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Issue 6.2

REVIEW

Book: Designing with Web Standards

Issue: 6.2 (January/February 2008)
Author: Dave Mancuso
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 4,084
Starting Page Number: 9
Article Number: 6205
Related Web Link(s):

http://www.zeldman.com/dwws/

Full text of article...

Web design didn't always seem to me to be directly related to REALbasic. But (and I'm probably preaching to the choir here), many RB applications use and manipulate XML for their own uses. Many use CSS and HTML for various reasons, and I'm sure a number of REALbasic applications use XHTML as well. And of course, as developers we manage (if not code from scratch) our own websites. With this in mind, I was excited to read Jeffrey Zeldman's new edition of his Designing with Web Standards book. I wanted to see if it kept its edge in today's world as much as the first edition did.

The book itself is a landmark work. Jeffrey Zeldman is a web design pioneer, one of the first in his field to advocate web standards. He founded the Web Standards Project a decade ago to provide a level playing field for web markup, both style and structure. The second edition of Designing with Web Standards is no different. It delineates the coming web standards in terms of implementation today.

The book is a great mix of theory, practice, and background information. Zeldman doesn't hide his bias at all. He's very much for new web standards, and he'd probably be happy if every website in the world was composed of CSS and straight XML. He recognizes, though, that the reality is far from a web standards dream, from both a design standpoint and from web browser compliance issues. The first edition of the book spent a lot of time describing CSS and XHTML layouts, but recognized that tables and HTML were real things that needed to be used in the real world. The second edition strongly encourages CSS and XHTML, and bluntly states that HTML needs to be left behind.

Zeldman recognizes that we work in the real world, however, and discusses how to use tables, old markup tags, and how to deal with browser bugs. He says that even just deleting font tags in page markup would be a start toward standards compliance--you don't have to go all the way to CSS and XML in one step.

The background tidbits and information on the history of web standards are very revealing. For instance, the history of Internet Explorer 5 on the Macintosh and how it pushed standards forward is surprising. More juicy is how IE5 was stifled and eventually killed by Microsoft for its success (Zeldman feels that IE5 made IE on Windows look bad in comparison, causing Microsoft to restrict further IE development on Macintosh).

I have to say as well that the book itself is beautiful. It's laid out well and is very readable, with great color illustrations. Zeldman's style is direct and informal, as if he's discussing (or arguing) web standards with you over coffee. With the book's up to date topics and tips, its clean style, its direct approach, and practical considerations, the second edition of Designing with Web Standards is a real winner.

End of article.