Big categorised lists of jQuery plugins

These are probably the most useful lists for reference as they helpfully divide the plugins into categories.

The official jQuery plugins repository
http://plugins.jquery.com/

45+ new jQuery techniques for good user experience (Smashing Magazine)
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/01/15/45-new-jquery-techniques-for-a-good-user-experience/

Noupe has several categorised lists:

• 50+ amazing jQuery examples
  http://www.noupe.com/jquery/50-amazing-jquery-examples-part1.html
• 45+ fresh out of the oven jQuery plugins 

  http://www.noupe.com/ajax/45-fresh-out-of-the-oven-jquery-plugins.html

• 37 more shocking jQuery plugins
  http://www.noupe.com/ajax/37-more-shocking-jquery-plugins.html

jQueryPlugins.com – An entire site dedicated to jQuery plugins with categories for user interface, navigation, forms and extensions.
http://www.jqueryplugins.com/categories/

240 plugins jQuery (Sastgroup.com)
http://www.sastgroup.com/jquery/240-plugins-jquery

jQuery plugins (Chirill Trescencov)
http://www.chirill.com/archives/11-Jquery-Plugins.html

100 popular jQuery examples, plugins and tutorials (Template Lite)
http://www.templatelite.com/100-popular-jquery-plugins/

The ultimate jQuery plugin list (Kollermedia)
http://www.kollermedia.at/archive/2007/11/21/the-ultimate-jquery-plugin-list/

JQuery at its best (Spicy News)
http://www.spicyexpress.net/general/jquerry-at-it-best-downloadable-jquerry-plugins-and-widgets-for-you-2/

jQuery plugins for forms

25+ jQuery plugins that enhance and beautify HTML form elements (Queness)
http://www.queness.com/post/204/25-jquery-plugins-that-enhance-and-beautify-html-form-elements

10 top jQuery plugins for form usability (Steve Reynolds)
http://www.reynoldsftw.com/2009/01/top-10-jquery-plugins-for-form-usability/

7 jQuery plugins to manipulate TEXTAREAs (Steve Reynolds)
http://www.reynoldsftw.com/2009/03/7-jquery-plugins-to-manipulate-textareas/

10 best jQuery datepickers plugins (AjaxLine)
http://www.ajaxline.com/10-best-jquery-datepickers-plugins

How to make your forms better with jQuery (Cool Javascripts)
http://cool-javascripts.com/jquery/how-to-make-your-forms-better-with-jquery.html

jQuery plugins for images

14 jQuery plugins for working with images (Six Revisions)
http://sixrevisions.com/resources/14-jquery-plugins-for-working-with-images/

10 jQuery plugins for manipulating images (Cool Javascripts)
http://cool-javascripts.com/effects/10-jquery-plugins-for-manipulating-images.html

10 jQuery plugins for showing image gallery (Cool Javascripts)
http://cool-javascripts.com/galleries/10-jquery-plugins-for-showing-image-gallery.html

Top 14 jQuery photo slideshow / gallery plugins (Blueprint Design Studio)
http://blueprintds.com/2009/01/20/top-14-jquery-photo-slideshow-gallery-plugins/

6 image manipulation plugins for jQuery you should know about (Shiny Blog)
http://blog.shinylittlething.com/2009/02/20/image-manipulation-jquery-plugins/

10 best jQuery sliders (AjaxLine)
http://www.ajaxline.com/10-best-jquery-sliders

3 wonderful jQuery plugins to play with images (Baj Pakhi)
http://www.shahin.co.nr/3-wonderful-jquery-plugins-to-play-with-images/

jQuery plugins for menus

10 best jQuery menu plugins (AjaxLine)
http://www.ajaxline.com/10-best-jquery-menu-plugins

11 jQuery plugins to enhance HTML dropdowns (Steve Reynolds)
http://www.reynoldsftw.com/2009/03/11-jquery-plugins-to-enhance-html-dropdowns/

3 jQuery plugins to show context menu (Cool Javascripts)
http://cool-javascripts.com/jquery/3-jquery-plugins-to-show-context-menu.html

