Cover of Designing with Web Standards

Author: Jeffrey Zeldman
Publisher: New Riders
Published: 2010
Pages: 411

Web standards have been receiving increasingly more attention in the past decade. One of the pioneering books in this area was Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards. There was a second edition, and now the current version is number three. That says something about the popularity of the book.

This book is divided in two parts. The first part, over four chapters, provides an introduction to web standards, the purpose they serve, and the benefits they bring.

The second part makes up the bulk of the book, with thirteen chapters. There is information on the recent history of HTML, along with comparisons between HTML4, XHTML, and HTML5. The importance of semantics is also emphasized here.

Following the markup is coverage of CSS, particularly CSS3. This includes handling the differences between browsers, normalization techniques, layout, and typography.

Following CSS DOM scripting. There is only one chapter on this subject, but it nicely completes the trio of frontend web technologies and ties together the earlier chapters.

The final two chapters are case studies, outlining the redesign of two websites using standard markup, styles, and scripting. They serve to demonstrate just a slice of what is possible with these technologies.

The previous books place some more emphasis on implementation details, building layouts and the like. This one has less code in it; not to say there is no useful code, but it has been trimmed down to the items of focus. This is helpul to get the important points across. It is worth pointing out that there is a companion volume, Developing with Web Standards, by John Allsop; I haven’t read it, but from what I can tell it is more focused on the implementation details that I mentioned were light in this book.

Throughout the book, Jeffrey explains things in clear terms. There is a minimum of technobabble that tends to be present in technical books, making this one easy reading.

The bottom line: Designing with Web Standards is a must-read for anyone involved in the process of building a website. The book is mostly theory and background and has little code in it, and as such as readable by programmers and non-programmers alike. Just read it already!