Review: Build your own website the right way using HTML & CSS

Yikes. One to remember, especially if you intend on giving clients access to an update feature like a CMS.

Aren’t there certain characters that wordprocessors use which break in html anyway? I’m thinking ’ " ! and such…

Anything that’s specific to Windows-1252 IIRC, curly quote brackets, and proprietary MS formatting that gets carried over when the page is copied and entered.

Dan, that really depends on the character encoding in use on your site, and whether it matches the character encoding in use by your CMS.

For example, if your site’s pages are displayed with ISO-8859-1, and your CMS’s admin pages are also displayed with ISO-8859-1, then Windows-1252 characters such as curly quotes will be pasted, stored, and displayed correctly by all current browsers, but will be reported as invalid ISO-8859-1 characters by HTML validators.

If your site’s pages are displayed with UTF-8, and your CMS’s admin pages are also displayed with UTF-8, then Windows-1252 characters such as curly quotes will be converted to UTF-8 by the browser when they are submitted to the CMS. These characters will therefore be pasted, stored, and displayed correctly by all browsers, and will not cause problems with HTML validators.

If, however, your site’s pages are displayed with UTF-8 but your CMS’s admin pages are displayed with ISO-8859-1 (or vice versa), then you can run into problems if your CMS is not converting the character encoding for display. If Windows-1252-encoded characters such as curly quotes are output directly to a UTF-8 page, for example, the characters will display incorrectly, and may be reported as invalid UTF-8 characters by HTML validators.

The moral of the story is that if you can use UTF-8 everywhere, you’ll avoid a lot of problems. The main factor keeping many sites (including large portions of SitePoint) on ISO-8859-1 is the lack of built-in support for UTF-8 in PHP 5. This will be corrected in the upcoming PHP 6.

Hope that helps to clear up the issue somewhat.

Was in the bookshop the other day and saw HTML Utopia. Expensive but couldn’t resist especially when I have to wait a while for deliveries.

Just started reading, I know most of this stuff already but its always a pleasure to read a Sitepoint book. I never really applied my knowledge into a real site, I always end up reading but not doing. I am going to try and practice building sites as I go along and treat this like a course.

That you should. In my experience the sitepoint books geared towards building something real really do help you just to get to grips with stuff, be it a project envisioned in the book or otherwise just ideas. The most important thing about these types of books is to follow the book till the bitter end, (or not so bitter really, but who likes to do that? Well we should of course) And in doing so the reader does gain key skills. That’s really what makes sitepoint publications stand out from the rest of the bookshelf. Real examples, real results.
P.s Sorry for taking so long to reply, I hadn’t glanced at this thread since a while and just only poped in now and then. Good luck with your study. :slight_smile:

I was told CSS layouts are better than table layouts for those who are using jaws or other screen readers.

That was a great review. Especially since there are SO MANY books and I have SO LITTLE money. Knowing which ones are better for beginners helps stretch my coins.

That’s generally considered correct :slight_smile:

Glad this review helped you out :slight_smile:

Its a good book ,very well written.It is for begginers not only with html but also css too.This book gives you all which anyone wants to know about html and css. i think its a best buy.