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. Designing with Web Standards is an AIGA Design Press book, published under Peachpit's New Riders imprint in partnership with AIGA.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #317874 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780321385550
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
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


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

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

Customer Reviews

Designing With Web Standards

Wholeheartedly recommended
New Rider's slogan "Voices That Matter" is one that I generally take with a large pinch of salt. In Zeldman's case, that's true. If Tim Berners-Lee is the father of the internet, Zeldman and the team at the Web Standards Project are the net's midwives. The W3C wrote the standards (or recommendations as they apologetically and coyly them), whilst Zeldman and his gang set about the hard, political and (until now) thankless task of bullying (browser-beating?) Netscape and Microsoft to conform to the standards that they'd helped set. Having brokered the end of the Browser Wars, they turned their attentions to the WYSIWYG tools like Dreamweaver, GoLive and (ahem) FrontPage, actually advising Macromedia on how to make DMX conform to Web Standards.

And now, this time, it's personal. Zeldman and the WaSP warriors are coming for you.

"Though today's browsers support standards, tens of thousands of professional designers and developers continue to use outdated methods that yoke structure to presentation".

This book is part of the campaign to educate us, the Web Professionals. It's part polemic, and part tutorial. Polemic because so many of us are yet a-standard (or even anti-standards), and tutorial because there's so much talk of why standards that a lot of us are saying "We know they're important. We know it's evil and wrong to use tables, and we know every time we use a deprecated tag a fairy dies somewhere - but how do we sew the DOM, XHTML, CSS and Accessibility all together?"

This book tells you how, and - because Zeldman is a real-life designer, just like us, he isn't pontificating from an ivory tower. This reader has read enough standards-fascists shouting "Ignore the real world!" and wonders if those authors actually do the stuff they're frothing about. Zeldman tells us that "My bias [is] toward getting work done under present conditions - a bias I believe most of this book's readers share". (page 3).

Inevitably, there's a forest of three-letter acronyms, and a lot of frankly rather dull stuff to get through, but Zeldman is (to this reader) as much a writer as he is Standards Samurai. There's a lot of jokes in the book. This reader is the first to admit that Accessibility, CSS, XHTML isn't the most fertile ground for thigh-slappin' gags, but there's enough wry smiles and flashes of personality to keep you turning the pages.

That's enough of the tone; what's the structure? Well, the first half of the book is the polemic. If you aren't a standards convert, this will make you one. If you're already a convert, but your boss/ client isn't, strategically leaving this book on the corner of their desk could result in your professional relationship with that boss suddenly becoming a whole lot easier. Like many polemic computer books, though, there's the danger of the first half of the book preaching to the choir.

The second half of the book is where the meat is. We go step-by-step through hybrid XHTML layouts, DOCTYPEs Standards Mode, Typography and Accessibility, leaning by doing it. This is not theoretical. The only depressing chapter is the one titled, "Box models, bugs and Workarounds", on how to accommodate the nasty gremlins of today's browsers. Unlike legacy browser-sniffing that we used to do, however, the Workarounds here are not wasted effort. Standards-compliance is not perfect in today's technology, but it's not going away; the WaSP have generated an unstoppable momentum.

What's bad about the book? Very little, really. It was `fast-tracked' through production, so the occasional page has a slight layout weirdness. Like many recent New Riders books, there's a typographical prissiness (the numerals `2' and `7' in the body of the text are the worst offenders). These are tiny points, from a publishing pedant, that I've only really included because the rest of the review is so glowing!

Wholeheartedly recommended.
Bruce Lawson,
DMXzone.com

Commits the very sins it condemns
I came upon this book via glowing reviews on amazon, citations on websites, and exalted praise from cutting-edge web developers. This was THE book to read if you want to build websites that didn't rely on spaghetti code and deeply nested tables, I was told.

I was greatly disappointed. While I appreciate the overall message of this book and some of the techniques are helpful, not only is it exasperating in its lack of information, but it actually commits the very sins that it relentlessly cites as the scourge of 99.9% of websites - redundancy, verbosity, and lack of clean, clear structure of what little information it imparts.

-REDUNDANCY AND VERBOSITY GALORE
The book really doesn't even get started until Chapter 6 on page 153 (and even that is being generous), after mind-numbing repetition in the form of exposition, bulleted lists, and executive summaries about why one should design and build websites using web standards. There's even a sentence on page 137 that proclaims, "Now let's stop exulting and get down to work." Well, guess what? It's just a tease - and there will be plenty more -- because the proselytizing never really stops.

When the author finally comes around to showing examples and their accompanying markup, it is sadly deficient. CSS that works with the markup is not even shown alongside it, although we are promised to be shown in another chapter. I learned very little about how to actually employ the techniques that Zeldman advocates so strenuously.

The meaningless subheads drove me nuts! Here's a taste: "CSS: The First Bag is Free; The F Word; How Suite it is; Not a Panacea, But Plays One on TV; Inherit the Wind; Miss Behavior to You." I know this might seem like a petty criticism, and maybe people are used to this style from the Dummies books, but 1. They're stupid 2. They impart absolutely no meaning, so if the book is used for a reference, they are less than helpful and 3. The subsections are constantly referred to in all of their absurd and useless glory. This constant reference to other sections by Chapter Number, Chapter Name, Subsection Name smacked of gratuitous page lengthening to me. (If you must refer, why not just use page numbers? Takes up about 1/10th of the space (LIKE GOOD WEB CODE), or better yet, use footnotes!)

-CRINGE-MAKING BANTER
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I don't get this stuff. I bought a serious, technical book about the new age of coding websites. It cost $35 and at 415 pages, that's about 8.4 cents per page. I don't need breaks for mindless digressions about blueberry tofu pie, what title you were thinking of for chapter 6, or for that matter why you want to write in the first person plural. At times, Mr. Zeldman seems to almost flaunt it in our face that he's wasting our time, e.g., on pg. 214 (after a discussion of how this isn't a CSS manual, and how he's introducing us to the "thighs" and "drumsticks" of CSS), he writes: "On the other hand, how many full-blown CSS reference manuals use the word "thighs" three times in one paragraph? You're right none of them do. Your money was well spent on this book."

And when he does actually explain something, it's like being hit over the head with a jackhammer. It took more than half of page 159 to explain this XHTML rule: "write all tags in lowercase".

-BAD TEACHING
The book is also sprinkled with pointless putdowns like "none of this is rocket science" (pg. 164), but the most egregious teaching technique occurs on page 196, when, mind you, very little actual teaching has even taken place. The author gives an example of markup from the Microsoft homepage (eek!) of what he calls "toilet debris" code and then goes on to say:

"Because redundancy is as bad in books as it is in code, we'll avoid explaining what's wrong with this markup. If you don't know by now, one of us hasn't done our job."

Should the phrase "we'll avoid explaining" ever be part an educational text? With all due respect Mr.Zeldman, I think it's you who didn't do your job.