Review: HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS

by ComputerBob

October 18, 2003

The Word On The Street

I recently redesigned my entire ComputerBob.com Web site to be XHTML and CSS compliant. During the redesign process, I was very grateful to get a lot of help and support from the SitePoint Forums. While at the the SitePoint site, I was impressed by several users' positive reviews of SitePoint's new book, HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS, by Dan Shafer (published by SitePoint Pty. Ltd.). In fact, the vast majority of the reviews that I read were very positive, so I ordered the $39.95 (U.S.D) book from SitePoint, hoping that it would help me with my site redesign.

My Experience With It

While much of it is well-written and easy to understand, it doesn't even come close to covering the topic of its title. Plus, it has a nearly uselessly organized Table of Contents, and a nearly non-existent index. Its content keeps skipping back and forth between general concepts and specific examples displayed on the book's Web site. The problem is, there doesn't seem to be any overall logic to the skipping back and forth, which makes it very difficult to follow. And the extremely sparse index frustrated every time I tried to look up any specific topic. Once, I wasted an entire hour, trying to find an explanation of the popular Box Model Hack -- despite the fact that the text refers to it twice, and on page 124 it says that it is discussed in Chapter 12, I discovered that it is actually never discussed at all anywhere in the book.

Conclusions

HTML Utopia would have been an acceptable first draft of a book, but, as it is, it's not complete, it's not a reference book, and its title is completely misleading. I think a much more accurate title would have been, How To Create Some Specific Parts Of One Particular Type Of 3-Column CSS Layout, With A Password-Protected Link That Will Allow You To Download The Remaining Web Site Files So That You Can Figure Them Out For Yourself.

The only part of the book that I found helpful to my site redesign was the CSS reference section at the back of the book. Unfortunately, even some of those explanations were incomplete, ambiguous, or were missing specific examples of how they are supposed to be used, which forced me to spend time looking for better CSS references several times.

I hope that some day, someone will write a comprehensive CSS Layout book that clearly explains the nuts and bolts, as well as the pros and cons of many different types of 2-column, 3-column, multi-column, floating, absolute, and relative CSS layouts. A book like that would go a long, long way toward convincing people to make the move to CSS layout. Unfortunately, this was not that book.