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: #278043 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

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 Back Cover
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.

About the Author
Jeffrey Zeldman is among the best-known Web designers in the world. His personal site (www.zeldman.com) has welcomed more than than 16 million visitors and is read daily by thousands in the web design and development industry. In 1998, Zeldman co-founded The Web Standards Project (www.webstandards.org), a grassroots coalition of web designers and developers that helped end the Browser Wars by persuading Microsoft and Netscape to support the same technology in their browsers.

Customer Reviews

Lucid and accessible -- the wave of the future!
Zeldman does a good job of persuading one that web standards are the future for interoperability and accessibility. The only thing (I suppose) that lets the book down is a dearth of references (a few choice ones are recommended) and only two concrete design "walkthrough" examples. However he mentions books with more references and, hey, it's the web! We can find a plethora of ref's online.

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.

Designing with Web Standards - Great book
I wasn't quite expecting this book to be so big, after checking out Jeffrey Zeldman's homepage (zeldman.com) and reading the other reviews on this title from Amazon I had the impression it would be an plane-English drop-in-reference style book, but it isn't; its more like a school text book, which, depending on how you look at it can be good or a bad thing.

The first few chapters are about what CSS really is, and how Zeldman thinks it should/must be used, most of the time he is right, personally on occasions I find his ideas a little lecturing.

If you are a web designer who is already aware that CSS and CSS-P is the way forward for the internet, then the first third of the book will not be so useful.

After this Zeldman goes into a mini project, which is split into two chapters with another lecture-style chapter between. I find this project and the chapters after are the meet and potatoes of the book, they are inspiring, functional and efficient.

On a final note, I found some of Zeldman's humour and jokes really not funny, maybe its me, but I got the feeling he was trying too hard, apart from this little artistic disappointment the book is really useful, I will recommend this book to any mid-level web designers!

Buy this Book!
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!