8 amazing jQuery accordions (Cats Who Code)
http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/8-amazing-jquery-accordions

jQuery plugins for tables/charts

jQuery plugins to show data in table format or chart format (Cool Javascripts)
http://cool-javascripts.com/jquery/jquery-plugins-to-show-data-in-table-format-or-chart-format.html

jQuery plugins for browser issue fixes

15 jQuery plugins to fix and beautify browser issues (DevSnippets)

http://devsnippets.com/reviews/15-jquery-plugins-to-fix-and-beautify-browser-issues.html

jQuery plugins for use with other stuff …

Power of WordPress and jQuery: 30+ great plugins (Noupe)
http://www.noupe.com/jquery/the-power-of-wordpress-and-jquery-30-useful-plugins-tutorials.html

jQuery plugins for SEO (Tim Nash)
http://www.timnash.co.uk/04/2008/jquery-seo/

8 jQuery plugins that utilize Google APIs (Steve Reynolds)
http://www.reynoldsftw.com/2009/03/8-jquery-plugins-that-utilize-google-apis/

7 of my favourite jQuery plugins for use with ASP.NET (Encosia)
http://encosia.com/2008/10/19/7-of-my-favorite-jquery-plugins-for-use-with-aspnet/

Great jQuery plugins for Drupal (DrupalSN)
http://drupalsn.com/learn-drupal/drupal-tutorials/great-jquery-plugins-drupal

6 jQuery plugins to use within your content in a Learning Management System (Random Syntax)
http://www.randomsyntax.com/2008/10/12/6-jquery-plugins-to-use-within-your-content-in-a-learning-management-system/

General listings of favourite or best jQuery plugins

Personal selections of the best plugins for web design and development. It’s quite fun to browse through these and compare & contrast people’s choices.

37 phenomenal jQuery plugins and demos for developers (Speckyboy)
http://speckyboy.com/2008/12/10/37-phenomenal-jquery-plugins-and-demos-for-developers/

30 awesome design enhancing jQuery plugins (Line 25)
http://line25.com/articles/30-awesome-design-enhancing-jquery-plugins

20 most interesting jQuery plugins – February 2009 (AjaxLine)
http://www.ajaxline.com/20-most-interesting-jquery-plugins-february-2009

20 jQuery plugins for unforgettable user experience (DevSnippets)
http://devsnippets.com/jquery-posts/20-jquery-plugins-for-unforgettable-user-experience.html

20 amazing jQuery plugins and 65 excellent jQuery resources (Speckyboy)
http://speckyboy.com/2008/07/21/20-amazing-jquery-plugins-and-65-excellent-jquery-resources/

Using jQuery to style design elements: 20 impressive plugins (DevSnippets)
http://devsnippets.com/reviews/using-jquery-to-style-design-elements-20-impressive-plugins.html

10 best jQuery plugins – March 2009 (AjaxLine)
http://www.ajaxline.com/10-best-jquery-plugins-march-2009

10+ most interesting and useful JQuery plugins – January 2009 (AjaxLine)
http://www.ajaxline.com/10-most-interesting-and-useful-jquery-plugins-january-2009

10+ useful jQuery plugins (AjaxLine)
http://www.ajaxline.com/10-useful-jquery-plugins

10 useful JQuery plugins (Enhance the User Experience)
http://enhance.qd-creative.co.uk/2008/06/11/10-useful-jquery-plugins/

Top 10 jQuery plugins and resources (LogicPool)
http://logicpool.com/archives/123

10 must have jQuery plugins and extensions (Front-End Book)
http://frontendbook.com/10-must-have-jquery-plugins-and-extensions

10 most useful and essential jQuery plugins (Microgeist)
http://microgeist.com/2009/02/10-most-useful-and-essential-jquery-plugins/

10 jQuery plugins every developer can’t live without (Refresh Events)
http://www.refresh-events.ca/blog/2009/03/16/10-jquery-plugins-every-developer-cant-live-without/

10 quick win jQuery plugins (Steve Reynolds)
http://www.reynoldsftw.com/2009/02/10-quick-win-jquery-plugins/

10 Über cool jQuery plugins (Invisible Window)
http://www.invisiblewindow.com/web-development/10-ber-cool-jquery-plugins

10 jQuery essentials (php four)
http://www.phpfour.com/blog/2007/06/jquery-essentials/

7 jQuery plugins to really enhance users experience (Shiny Blog)
http://blog.shinylittlething.com/2009/02/24/jquery-plugins-to-enhance-users-experience/

7 jQuery plugins that made our lives easier at ON Networks (Nick Lewis)
http://www.nicklewis.org/node/949

The 6 most useful jQuery plugins (Flexible Developments)
http://calisza.wordpress.com/2008/08/26/6-most-useful-jquery-plugins/

