. Audio on the Web
  20. Video on the Web
  21. Interactivity
  22. Introduction to JavaScript
  23. Cascading Style Sheets
  24. Introduction to DHTML
  25. Introduction to XML
  26. Embedded Font Technology
  27. Internationalization

The five (5) appendixes include the following:

HTML Tags and Elements
List of Attributes
Deprecated Tags
Proprietary Tags
CSS Compatibility

About the Author

Jennifer Niederst has been designing for the Web since 1993. From when she was the designer of O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator (GNN), the first commercial web site, she has continued to design for the Web. She has now been working almost exclusively on the Web, first as creative director of Songline Studios (a subsidiary of O'Reilly), where she designed the original interface for WebReview (www.webreview.com), and as a freelance designer and consultant since 1996. She is also the author of the two best-selling works, "Designing for the Web" (O'Reilly, 1996), and "Learning Web Design" (O'Reilly, 2001), and has taught web design at the Massachusetts College of Art and the Interactive Factory in Boston, MA. She has spoken at major design and Internet events including the GRAFILL conference (Geilo, Norway), Seybold Seminars, and the W3C International Expo. In addition to designing, Jennifer enjoys cooking, travel, indie-rock, and making stuff. You can visit her at www.littlechair.com or send her email at jen@oreilly.com.

Target Readers

Readers of this excellent "nutshell" approach to Web design will find it to be very useful, especially to more experienced designers. Although those new to Web design can of course find value here, the focus in this title is to organize the essential answers to the most likely questions designers typically run across in their daily work. 

Also, with the technology changing so rapidly, we can hope Ms. Niederst has plans to revise this valuable addition to the field of Web design, as this book has proved to be very helpful for many professionals heavily involved in Web design work. For anyone so involved in Web design, this title from Ms. Niederst is an essential tool that should be added to their growing number of references related to designing Web pages.

Ms. Niederst's latest work on HTML coding, "Learning Web Design," is the book beginners will find useful, as it focuses on the concerns of those just beginning to learn how to create web pages. As she says in her preface to "Learning Web Design," "I like to think of it ("Learning Web Design") as the "prequel" to the Nutshell book." With the two of these books in hand, you have the makings of a solid foundation that will help you get going in your efforts to learn how to create web pages.

This "Web Design in a Nutshell" title was written to help in her job as a Web designer, and it will well serve others as equally experienced as she is in this realm, while her "Learning Web Design" will be more suited to beginners. This means either or both of these titles could be considered for use in a classroom environment. For universities and colleges presenting HTML classes, or a sequence of courses covering various Web design aspects of the Internet, these titles from Ms. Niederst could be of much value in Web design classes.

O'Reilly Hits Another Homer

The O'Reilly publishing firm, famous for their emphasis on a common-sense approach to explaining very technical material, depth of detail, and focus on the practical, has released an invaluable tool for anyone interested in learning how to create Web pages. With author Niederst's emphasis here on succinctly organizing what busy Web designers need to know, the result is a very valuable tool that will likely soon become dog-eared from frequent use.

This release from O'Reilly and Ms. Niederst's other O'Reilly titles can easily be considered essential for anyone seriously interested in learning how to create Web pages.

Book Contents

576 pages; preface; acknowledgments; figures; tips; tables; appendixes; glossary; index; cover colophon

Author

Jennifer Niederst

ISBN

January 1999 - First Edition
1-56592-515-7

List Price

$29.95

Publisher

Contact: Lisa Mann
lisam@oreilly.com
1-707-829-0515, ext 230
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
101 Morris Street
Sebastopol, California 95472
1-800-998-9938
1-707-829-0515
FAX 1-707-829-0104
www.oreilly.com