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Summary: Transition Your Thinking
Review: This book documents the jagged history of web design's hows and whys, while teaching you the techniques you'll need to transition your thinking away from obsolete and often proprietary markup, to markup that embraces any and all users, and user-agents.In an easy to read, easy to follow style, Jeffery Zeldman shows you by example, how you can upgrade your design process, cut costs, and open up your designs to the future without closing them to the past. The book covers new-thinking markup fundamentals of XHTML and the presentational power of CSS, by walking you first through a hybrid design, where old school meets new school, and then a complete new school design. Transitioning between the two schools of thought, Jeffrey Zeldman explains elements of layout, typography, and accessibility that can quickly help you bring your sites into compliance with the standards that are shaping the web. Browsers have already reached a level of compliance with web standards that set the stage for a more mature web. Now it's time for designers to do the same. This book will help you get there.
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Summary: Zeldman stands out in a class by himself
Review: One of the main differences between Jeffrey Zeldman & other writers dealing with web standards/CSS is that Jeffrey lives & works in the real world of web development. Other writers on these topics seem to be playing to the CSS-purists and/or theorists whose own work has little, if any, value in the marketplace. Who would hire someone to create a web site that looks little better than an ad in the local yellow pages? In this book Jeffrey cuts to the chase and provides practical solutions with a writing style that keeps you engaged and even entertained. Far too many of the current CSS 'professionals' write in a style of an old prissy school teacher and drone on and on about how things 'should be if only browsers would just.........(fill in the blank)' or blather on about how great a particular browser is because it renders CSS correctly forgetting to mention that it has a total marketshare of maybe 3% - whoop-de-do. I found this book well above the rest that deal with CSS/Standards and recommend it without reservation.
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Summary: Wholeheartedly recommended
Review: New Rider's slogan "Voices That Matter" is one that I generally take with a large pinch of salt. In Zeldman's case, that's true. If Tim Berners-Lee is the father of the internet, Zeldman and the team at the Web Standards Project are the net's midwives. The W3C wrote the standards (or recommendations as they apologetically and coyly them), whilst Zeldman and his gang set about the hard, political and (until now) thankless task of bullying (browser-beating?) Netscape and Microsoft to conform to the standards that they'd helped set. Having brokered the end of the Browser Wars, they turned their attentions to the WYSIWYG tools like Dreamweaver, GoLive and (ahem) FrontPage, actually advising Macromedia on how to make DMX conform to Web Standards. And now, this time, it's personal. Zeldman and the WaSP warriors are coming for you. "Though today's browsers support standards, tens of thousands of professional designers and developers continue to use outdated methods that yoke structure to presentation". This book is part of the campaign to educate us, the Web Professionals. It's part polemic, and part tutorial. Polemic because so many of us are yet a-standard (or even anti-standards), and tutorial because there's so much talk of why standards that a lot of us are saying "We know they're important. We know it's evil and wrong to use tables, and we know every time we use a deprecated tag a fairy dies somewhere - but how do we sew the DOM, XHTML, CSS and Accessibility all together?" This book tells you how, and - because Zeldman is a real-life designer, just like us, he isn't pontificating from an ivory tower. This reader has read enough standards-fascists shouting "Ignore the real world!" and wonders if those authors actually do the stuff they're frothing about. Zeldman tells us that "My bias [is] toward getting work done under present conditions - a bias I believe most of this book's readers share". (page 3). Inevitably, there's a forest of three-letter acronyms, and a lot of frankly rather dull stuff to get through, but Zeldman is (to this reader) as much a writer as he is Standards Samurai. There's a lot of jokes in the book. This reader is the first to admit that Accessibility, CSS, XHTML isn't the most fertile ground for thigh-slappin' gags, but there's enough wry smiles and flashes of personality to keep you turning the pages. That's enough of the tone; what's the structure? Well, the first half of the book is the polemic. If you aren't a standards convert, this will make you one. If you're already a convert, but your boss/ client isn't, strategically leaving this book on the corner of their desk could result in your professional relationship with that boss suddenly becoming a whole lot easier. Like many polemic computer books, though, there's the danger of the first half of the book preaching to the choir. The second half of the book is where the meat is. We go step-by-step through hybrid XHTML layouts, DOCTYPEs Standards Mode, Typography and Accessibility, leaning by doing it. This is not theoretical. The only depressing chapter is the one titled, "Box models, bugs and Workarounds", on how to accommodate the nasty gremlins of today's browsers. Unlike legacy browser-sniffing that we used to do, however, the Workarounds here are not wasted effort. Standards-compliance is not perfect in today's technology, but it's not going away; the WaSP have generated an unstoppable momentum. What's bad about the book? Very little, really. It was 'fast-tracked' through production, so the occasional page has a slight layout weirdness. Like many recent New Riders books, there's a typographical prissiness (the numerals '2' and '7' in the body of the text are the worst offenders). These are tiny points, from a publishing pedant, that I've only really included because the rest of the review is so glowing! Wholeheartedly recommended.
