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Refactoring HTML: Improving the Design of Existing Web Applications
- By Elliotte Rusty Harold
- Published May 1, 2008 by Addison-Wesley Professional. Part of the Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Fowler) series.
- Copyright 2008
- Dimensions: 7x9-1/4
- Pages: 368
- Edition: 1st
- Book
- ISBN-10: 0-321-50363-5
- ISBN-13: 978-0-321-50363-3
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Product Author Bios
Elliotte Rusty Harold is an internationally respected writer, programmer, and educator. His Cafe con Leche Web site has become one of the most popular sites for information on XML. In addition, he is the author and coauthor of numerous books, the most recent of which are Java I/O (O’Reilly, 2006), Java Network Programming (O’Reilly, 2004), Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003), and XML in a Nutshell (O’Reilly, 2002).
Like any other software system, Web sites gradually accumulate “cruft” over time. They slow down. Links break. Security and compatibility problems mysteriously appear. New features don’t integrate seamlessly. Things just don’t work as well. In an ideal world, you’d rebuild from scratch. But you can’t: there’s no time or money for that. Fortunately, there’s a solution: You can refactor your Web code using easy, proven techniques, tools, and recipes adapted from the world of software development.
In Refactoring HTML, Elliotte Rusty Harold explains how to use refactoring to improve virtually any Web site or application. Writing for programmers and non-programmers alike, Harold shows how to refactor for better reliability, performance, usability, security, accessibility, compatibility, and even search engine placement. Step by step, he shows how to migrate obsolete code to today’s stable Web standards, including XHTML, CSS, and REST—and eliminate chronic problems like presentation-based markup, stateful applications, and “tag soup.”
The book’s extensive catalog of detailed refactorings and practical “recipes for success” are organized to help you find specific solutions fast, and get maximum benefit for minimum effort. Using this book, you can quickly improve site performance now—and make your site far easier to enhance, maintain, and scale for years to come.
Topics covered include
• Recognizing the “smells” of Web code that should be refactored
• Transforming old HTML into well-formed, valid XHTML, one step at a time
• Modernizing existing layouts with CSS
• Updating old Web applications: replacing POST with GET, replacing old contact forms, and refactoring JavaScript
• Systematically refactoring content and links
• Restructuring sites without changing the URLs your users rely upon
This book will be an indispensable resource for Web designers, developers, project managers, and anyone who maintains or updates existing sites. It will be especially helpful to Web professionals who learned HTML years ago, and want to refresh their knowledge with today’s standards-compliant best practices.
This book will be an indispensable resource for Web designers, developers, project managers, and anyone who maintains or updates existing sites. It will be especially helpful to Web professionals who learned HTML years ago, and want to refresh their knowledge with today’s standards-compliant best practices.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
A good review of xHTML standards for those already familiar with HTML, By
This review is from: Refactoring HTML: Improving the Design of Existing Web Applications (Hardcover)
First the good:It is an _excellent_ tutorial on modern xHTML for those that have used HTML from its tag-soup beginnings. He methodically gives examples on why we, as web programmers, need to utilize a particular technology (CSS, Accessibility, etc). For example, he doesn't just say "Use CSS" because its the new way of doing things. He gives no-nonsense specific examples in bandwidth savings, alternate devices, etc. His writing style is easy to read for computer geeks: a signature trait of any Martin Fowler signature series book. He also provides a series of regular expressions that you can use to search through your HTML code to find problem areas and does a good introduction to the program "tidy". Since I am definitely _NOT_ a Regex geek, these are highly appreciated. And finally, he shows usage of some xHTML tags and attributes of which I was not aware: such as proper usage of <acronym/> and <abbr/> tags. Onto the... Read more
use CSS and XHTML, By
This review is from: Refactoring HTML: Improving the Design of Existing Web Applications (Hardcover)
