Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook, Special Edition

Welcome to the second edition of Web Standards Solutions. Why do we need an updated book?
Well, while the rules have remained the same, the game has changed. We’ve had a full suite of
new browsers since the first edition of this book (Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Chrome, Firefox 3,
Safari 4, Opera 9), and their adoption of present (and evolving) standards is moving ahead at a
rapid pace. The good news is that all of the main browser vendors have focused on standards
compliance, so things are getting easier. The bad news is that there are still a lot of legacy brows-
ers in the wild to account for, and many of the hoops we’ve had to jump through remain.
This book is designed to give you ammunition—ammunition to bring web standards solutions
to your own projects and the ability to make better choices with markup and style. Throughout
each chapter, we’ll be comparing common web design methods, trying to answer why one way
may be better than the other. By examining that comparison, we’ll be able to apply the best tool
for the job in our own projects.
But first, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page—this book is filled with acronyms, blocks of
code, and concepts that might be foreign. First, let’s talk about web standards.