Youthtopia Blog

The human brain was not designed to clog itself with oceans of factoids such as XHTML attributes, which CSS tags are inherited, and the entity number for the em dash (it's 8212). Here was my problem: seven days ago I noticed huge gaps in the "Web Design" sections on my bookshelves. I have been lending web books to everybody: my wife for her new job; an 84-year-old friend named Harry (who is publishing his novel online); and the 14-year-old kid next door who wants to be a millionaire before he reaches the ripe age of 15. Bereft of books, tired of Googling, and feeling guilty about pestering the local library's reference staff — I needed to grab essential tidbits of information quickly, so as not to slow down my work. My old reference books were out on loan but fortunately (for my overworked cerebral cortex) my new books stayed at home. For the past week I have been opening and closing the four supplementary chapters of Web Designer's Reference more than I opened and closed my refrigerator door. It took me a whole week to realize that this book offers much more than a handy reference: this weekend I read the book from page first to last. And I was thrilled to discover that Grannell's book is among the clearest, completest, and most insightful book about web design that I've studied in the past six years.
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