Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #74241 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-16
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Amazon.com
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.

Review
"Jeffrey and his web standards coconspirators have made it possible for those old enemies--beauty, usability, and accessibility--to play nice together in any website." -- Louis Rosenfeld, publisher, Rosenfeld Media

"Zeldman explains complex technologies in a way that designers can not only understand, but actually get excited about. If you are serious about web design, you need this book. -- Hillman Curtis, author, MTIV: Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer

From the Publisher
If ever there were an author who could make web standards exciting, it's Jeffrey Zeldman. His light and humorous writing style make for such an engaging read. It's only after you stop reading that you realize how much you're learning. What's more, you're not just learning -- you're learning from THE ABSOLUTE BEST web standards guy there is.

Daily, Zeldman practices what he preaches, and in this book, he openly shares all he knows. In no time, you'll be saving time and money by creating faster, leaner, more compatible web pages. Not longer after that, you'll find you have more free time, having been spared the endless cycle of coding and re-coding web pages for every possible browser/system scenario. You might even find you have enough free time to join Zeldman on his never-ending quest to convince others that web standards is THE ONLY WAY to go.

Customer Reviews

A must read
This book is a must read for anyone associated with a website. Designer, developer, manager.

Very good content and discussion
I found it a very interesting book to read but it didn't give as much of concrete situation analysis as I expected. It surely convinced me to embrace techniques for the visually impaired and textual devices.

Great for beginners
It's a very good book, and one I'd recommend to any developer who is trying to make the switch from tables to CSS-based code and standards, but if you've been using standards in your work for a while this book will only tell you things you already know.

However, Zeldman's tone is always light and engaging, and sometimes it's good to have a little refresher.

5* if you're new to web standards
4* otherwise