Designing With Web Standards

Rating:
Summary: over-hyped
Review: I admit it. I fell for the hype and bought this book after reading the glowing reviews on amazon but never having even glanced through the book. Big mistake.

Short version - very little content, tons of pretty obvious observations on css design. Nothing you can't find better done on one of the many css news sites/blogs.

Perhaps, the best way to describe this book is perhaps to compare it to Bill Gates writing a book about computers. Yeah, Gates is a big name in computers. Do you want to learn about computers from him? Probably not.

Zeldman seems like a good source to learn CSS from but is a poor teacher. The books spends most of it's time on common sense theory of css-design. Very, very little actual implementation.

The writing style is another issue - from early on the author informs that he'll be referring to himself as "we". Well, "we" are very bad at writing easily flowing text. Combine the lack of content with the very poor writing style and I'm sad to say I regret having spent the money on this one.

Rating:
Summary: Worth every penny...
Review: ...and even a few more. Good real-world examples, and a strong push in the right direction.

Rating:
Summary: Good, but not great
Review: If you already believe that CSS/XHTML is the present and future of web page design, much of this book will be useless for you. Zeldman devotes a lot of ink to defining these technologies and convincing the reader that it is time to use them.

However, there are some good tips inside, and the writing style is easy to read (if often overly flip).

On the other hand, if you are still building HTML 3 or HTML 4 pages, or didn't know that HTML had version numbers, then this is the book for you!

Rating:
Summary: Great Web Standards Introduction
Review: Before I read this book, I had no clue about CSS or web standards. I was almost to the point to think that CSS and web standards were a joke and useless. After reading Jeffrey's book, I became inspired to learn XHTML and CSS. I have successfully converted my personal web site from HTML to XHTML 1.1 which validates. It only took me two months to learn this and I owe Jeffrey a lot of thanks (plus Elizabeth Castro, Joe Clark and Eric Meyers).

This book is money well spent.

Rating:
Summary: Essential
Review: It's the book I wish our corporate web developers would read. A breath of fresh air in a world of stinking Microsoft IE only mindsets. This book may not make you rich, but think of reading it as a small act of civil disobedience while working towards a world governed by web standards.

Rating:
Summary: Lots of fluff - Very Little Substance
Review: I bought this book based on some recommendations I saw and was sorely disappointed. It took over 150 (out of 420) pages to actually get to *how* to use CSS. Even then the examples were weak.

The philosophy seemed to be "Always use three paragraphs when one will do." The asides and so-called jokes did nothing but distract from the subject. The "artsy" fonts, expecially for numbers, detracted and hampered comprehension. Every time a chapter was referenced, the whole chapter title was used (and they are very long titles) and this got very tedious.

There are a couple of nuggets of information that are useful in this book, but it takes *way* too much effort to dig them out.

Overall, look other places for solid information on how to actually use CSS.

Rating:
Summary: The best book I've read in a long while
Review: I believe that it is a lot easier to read a book that is written in a very conversational style. Jeffrey Zeldman writes this way, and provides a light-hearted yet expert view of Web standards.

Zeldman goes into detail explaining the rise and fall of version 3 and 4 browsers. It's a really interesting look at how HTML exploded from a dozen or so tags in its beginnings to the <BLINK> tag and others that would water down HTML's original purpose.

Now that we have arrived at a point in time where we can write pages that have the hope of looking the same in Netscape/Mozilla, Opera and Internet Explorer, it's great to have a manual describing how to do so. This book is that very manual. If you are new to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), this book will convince you to use CSS. Then the book will educate you.

I think the fact that this book manages to convince people to use CSS and other standard methods will really cause a wave of change across the Web. Call it a return to HTML's purpose. I call it "television is best seen on TV, not in a Web browser". This volume book-ends very nicely with "Eric Meyer on CSS". Buy both books and you'll soon be on the road to being an early adopter of "The Right Way".

Rating:
Summary: Required Reading for Today's Web Designer
Review: If you read my "Fear of Styling" CSS Bibliography at design-bookshelf.com, you'll see there's a plethora of CSS guides on the market -- some better than others -- but this one is slated to rise to the top of the heap right next to Schmitt's "Designing CSS Web Pages" and Meyer's "Mastering the Language of Web Design."

