Product Description

Best-selling author, designer, and web standards evangelist Jeffrey Zeldman has revisited his classic, industry-shaking guidebook. Updated in collaboration with co-author Ethan Marcotte, this third edition covers improvements and challenges in the changing environment of standards-based design.

Written in the same engaging and witty style, making even the most complex information easy to digest, Designing with Web Standards remains your essential guide to creating sites that load faster, reach more users, and cost less to design and maintain.

• Substantially revised—packed with new ideas

• How will HTML5, CSS3, and web fonts change your work?

• Learn new strategies for selling standards

• Change what “IE6 support” means

“Occasionally (very occasionally) you come across an author who makes you think, ‘This guy is smart! And he makes me feel smarter, because now I finally understand this concept.’” — Steve Krug, author of Don’t Make Me Think and Rocket Surgery Made Easy

“A web designer without a copy of Designing with Web Standards is like a carpenter without a level. With this third edition, Zeldman continues to be the voice of clarity; explaining the complex in plain English for the rest of us.” — Dan Cederholm, author, Bulletproof Web Design and Handcrafted CSS

“Jeffrey Zeldman sits somewhere between ‘guru’ and ‘god’ in this industry—and manages to fold wisdom and wit into a tale about WHAT web standards are, HOW standards-based coding works, and WHY we should care.” — Kelly Goto, author, Web ReDesign 2.0: Workflow that Works

“Some books are meant to be read. Designing with Web Standards is even more: intended to be highlighted, dogeared, bookmarked, shared, passed around, and evangelized, it goes beyond reading to revolution.” — Liz Danzico, Chair, MFA Interaction Design, School of Visual Arts

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11667 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

From the Back Cover
Best-selling author, designer, and web standards evangelist Jeffrey Zeldman has revisited his classic, industry-shaking guidebook. Updated in collaboration with co-author Ethan Marcotte, this third edition covers improvements and challenges in the changing environment of standards-based design.

Written in the same engaging and witty style, making even the most complex information easy to digest, Designing with Web Standards remains your essential guide to creating sites that load faster, reach more users, and cost less to design and maintain.

• Substantially revised—packed with new ideas

• How will HTML5, CSS3, and web fonts change your work?

• Learn new strategies for selling standards

• Change what “IE6 support” means

“Occasionally (very occasionally) you come across an author who makes you think, ‘This guy is smart! And he makes me feel smarter, because now I finally understand this concept.’” — Steve Krug, author of Don’t Make Me Think and Rocket Surgery Made Easy

“A web designer without a copy of Designing with Web Standards is like a carpenter without a level. With this third edition, Zeldman continues to be the voice of clarity; explaining the complex in plain English for the rest of us.” — Dan Cederholm, author, Bulletproof Web Design and Handcrafted CSS

“Jeffrey Zeldman sits somewhere between ‘guru’ and ‘god’ in this industry—and manages to fold wisdom and wit into a tale about WHAT web standards are, HOW standards-based coding works, and WHY we should care.” — Kelly Goto, author, Web ReDesign 2.0: Workflow that Works

“Some books are meant to be read. Designing with Web Standards is even more: intended to be highlighted, dogeared, bookmarked, shared, passed around, and evangelized, it goes beyond reading to revolution.” — Liz Danzico, Chair, MFA Interaction Design, School of Visual Arts

About the Author
Dubbed King of Web Standards by Business Week, Jeffrey Zeldman (zeldman.com) was one of the web’s first designers and bloggers. He publishes A List Apart “for people who make websites;” runs Happy Cog™, a leading web design studio; and co-founded An Event Apart, The Deck, and The Web Standards Project.

Versatile user experience designer/developer Ethan Marcotte served as a steering committee member of The Web Standards Project, and has worked with clients including New York Magazine, Harvard University, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Books to which he has contributed include Handcrafted CSS, Web Standards Creativity, and Professional CSS. Ethan writes and does technical editing at A List Apart, and is a popular educator and conference speaker. He would like to be an unstoppable robot ninja when he grows up (unstoppablerobotninja.com).

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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!