Best-selling author, designer, and web standards evangelist Jeffrey Zeldman has updated his classic, industry-shaking guidebook. This new edition--now in full color--covers improvements in best practices and advances in the world of browsers since the first edition introduced the world to standards-based design. Written in the same engaging and witty style, making even the most complex information easy to digest, it remains an essential guide to creating sites that load faster, reach more users, and cost less to design and maintain. Readers will learn from Jeffrey's insights as he demonstrates how web standards are driving search engine friendliness (findability) and the Web 2.0 applications that have reinvigorated the medium and the online marketplace. Readers will discover new techniques to make CSS layouts work better across multiple browsers and ways to make web content more accessible. Designing with Web Standards is an AIGA Design Press book, published under Peachpit's New Riders imprint in partnership with AIGA.
Standards, argues Jeffrey Zeldman in Designing With Web Standards, are our only hope for breaking out of the endless cycle of testing that plagues designers hoping to support all possible clients. In this book, he explains how designers can best use standards--primarily XHTML and CSS, plus ECMAScript and the standard Document Object Model (DOM)--to increase their personal productivity and maximize the availability of their creations. Zeldman's approach is detailed, authoritative, and rich with historical context, as he is quick to explain how features of standards evolved. It's a fantastic education that any design professional will appreciate.
Zeldman is an idealist who devotes some of his book to explaining how much easier life would be if browser developers would just support standards properly (he's done a lot toward this goal in real life, as well). He is also a pragmatist, who recognizes that browsers implement standards differently (or partially, or not at all) and that it is the job of the Web designer to make pages work anyway. Thus, his book includes lots of explicit and tightly focused tips (with code) that have to do with bamboozling non-compliant browsers into behaving as they should, without tripping up more compliant browsers. There's lots of coverage of design and testing tools that can aid in the creation of good-looking, standards-abiding documents. --David Wall
Topics covered: Why Web standards (such as XHTML, CSS, ECMAScript, and DOM) are good for everyone, and why site designers and browser makers should move towards standards compliance.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
Not enough doing....:
...being relatively new to CSS web design I've read quite a few books that seem to promise much to the novice web designer and although this book has some great information I expected to perhaps roll up my sleeves and get under the bonnet! (AKA The hood in the US!) I realize that I'm one edition behind everyone else but this book was quite disappointing to some extent! As some of the other readers pointed out, the book takes far too long to get going and pretty much repeats itself over and over with very... more info
Hard to Recommend:
To summarize: too much lecture not enough tangible content. As other reviewers who are not keen on the book point out the first six chapters go on and on about the same topics - these chapters could easily be condensed down to one or two chapters. When Mr. Zeldman finally does give examples (and there aren't that many) they are oversimplified. If you are looking for a technical book that provides concrete examples of how to improve your HTML markup and coding practices this is not it. If you want to... more info
The definitive guide to web standards:
Jeffrey Zeldman did it again. He made a huge impact with his Designing with Web Standards book (1st ed) close to a decade ago. Well, he's published his third edition, and it is as insightful as the first. This book is up to date, and covers modern technologies, from HTML5 to CSS3 to IE8. Readers of this book will gain a valuable insight into the recent history of web standards, be shown where things are now, and get a glimpse at where they may be going. Anyone connected to the web development... more info
Ammo to use when doubters question why we code the way we do:
This book is not a step-by-step or hands-on-training kind of book, but is a confidence builder for developers that are already validating code and thinking of what tags are most appropriate for a particular piece of markup, in other words, those that are designing with web standards. This edition has a lot of new material, and the inclusion of Ethan Marcotte is a big plus. Jeffrey Zeldman writes in a way similar to Molly Holzschlag in her 2002 book 'Integrated Web Design', or Jeffrey Veen in his 2000 book... more info
