Refactoring HTML: Improving the Design of Existing Web Applications - Hardcover

Elliotte Rusty Harold

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9780321503633: Refactoring HTML: Improving the Design of Existing Web Applications

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0321503635 ISBN 13: 9780321503633

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional, 2008

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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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About the Author:

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).

Foreword

Foreword by Martin Fowler

In just over a decade the Web has gone from a technology with promise to major part of the world's infrastructure. It's been a fascinating time, and many useful resources have been built in the process. But, as with any technology, we've learned as we go how best to use it and the technology itself has matured to help us use it better.

However complex a web application, it finally hits the glass in the form of HTML—the universal web page description language. HTML is a computer language, albeit a very limited and specialized one. As such, if you want a system that you can evolve easily over time, you need to pay attention to writing HTML that is clear and understandable. But just like any computer language, or indeed any writing at all, it's hard to get it right first time. Clear code comes from writing and rewriting with a determination to create something that is easy to follow.

Rewriting code carries a risk of introducing bugs. Several years ago, I wrote about a technique called refactoring, which is a disciplined way of rewriting code that can greatly reduce the chances of introducing bugs while reworking software. Refactoring has made a big impact on regular software languages. Many programmers use it as part of their daily work to help them keep code clear and enhance their future productivity. Tools have sprung up to automate refactoring tasks, to further improve the workflow.

Just as refactoring can make a big improvement to regular programming, the same basic idea can work with HTML. The refactoring steps are different, but the underlying philosophy is the same. By learning how to refactor your HTML, you can keep your HTML clean and easy to change into the future, allowing you to make the inevitable changes more quickly. These techniques can also allow you to bring web sites into line with the improvements in web technologies, specifically allowing you to move toward supporting XHTML and CSS.

Elliotte Rusty Harold has long had a permanent place on my bookshelf for his work on XML technologies and open source software for XML processing. I've always respected him as a fine programmer and writer. With this book he brings the benefits of refactoring into the HTML world.

—Martin Fowler

Foreword by Bob DuCharme

A key to the success of the World Wide Web has always been the ease with which just about anyone can create a web page and put it where everyone can see it. As people create sets of interlinked pages, their web sites become more useful to a wider audience, and stories of web millionaires inspire these web developers to plan greater things.

Many find, though, that as their web sites get larger, they have growing pains. Revised links lead to nowhere, pages look different in different browsers, and it becomes more difficult to keep track of what's where, especially when trying to apply changes consistently throughout the site. This is when many who built their own web site call in professional help, but now with Refactoring HTML, you can become that professional. And, if you're already a web pro, you can become a better one.

There are many beginner-level introductions to web technologies, but this book is the first to tie together intermediate-level discussions of all the key technologies for creating professional, maintainable, accessible web sites. You may already be an expert in one or two of the topics covered by this book, but few people know all of them as well as Elliotte, and he's very good at explaining them. (I know XML pretty well, but this book has shown me that some simple changes to my CSS habits will benefit all of the web pages I've created.)

For each recommendation in the book, Elliotte lays out the motivation for why it's a good idea, the potential trade-offs for following the recommendation, and the mechanics of implementing it, giving you a full perspective on the how and why of each tip. For detecting problems, I'll stop short of comparing his use of smell imagery with Proust's, but it's pretty evocative nevertheless.

I've read several of Elliotte's books, but not all of them. When I heard that Refactoring HTML was on the way, I knew right away that I'd want to read it, and I was glad to get an advanced look. I learned a lot, and I know that you will, too.

—Bob DuCharme
Solutions Architect, Innodata Isogen

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