5 useful jQuery plugins which saved me a lot of work (Dev Blog)
http://nik.chankov.net/2009/03/17/5-useful-jquery-plugins-which-saved-me-a-lot-of-work/

Five jQuery plugins that are a joy to use (Pathfinder Development)
http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/07/five-jquery-plugins-that-are-a-joy-to-use/

4 cool jQuery plugins (DesignerFied)
http://designerfied.com/138/4-cool-jquery-plugins.html

4 jQuery plugins (Fresh)
http://welikeitfresh.com/2008/12/16/4-jquery-plugins/

Top 3 jQuery plugins for web designers and developers (Noam Web Design Blog)
http://www.noamdesign.com/Web-Design-Blog/top-3-jquery-plugins-for-web-designers/

List of useful jQuery plugins (Mark Grabanski)
http://marcgrabanski.com/article/list-of-useful-jquery-plugins

jQuery Plugins – Best for Web Designers (Hidden Pixels)
http://hiddenpixels.com/javascript/jquery-plugins-web-designers/

My favourite jQuery plugins (Simple.Friendly.Solutions.)
http://www.migliorisi.com/Blog/post/My-favorite-jQuery-Plugins.aspx

The best web 2.0 jQuery javascript plugins (Wiliam)
http://www.wiliam.com.au/wiliam-blog/the-best-web-2-jquery-javascript-plugins

Top jQuery plugins for web 2.0 effects (Website Ideas)
http://www.website-ideas.co.uk/2008/09/25/top-jquery-plugins-for-web-20-effects/

Must have jQuery plugins (SKFox)
http://skfox.com/2008/07/11/must-have-jquery-plugins-july-2008/

jQuery plugin favorites (Cody Lindley)
http://codylindley.com/Webdev/319/jquery-plugin

jQuery plugins (Caty’s Blog)
http://blogs.catydesign-studio.com/2009/03/12/jquery-plugins/

The author focuses purely on the pre-coding design stage of building a site.  However, he takes the sensible view that someone designing a website  needs to understand implementation issues so that the design won’t be unnecessarily difficult to code once the Photoshop comps are complete.

The book covers the whole of this design process, starting with getting an effective brief out of  clients. There’s good advice here about asking clients which sites they like or dislike and why – which it’s rightly said can be as informative as a design brief in itself.  There follows a good discussion on wireframing and an excellent section on aesthetics. The latter has a very succinct summary of best practice regarding layout and composition, with good links to  tools for choosing colour schemes and using grids.

Some of the most interesting parts of the book are the tips on how to effectively present your designs to clients via Photoshop comps and mock-up sites. This should be of particular help to a lot of people starting out, as compiling deliverables is an area which doesn’t tend to get a lot of coverage in other books.

As well as the designs for the example  site, there are well-chosen screen-shots from real sites which enrich the book a lot. Throughout, the author emphasises the importance of attention to detail and the designer’s responsibility to push at boundaries, while respecting useful conventions.

Sexy Web Design by Elliot Jay Stocks is published by Sitepoint.

There’s an ever-growing number of decent books appearing about Drupal, covering in detail various aspects of this complex CMS and catering to different experience levels and levels of coding ability. ‘Drupal 6 Themes’ by Ric Shreves fills a niche for detailed coverage of Drupal’s theming functionality for users with decent HTML and CSS skills, and maybe a little bit of PHP. It’s a book that I think designers and web managers wanting to add Drupal to their skill-set can get a lot out of reading and it’ll certainly help a lot if you’re starting out on the labour of wrangling with the design of a site based on a theme someone else created.

The book’s well written with a sensible structure, moving from general discussions of how theming in Drupal works to specific demonstrations of how to modify existing themes and build new ones from scratch. There’s a very clear explanation of the best ways to employ intercepts and overrides to achieve style changes and useful coverage of theming Drupal’s forms.

One of the most difficult things about changing the look of Drupal sites is the sheer number of CSS and template files you usually have to wade through. This book includes a short introduction to tools which can help with this – like Devel’s Theme Developer module, and the Firebug and Web Developer extensions for Firefox. There’s also detailed listings of Drupal’s theming elements and core CSS files.

Overall, this is a good solid read which can really enhance a new or intermediate Drupal user’s appreciation of how to get the most of theming. However, theming isn’t the only thing you need to master to get a Drupal site looking exactly the way you want. For an all-round understanding of  Drupal’s front-end, I’d also recommend you look at O’Reilly’s recent Using Drupal as well, which has demonstrations of using CCK and Views – as well as a good chapter on theming (although it doesn’t go into as much detail as this book). There’s also a forthcoming book on Front End Drupal due out next month which I definitely want to pick up.

