Reviewing Adaptive Web Design
I recently bought and read the electronic version of Adaptive Web Design, written by Aaron Gustafson which was overall a nice -and short- read. Aaron is obviously a good writer, but this is no surprise if one looks at his CV. He also seems like a nice guy -twitter wise-, maybe a bit easier to approach than other folks from the “Zeldman Web Influencers group”. I rarely buy books, but I had a good feeling for this one.
Some of my impressions after reading the book, are, unfortunately, similar with to the ones I wrote about after reviewing Hardboiled Web Design. I don’t think that is entirely due to the book, but mostly because the problems this book tries to address don’t have actual solid technical solutions. In short, we have neither the specs nor the implementations of some existing specs. (take for example the notorious RWD images problem or the persisting IE7 and IE8 percentages). In general, I bought the book hoping somehow to discover new innovative ways of writing my markup and my stylesheets, using media queries and discover things that I might have missed. In general the number of different techniques included in the book were rather small, and most of them I knew already.
Progressive Enhancement – but no techniques
Aaron mentions in his book,
By design, this book is not intended to be an exhaustive compendium of progressive enhancement techniques, so the examples will be brief and focused…
I’ll have to object. As I said I honestly think the principles and theoretical approach of progressive enhancement are well established and popular since quite some time. Our problem today is not the lack of theoretical background, but the need for technical solutions to our problems. But that is not in any way Aaron’s fault.
Semantic HTML
The second chapter is a nice introduction to html5 and microformats, but in my opinion every web designer that hasn’t heard of (or used) HTML5 elements and microformats so far, must be leaving in a cave, and should probably start searching for a new profession. There were many pages also devoted to the alt and title attributes, for which I think is pretty safe to say they’re globally used and respected as means of improving accessibility since quite a while. I would personally prefer some more insight on RDFa and microdata with the latter attracting much attention after the creation of schema.org. Here I’d like to note that I am personally very confused as to which technology one should follow today. These three aforementioned specs seem to serve the same purpose, but I imagine their success depends largely on major search engines adoption.
CSS
Here, I liked the analysis of parsing errors a lot. I admit that after four or five years of CSS writing, I never dived into how browsers handle CSS parsing errors. I read with great interest how one can use basic and advanced CSS selectors in order to achieve progressive enhancement, although I believe Paul Irish’s HTML conditional classes method is quite simpler.
Javascript
The Javascript chapter was more interesting as it covered several details that often are not included in Javascript books.
Accessibility
The last chapter was the most interesting for me, with details about many WEB-ARIA roles that I had not read about before.
Overall, it is a book I wish everyone starting web design would read before he got his hands dirty with the markup and CSS.