The Web means mostly webpages written in HTML. The popularity of HTML is overwhelming. Yet it has well known problems. There is no intrinsic separation of semantic content from presentation details. And the tag syntax is very sloppy.Harold explains in clear and strong terms why you should clean up your webpages. Mostly by using CSS and by making [and checking] that the pages are well formed and valid under XHTML. This is not a text on CSS, and if you are going to follow the precepts of the book, you will need another book, dedicated to CSS. The strength of Harold's message is in the clarity. He is trying to influence you in a top-down manner. To make these strategic decisions. For example, by going with CSS, you simplify maintenance. Because files are factored into CSS files, which layout people can work on, and semantic content files, which can be the purview of others who are more involved with intrinsic information processing. The latter files also have the... Read more
9 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Mainly for hardcore techies, By
This review is from: Refactoring HTML: Improving the Design of Existing Web Applications (Hardcover)
Despite years of progress by web standards advocates, and a significant improvement in the quality of the HTML on the web, many of us still end up grappling with outmoded, broken HTML on a regular basis. When confronted with a large site filled with broken pages it can be hard to know where to start. Elliotte Rusty Harold's Refactoring HTML offers a step by step recipe book for migrating such sites to clean, semantic code.Harold's is a well known name in the XML world, and that background shows through in how he approaches the book. While a general audience will probably find useful content, the reader needs to be prepared for a series of command-line and Java-based examples. Tools like tidy are featured prominently, as is the use of regular expressions to seek out broken code to fix and, in the music-to-my-ears category, automated testing. If you're equipped to do so, following these steps will lead to much cleaner, more manageable sites, but I found myself... Read more |
Online Sample Chapter
How to Assure a Well-Formed Website
Sample Pages
Table of Contents
Foreword by Martin Fowler xvii
Foreword by Bob DuCharme xix
About the Author xxi
Chapter 1 Refactoring 1
Why Refactor 3
When to Refactor 11
What to Refactor To 13
Objections to Refactoring 23
Chapter 2 Tools 25
Backups, Staging Servers, and Source Code Control 25
Validators 27
Testing 34
Regular Expressions 48
Tidy 54
TagSoup 60
XSLT 62
Chapter 3 Well-Formedness 65
What Is Well-Formedness? 66
Change Name to Lowercase 69
Quote Attribute Value 73
Fill In Omitted Attribute Value 76
Replace Empty Tag with Empty-Element Tag 78
Add End-tag 81
Remove Overlap 85
Convert Text to UTF-8 89
Escape Less-Than Sign 91
Escape Ampersand 93
Escape Quotation Marks in Attribute Values 96
Introduce an XHTML DOCTYPE Declaration 98
Terminate Each Entity Reference 101
Replace Imaginary Entity References 102
Introduce a Root Element 103
Introduce the XHTML Namespace 104
Chapter 4 Validity 107
Introduce a Transitional DOCTYPE Declaration 109
Remove All Nonexistent Tags 111
Add an alt Attribute 114
Replace embed with object 117
Introduce a Strict DOCTYPE Declaration 123
Replace center with CSS 124
Replace font with CSS 127
Replace i with em or CSS 131
Replace b with strong or CSS 134
Replace the color Attribute with CSS 136
Convert img Attributes to CSS 140
Replace applet with object 142
Replace Presentational Elements with CSS 146
Nest Inline Elements inside Block Elements 149
Chapter 5 Layout 155
Replace Table Layouts 156
Replace Frames with CSS Positions 170
Move Content to the Front 180
Mark Up Lists as Lists 184
Replace blockquote/ul Indentation with CSS 187
Replace Spacer GIFs 189
Add an ID Attribute 191
Add Width and Height to an Image 195
Chapter 6 Accessibility 199
Convert Images to Text 202
Add Labels to Form Input 206
Introduce Standard Field Names 210
Turn on Autocomplete 216
Add Tab Indexes to Forms 218
Introduce Skip Navigation 222
Add Internal Headings 225
Move Unique Content to the Front of Links and Headlines 226
Make the Input Field Bigger 228
Introduce Table Descriptions 230
Introduce Acronym Elements 235
Introduce lang Attributes 236
Chapter 7 Web Applications 241
Replace Unsafe GET with POST 241
Replace Safe POST with GET 246
Redirect POST to GET 251
Enable Caching 254
Prevent Caching 258
Introduce ETag 261
Replace Flash with HTML 265
Add Web Forms 2.0 Types 270
Replace Contact Forms with mailto Links 277
Block Robots 280
Escape User Input 284
Chapter 8 Content 287
Correct Spelling 287
Repair Broken Links 292
Move a Page 298
Remove the Entry Page 302
Hide E-mail Addresses 304
Appendix A Regular Expressions 309
Characters That Match Themselves 309
Metacharacters 311
Wildcards 312
Quantifiers 313
Index 327
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