Drupal 6 Themes: Create New Themes for Your Drupal 6 Site with Clean Layout and Powerful CSS Styling by Ric Shreves is published by Packt Publishing.

Related posts

I looked at a number of other starter resources for getting to grips with Drupal this January in a post on Learning Drupal.

Thankfully, there’s only one page in Forms that Work about whether to use colons at the end of labels. However, there’s actually an awful lot else that you can explore about form design which is potentially useful and this book certainly covers most of the areas I can think of.

The first couple of  chapters look at persuading people to answer forms and how to ask for the right information. There’s a focus on understanding who is going to answer your form and on ensuring that you’re trying to get information which is really needed. The advice about asking the specific people who are going to work with the information what they need and checking if the organisation already holds the information you’re asking for are things that seem obvious, but which often seem to be overlooked in practice.

The following sections cover how to make questions easy to answer and how to write useful instructions. This includes guidance on using plain language and avoiding negative questions. Chapters follow on choosing form controls and making the form flow easily, with common-sense advice on meeting users’ expectations about how controls work, breaking up long forms by topic and avoiding surprising users with sudden changes.

The visual design of forms is discussed next. The authors advise not to stress too much over minute details. The principal guidance here is to put labels where users will see them, indicate required fields and choose legible text. To make a form look easy, there is advice on applying logos and branding to forms and on making forms look tidy and organised with grids and grouping.  Finally there’s a concluding chapter on usability testing which the authors are very keen on. I found the most interesting advice here to be that the authors find testing forms with more than five users usually leads to diminishing returns.

Overall, it’s a nicely designed book which also includes cartoons, case studies and a useful list of further reading with helpful comments.

“Forms that Work” is about usability rather than coding, so there’s nothing here about how to achieve some of the recommendations with CSS.  If you’re interested in this, then there’s a good free collection of links you could usefully explore in the Smashing Magazine article: CSS-Based Forms: Modern Solutions.

Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability is by Caroline Jarrett and Gerry Gaffney. It’s published by Morgan Kaufmann.

Oh, and apparently it doesn’t matter much either way if you use colons at the end of labels (p.132), but if you want a rule to follow, then use them (p. 140).

Related posts

See also my review of Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works. This is from the same publisher, shares the same overall book design and covers web writing apart from forms – making it a nice companion volume to “Forms that Work”.

Many of the suggestions made by the author are things which you will probably already regard as common- sense good practice. However it’s still interesting to follow through the scientific reasoning produced for why certain methods  of design and content production are more effective.

Among the things you learn about:

• Reviews and ratings can influence people very strongly because of their need for social validation.
• You can take advantage of people’s desire for reciprocity to influence website visitors to do what you want, even if it’s just by giving them free (useful) information.
• Invoking a fear of scarcity can make people feel that your products are more desirable.
• Providing too many choices can be bad and lead to people making no choice at all.
• You should list the product which you want people to buy first in product listings, because the “order effect” leads people to believe “first is best”.
• Using the words “you” and “yours” involves readers by speaking to their self-centred unconscious mind.
• The concept of personas and people’s need to be consistent can be used to influence website users’ behaviour.
• The principles of similarity, attractiveness and association can catch people’s attention and link them emotionally to your site.
• Pictures and stories make powerful website content because they talk directly to the unconscious.

The book’s engagingly written and very short, so you can easily read it all in one sitting. Despite being initially sceptical about whether it could teach me anything useful, I did end up finding it quite interesting and a worthwhile read.

Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click? (Voices That Matter) by Susan M. Weinschenk Ph.D. is published by New Riders.

In making a case for this,  the authors put across some nice points about how CSS layout techniques we have come to take for granted make simple layout tasks a heck of a lot more complicated than they really should be. This is a valid topic which a lot of books about CSS tend to skirt around. The book also contains  a short introduction to the CSS table display properties, a simple set of examples, discussion of the pros and cons of using them (mostly the pros though) and a chapter on considering older browsers. To conclude there is a look forward to the layout options that will be available (eventually) in CSS3.

The major criticism the book tends to provoke (one the authors foresee, but don’t entirely manage to assuage) is that it is  too soon to start using layout techniques which are unsupported by IE6 and, especially, by IE7. If we haven’t got rid of IE6 yet, which has been around since 2001, then how long will it take before we can really ignore IE7? The authors’ suggestion of providing simplified versions of designs for the most popular browser is unlikely to go down well with a lot of clients.