Zeldman sends us on a slightly different track, mixing hard-core CSS with a bit of humanity. Since so many of us 'old timers' are worried about browser compatibility, his guidance in building CSS driven web pages that "compromise" and "complement" structures for older browsers is well worth the price alone. I've now tested four of his suggested CSS layouts and all four work well and offer 'almost' W3 validation. And, don't let those W3 people push you around. They're so retentive about their specs few web pages get through unscathed.

Aside from that cover, I think you'll find Zeldman's "Designing with Web Standards" insightful, and inspiring as a desk-side companion. I also highly recommend the book to trainers and professors teaching web design at university level BEFORE teaching the likes of Dreamweaver and GoLive. I've interviewed too many new college graduates who don't know their attributes from their padding. This is important stuff. The stuff that will make your web pages work -- and keep working in the future.

Rating:
Summary: Lots of paper, little content
Review: Based on the positive reviews, I bought the book and read it. The book is an amazing waste of paper. The contents of the book can be summarized as advocating a certain way of coding Web sites, with one partially worked example. The book could have been a 5 page white paper.

The book advocates writing Web sites using XHTML, and using CSS for layout information (styles.) There is some discussion of being careful to write structural tags instead of specific markup. As an example of what this means, if you want to display a list without bullets or numbering, you should tag the list items using li.../li, and write an appropriate CSS style for the list that produces the look you want. This is better than writing individual items separated using br to force formatting. By the way, Zeldman gives this specific example, without bothering to show how to write the appropriate CSS styles.

While the book contains many recommendations, it provides few worked examples, and essentially no reference information. When you read the book, you learn that you should create Web pages in a certain manner, but not how to do it. Chapter 6 contains an actual example of what Zeldman thinks you should write. It begins on page 153 of the book. The preceding 1/3 of the book contains lots of opinions, but little information. Chapter 6 contains useful information, as does chapter 8 (the first part of an example, showing the XHTML of the single worked example in the book), and chapter 10 (which contains the corresponding CSS to chapter 8's XHTML). Most of the remaining chapters have some information.

What I generally expect in a book that explains a topic is a description, a worked example, some references for more extensive information, and discussions of good and bad alternatives.

Zeldman's book instead provides many chapters of opinionated ramblings about his view of the current state of the Web design world, how the world got that way, and what is wrong with it. These ramblings are written assuming that the reader cares or has a reason to care about how the Web design world got to the state that Zeldman thinks it is in, and that the reader fundamentally understands the topic, which Zeldman discusses in obscure references. These ramblings are then followed by one or two partial examples, no reference information, then more ramblings about the topic, now that you have been presented with Zeldman's solution.

If you want to learn how to design with CSS, there are many alternative books, and of course there are the W3C standards themselves. What is good about Zeldman's book is that he addresses the issue of how to design pages using CSS/XHTML, rather than simply how to code the CSS. The problem with the book is that he provides almost no information about how to do this.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book - but SHUT UP already!
Review: First of all, this is an excellent book. It is well thought out, well written and provides lots of great instruction and examples. Zeldman does a wonderful job making his case for Web standards and the evolution of the WWW. But that is also the biggest problem with this book. Zeldman makes his case - and it is a great one. I'm convinced. But then he makes it again. And again. AND AGAIN. We're fully 150 pages into the book before we actually start learing HOW to develop with standards. Now, I understand that a case needs to be made. I'm one of those "old school" designers that has been in this biz for years and years now. I'm a master of all those HTML tricks that are now taboo in StandardsLand. He was preaching right to me and I for one needed to be preached at. My methods are out of date, my skills need to be honed. No problem, happy to convert. I'm sold. So cut to the chase! Zeldman's passion is clear and his wit is sharp. It really is an excellent read. But I also think he doesn't trust his reader enough to understand his points quickly enough. The initial 150 pages could probably be boiled down to 50 or 75 with the same result, leaving more room for instruction and how-to. Still, highly recommended!