Designing with Web Standards (Voices That Matter)

The books is quite an easy read with some nice historical discussion and ought to be accessible by anyone with a reasonable amount of experience with HTML4 (such as taught in one undergraduate module on web design or books like "Teach yourself HTML in 24 hours"). It's not a full-on CSS book, but does a nice job of introducing some CSS basics. What's nice is that it is not a "tables are bad, pure CSS is good" evangelising book but discusses and approves of transitional approaches.


Buy this Book!   January 5, 2004
Christopher Murphy (N. Ireland)
9 out of 9 found this review helpful

I don't often relentlessly urge people to "buy this book!", but Jeffrey Zeldman's 'Designing with Web Standards' is one of the best web design books I've read in ages.

It's well-argued and contains easy to follow (I'd say 'idiot-proof', but...). Follow the guidelines in this book and not only will your web pages be forward compatible (compatible with standards-driven browsers of the future), but they'll also be more widely accessible and, most importantly, they'll load much, much faster.

A week with this book and I was building pages one quarter the size of my originals (i.e. four times faster loading). Again: Buy this book!


Articulate, passionate and practical   June 30, 2003
Mr. Michael Ward
14 out of 15 found this review helpful

Jefferey Zeldman has just written THE bible for modern web designers.

He demonstrates the way that designers have got themselves in a rut with their old techniques, and shows us the path to practical web design in the modern era.

Web Standards are a difficult thing to master, but this book shows us how we can design sites in a way that is both artistic and elegant, yet meets web accessibility standards and works across every browser on every platform from PC to phone to PDA.

If you only glanced at Zeldmans work, you might think he was a zealot preaching ways that are unworkable in a business scenario. You couldn't be futher from the truth. The authors main concern is fusing the ideology of web standards, with the practicality of life in the competitive world of web site design.

As a web professional, do yourself the biggest favour you can and get this book. Use it to learn about the ideas and methods behind the web standards push, then use it to convince your managers that this is the way forward.


A funny, smart and useful book   December 16, 2003
7 out of 7 found this review helpful

Without doubt, Zeldman is at the forefront of his field, and this book is a great collection of the concepts and practical tricks which underpin standards-based web design.

I came to it after reading the magazine site Zeldman runs, A List Apart. While it's useful to read individual articles by experts online, I wanted a more general guide to the whole subject, which this book provides.

The weakest aspect is probably the slow pace of the first half of the book. These sections make the case for standards-based design, which, while compelling, could be made much more concisely. Having said that, the joy of the book as a whole is Zeldman's discursive and amusing style which helps to keep you going through code examples which might otherwise be pretty dry. How many other authors 'break open the small salty snacks' with you when they've reached the final step of a code demonstration?

If you're in a hurry to learn CSS and XHTML, you might be best served by a Visual Quickstart guide based primarily on learning the tags. But if you take that approach, there's always a risk that you'll never fully grasp the reason for taking the extra trouble to create sites in this way. And alternatively if you just follow the many websites offering web standards tutorials, you risk missing the overview of the basics which this book presents to you in a logical order.

Overall, this book is as much about the history and the business case as the tags themselves. The end result is that you not only know the techniques, but you become an evangelist for web standards yourself.


Essential purchase   February 23, 2006
13 out of 14 found this review helpful

The title sounds a little dull and belies the importance of this book. Think about it like this; who specifies the web standards to which the browser makers are increasingly if not fully complying? The W3C. Jefferey Zeldman is the guy who wrote 'their book' about web standards.

Web standards isn't just about making sites accessible to the disabled, it's about making them work across browsers, and understanding how the whole whole website/browser thing works. Do you really understand how doctype switching works? Do you really know what XHTML is all about for example? Do you know how to separate presentation from content (cos that's the way it's going)?

The first part of the book is a general history thing and the second looks at techniques and examples. But, if you're looking for a CSS cookbook, or a complete tutorial in HTML, CSS then seek elsewhere.

If you're doing anything with websites today, you simply must read this book. It'll deepen your understanding 'and' save you time and money.