There also seem to be potential accessibility problems with CSS display tables unless the designer is careful. The authors downplay the importance of source order for accessibility, quoting research stating that “the source order of a web page is likely to be of little relevance to the majority of screen reader users”. I guess I might accept that for simple layout tables like the ones demonstrated in this book. However the major accessibility problems in traditional HTML table layouts were caused by endlessly nested tables messing up source order utterly and making pages impenetrable to  a screen reader user. If this kind of situation isn’t going to be repeated, then CSS display tables presumably need to be nested in moderation and care needs to be taken that content spread across cells reads in an acceptable order when linearised.

On the plus side,  it is always nice to know about another way of doing things and CSS display tables are a solid addition to anyone’s skill set for when you eventually find yourself in the lucky position of not having to bother about IE6 or 7.

In general, I found the book  a refreshing read. It provides a coherent argument,  is well written in a concise way and provokes you to question fundamental aspects of how you work. Not many web design or IT books manage this and it would be nice if more of them did.

Everything You Know About CSS is Wrong! by Rachel Andrew and Kevin Yank is published by Sitepoint.

Web Design

Designing with Web Standards – I read the first edition of Jeffrey Zeldman’s book in 2003 when I was  pretty fed up with the unsatisfying business of learning endless display hacks for different browsers, which web design then seemed mainly to consist of.  I  liked the whole idea that web standards offered a more coherent future for web development and the author’s coherently-argued narrative and gradualist approach made it all seem more realisable.

The Zen of CSS Design – Really opened my eyes to what could be done with CSS. Lots of really pretty stuff.

Bulletproof Web Design and CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions – 2 very well-thumbed books on web design which I keep coming back to.

From a personal perspective, I’d like to include  The Art and Science of Web Design by Jeffrey Veen published back in 2000.  I borrowed this from the library at college in 2001 while doing an MSc in Information Systems. I read it through in an afternoon, totally caught up in it.  A lot of its advice is definitely outdated now, but it was well written and a great read at the time.

Usability

Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability – Fun to read and re-read. A real-life feel to the examples and some great graphics and cartoons which you can use with clients or project team members to explain points.

Designing Web Usability– Another book which I read at college as part of a module on user interface design which focused mainly on web usability. I felt like I got more out of this book than from everything else in the module combined. It’s powerfully (if somewhat prescriptively) argued and made a great cover-to-cover read at the time.

Accessibility

Building Accessible Websites – Well written with a friendly authorial voice and a pragmatic approach to accessible design. Also had a nice selection of resources on the accompanying CD.

Search and navigation

Ambient findability – I always enjoy well-written stuff about search and this is one of the most satisfying reads on the subject.

Information Architecture for the Word Wide Web – I read the original (shorter) version at college and enjoyed it a lot – then read the second, much larger, edition a couple of years ago. A really comprehensive look at navigation and search which gives you a lot to think about.

The pairing of mobile design with accessible design is a neat way of improving the marketability of design techniques which help people with disabilities. There’s some nice points made about the similarities between the difficulties of web-browsing on an iPhone and the problems which people with fine-motor disabilities or less-than perfect-vision can have when browsing on a PC or Mac. The authors go so far as to say that: “It could be that the current crop of mobile devices is the best thing to happen to people with disabilities for a long time. When else have millions of people stood in line with $199 or €129 or £99 in hand to purchase a functional disability?”

With an admirable brevity, the book neatly summarises the basic techniques required to meet level A compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. There are chapters advising on metadata, separating design from structure with CSS, proper use of tables, video and audio, scripting accessible menus, accessible Ajax and Rich Internet Applications. The Ajax section includes an introduction to the basics of the W3C/WAI Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) specification. The final parts of the book include plenty of links to useful resources and a 20-point checklist of questions to ask about your site which could be of real practical benefit.

The authors avoid being too doctrinaire – for example, the use of layout tables in email design is pragmatically accepted, as email clients currently make it impossible to get predictable results out of CSS.

The book is a good little introduction to accessible design and newcomers to the field should get a lot out of it. Even readers who already know a lot about accessibility may find the odd tip which is useful to them, especially if they want to sell accessible design to clients via examples of its benefits to users of mobile devices.

Universal Design for Web Applications: Web Applications That Reach Everyone is by Wendy Chisholm and Matt May. It’s published by O’Reilly.

