Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman.
Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards could have used a better title for two reasons. First, designing with web standards implies that the book is useful only for web designers and their ilk, which is simply not true. The first part of the book merits a place on the desk of any IT manager who is responsible for a web presence. Second, I think it is a pretty boring name for a book introducing such an exciting shift in web design practice. Web standards compliant design results in cost savings, increased scalability, improved maintainability, and inherent improvements in accessibility to alternate devices such as screen readers.
Web standards are basically guidelines for designers to use when writing code, and rules telling browsers and other output devices how to handle code written to those standards. Actual programming languages all have a required syntax that programmers must follow to get their code to work properly and there are set commands from which programs must be constructed. Markup and scripting languages for the web, however have been plagued by differing implementations by different browsers, each trying to outdo each other and win the “browser wars”. These differences, even between different versions of the same browser, made it necessary to maintain multiple versions of a web page. This may have been possible during the Internet boom, but is far too expensive in today’s business climate. Luckily all modern web browsers finally support web standards to a degree that makes them feasible to use. This eliminates the need for maintaining multiple page versions, and ensures that a page will continue to look the same even as browsers continue to be upgraded (forward compatibility). Zeldman lays all of this out in much greater detail, and gives an overview of how it should be done. The book is divided into three sections, but as the third part is basically a description of the standards support in current modern browsers, I will limit this review to the first two parts.
The first part of the book discusses what web standards are, how they can benefit an organization, and what options are available to an organization considering a move to standards based design, and gives some real life success stories. The section doesn’t go into much detail about the nuts and bolts of standards based design, instead focusing on giving an overview and helping the reader to understand the issues in play. The thing that makes this section truly useful in my opinion is that Zeldman avoids simply evangelizing. He instead gives an overview of the pros and cons of standards based design and suggests alternatives to full standards compliance in cases where they would better serve the needs of the project. Zeldman has a gift for explaining things in a way that is easy to understand even for non-designers. This comprehensive overview could help give an IT manager the knowledge needed to speak with his web design team, and to make decisions that could save the organization a lot of money and time.
The second part of the book is most useful for those actually involved in web design itself. Covering the how and why of hybrid layout, CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) layout, accessibility, and DOM (Dynamic Object Model) Scripting, it gives useful practical examples, as well as inspiration for creating techniques not covered in the book.
The book is not intended to be a text on the ins and outs of any particular technology. There is not a lot of instruction on any particular technique, but it does contain quite a bit about how to use XHTML (eXtended HyperText Markup Language), CSS, and DOM scripting together to make forward compliant, accessible, interesting, and beautiful web pages. If I could choose anything to add to the book, it would be a little bit more explanatory depth on the techniques covered, but that is not really the purpose of the book.
Overall, Zeldman does a great job of giving a general overview of standards, their pros and cons, and how they can be used to your advantage. The first part would be very useful for a designer trying to get a better understanding of standards or figure out how to sell the idea to his/her manager. It would also be useful for anyone else who plays some part in the creation of a web page. The second part of the book serves as a good introduction to many of the techniques used in standards based design. It is a good starting point for designers trying to figure out where to start in learning about web standards, and a source of new ideas for designers already involved in standards based design. Those looking for an in depth explanation of the technologies covered, though, should look elsewhere. Designing with Web Standards, like Zeldman’s website http://www.zeldman.com is a great jumping off point for learning about web standards, but will not stand alone to teach you any particular technology. I highly recommend the book for those interested in learning more about web design, and recommend it as an interesting read for designers already using web standards. For a preview of Zeldman’s writing style, see his website. Most of the material covered in the book has also been covered on the site, but the book serves to put it all in one conveniently organized place.
