On Updating a Book (Webdesign mit CSS, 2nd Edition)
Jens O. Meiert, May 3, 2007 / March 1, 2009.
This entry is filed under Web Development, Accessibility, Design.
I’m still working on the second edition of Webdesign mit CSS (German, estimated release in August). And I may say: I like this work, but updating a book’s more challenging than starting from scratch. It looks like less work, but that work’s “different”.
Some changes in the next edition:
- General contentual and didactical revision,
- several totally refreshed layouts meaning more eye candy,
- four new designs crafted by Ingo Helmdach,
- improved accessibility, largely referring to scalability and contrast (some problems will persist and are even intended, though – those are noted),
- revised user agent support – support for Internet Explorer 5 is dropped while IE 7 and Firefox 2 join the crew (remember that the first edition has been written in the beginning of 2005),
- several “auxiliary” updates including:
- different common DTD (surprise …),
- entity references (replaced by corresponding characters),
- typography (not only covering better readability and scannability of some designs, but also correct use of dashes, ellipsis, …),
- more specific (general) font size definitions,
- an additional preface, by a well-known web dev magician (surprise …),
- a new, fresh book layout, and an
index of all HTML elements proposed since 1992.
If that’s no outlook for an updated CSS and design book.
Besides, I sometimes would have loved to start all over again as it’s more difficult to change the path once you’re moving (and we entered the highway more than two years ago). This affects certain didactic things and several designs but also “minor” things like coding guidelines – for example, what’s the cost of problem when it comes to personally “undesired” uppercase color values, compared to the cost of solution? From time to time I’d also like to write more about information design, information architecture, or usability but that’s “out of scope” and not really critical in a CSS book.
So, the book will continue to offer a consistent, clean, and straightforward approach towards web standards. And while you feel me when I say that even trivial things may hurt a perfectionist (you’ll know that from certain website redesign constraints), let’s look forward to the new Webdesign mit CSS!
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