The first two chapters focus on web content and web audiences in a broad sense. They review what good web writing consists of and how to focus on the specific needs of your site’s users. This includes a useful introduction to the use of personas and scenarios for user-centred design.

The book then looks in detail at writing good home pages, pathway pages and information pages. The coverage of pathway pages is particularly interesting, as this is a part of websites which doesn’t tend to get a lot of attention.

Some of the best stuff in the book is in the middle chapters which are primarily about the writing process itself. This includes sections about focusing on essential messages and tuning up your sentences. This is the part of the book where the title “Letting Go of the Words” comes to make most sense. There’s an emphasis on cutting away unnecessary verbiage and addressing users directly with short simple sentences, using words they would use themselves. There’s also a section on designing your web pages for easy use, which has some sensible advice about how design can impact upon the readability of web text.

Later chapters look at using lists and tables, headings, effective use of illustrations and writing meaningful links. The section on links is particularly useful, providing guidelines and examples you can usefully hand on to any content authors who are addicted to using “Click here”.

Finally the concluding section has good advice on drafting, working with reviewers and creating a style guide. There are additional special sections on writing online press releases and legal information which will be useful for a lot of corporate sites where these ubiquitous sections are often badly realised.

In general, I’d recommend this as a guide to web writing to anyone involved with creating websites, but its non-technical nature could make it especially useful as a resource for authors contributing to an organisation’s website via a content management system. If you can’t afford to send your web authors on courses about writing for the web or haven’t got time to write extensive guidance for them yourselves, then buying a copy of this book and sharing it around would be a great way to help them start thinking appropriately about how to approach online content creation.

Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content That Works is by Janice (Ginny) Redish and is published by Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.

If you find yourself in this situation, then Elliotte Rusty Harold’s book Refactoring HTML: Improving the design of existing web applications will be a good antidote to “wait for the redesign” paralysis. The book encourages taking a gradual approach to converting your website to a modern standards-compliant state, rather than trying to do everything at once. I think this is a great area to write a book about, since it fulfils a need a lot of website managers will have. Designing and building new sites is fun and there are an awful lot of books available about this creation process. Maintenance and incremental improvement of old sites is distinctly unsexy in comparison and gets much less shelf-space.

The book is a compendium of stuff, most of which you’ll probably already know you should be doing. It’s arranged with subjects listed in a cookbook fashion – covering why you want to make each change, potential trade-offs and the mechanics of how to carry out each improvement. The first chapter is an introduction to the subject of refactoring, which is a programming concept that may be new to a lot of web designers.

“Refactoring is the gradual improvement of a code base by making small changes that don’t modify a program’s behaviour, usually with the help of some kind of automated tool. The goal of refactoring is to remove the accumulated cruft of years of legacy code and produce cleaner code that is easier to maintain, easier to debug, and easier to add new features to.” From “Refactoring HTML”

In the second chapter, there is a thorough overview of automated tools you can use for refactoring. A lot of the information here is going to be of more use if you’re a programmer. However, the discussion of regular expressions should be of use to anyone who has to deal with outdated HTML code. It’s backed up by an appendix which provides a beginner’s guide to regular expressions. Throughout the book there are specific regular expressions supplied for fixing particular problems which will be hugely useful to non-programmers like me who find writing their own regular expressions a pain.

Chapters 3 and 4 cover all the aspects of well-formedness and validity in HTML documents. The author is sensibly not insistent upon validation for its own sake and on several occasions gives examples of times when it may be pragmatically better to go for an invalid option. He also points out where the standards don’t actually make much sense – the rule that block quotes can’t be within paragraphs is one example discussed which has always really annoyed me.

Chapter 5 covers layout, with some discussion of replacing table layouts and frames-based layouts with CSS. However this is definitely not a design-oriented book and its CSS advice is limited to providing some basic layouts and advising that CSS is ‘very much a technique for full-time professionals”.

The book continues with a nice-to-see chapter on accessibility and a section on web applications. The latter includes an interesting section on Web Forms 2.0 types as well as solid advice on older topics, like when to use POST or GET and the need to escape all user input. Finally, there’s a chapter on content which – like the section on layout – is pretty basic. Still, it’s nice to see an emphasis on the need for correct spelling in a book that seems to be aimed primarily at coders.

Refactoring HTML as a whole is certainly useful for anyone managing a badly-coded site, especially if they haven’t thought much about ways to semi-automate testing and improvements.

Refactoring HTML: Improving the design of existing web applications by Elliotte Rusty Harold is published by Addison-Wesley.