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Home » Web » Standards » CSS » Opinion » Reading » Designing with Web Standards : Jeffrey Zeldman

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Designing with Web Standards : Jeffrey Zeldman

If, like me, you design web sites this is possibly one of the most important books I have ever read about the subject. Over the past few years everyone has been designing and coding sites in a particular way and there has been a lot of pain because all of the different browsers and different versions display sites slightly differently. The Microsoft site has seven browser detection scripts and still doesn't work properly - 6 or 7 pieces of that code you don't need but your browser has to down load them when you visit.

There have been complex workarounds and a lot of very bad practice. With the development of Cascading Style Sheets in 1999 things started to look interesting. The ability to change the look of complete sites by swapping one file throws up all sorts of possibilities. CSS finally gave us a way to split the content from the design. At the same time Zeldman, along with a few others started to shout very loudly about how how the browser developers were not sticking to the the standards, CSS and others html 4, and amazingly they listened - yes Microsoft stopped and listened to them!

With a few very minor exceptions we are now seeing the dawn of a new era brought on by browsers using web standards properly, CSS, accessibility and the emergence of xhtml to replace html4.01. The thing is you can follow each discipline and still not get a site to work efficiently. Zeldman's book gives you the basic reasons why you should be using the Web Standards and more importantly how you should change your approach on how to design web sites.

I expect this book will become a classic and spawn a hundred similar titles. What is important for business is that they follow Zeldman's advice in this book. It's not just for web geeks like me but anyone in the industry who wants to produce a top flight site at the same time as saving time and money.

Posted by Simon at August 30, 2003 4:17 AM

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