Bruce Lawson,
DMXzone.com
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Summary: The Gospel According to Jeffrey
Review: Zeldman does it again! From the get go, he delivers his sermon about forward compatibility and web standards like a preacher, helping us to see the light. There will be doubters and non-believers, but Zeldman can and does back up every point he makes for using standards. He covers almost every nook and cranny of web design these days: xhtml, css, accessibility, browser compatibility, hybrid markup, DOM, etc, with screenshots, examples, and resources along the way. JZ also continues with his witty headers, which are a treat. I believe! I believe! Praise Zeldman! I own Taking Your Talent to the Web, which has a prominent place in my bookshelf. Until I read that book, I was convinced that web design was forever doomed. I use it these days as a textbook for my Web Design students, who have become fans of the Daily Report. Designing with Web Standards is a brilliant sophomore effort and a worthy companion. It will sit right next to JZ's first book and help teach my future web design students, too. If you are a web designer/developer, this book is a must for your library. Jeffrey Zeldman, we are lucky to have you in our world. Thank you for sharing your wonderful site(s) and insight.
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Summary: Our Transition to Standards-Based Design
Review: Our agency is transitioning to standards-based design, and Zeldman's book has been very helpful. There are many how-to standards sites on the web, but none that detail the steps (and the reasons why CSS works) as well as this book does. Considering that ESPN, Wired, Fast Company, and others have published standards-based sites, we feel it's important for us to understand the standards process, offer it to our clients, and make it part of our business model.
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Summary: Usable and relevant
Review: Jeffrey Zeldman, godfather (in the non-scary, non-bloodbath sense) of the web design industry, returns to the book-publishing fray with his latest tome, the extremely usable & well-written "Designing with Web Standards". For quite a long time most web designers have treated standards compliance with the same respect as Microsoft enjoys on Slashdot. They are nagged by an annoying voice in the back of their heads that scream, "design for the future" - but drown it out with the client's cries of "design for the past" and their own misapprehension that "everything should be pixel-perfect in Netscape 4". They hack, triple-test, pet every single line of carefully-crafted HTML, spend countless days ironing out every obscure browser bug known to man, and then pull their hair out in large knots when a new browser comes along & everything breaks. If you are one of those people (I certainly used to be), perhaps it's time to stand back & realize the obvious: standards compliance is the only way of future-proofing your sites. It's the only way of making sure that what you build today won't break tomorrow. And fortunately for you mr. Zeldman is here to take your hand, show you where you went wrong, and guide you gently into this brave new world. It's foolish to claim that standards compliance can solve all the problems of web development - but it's equally foolish to continue living in the past when you have an excellent book like this that can make your professional life so much easier.
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Summary: Highly Recommended!
Review: I purchased this book as a recommendation from a client I do web development for and it ended up being the best tech book I have read in a long time. I jumped in head first by implementing web standards design before I finished the book. The examples are very helpful and the code sniplets are very usefull. By using the princples of this book, I am designing and coding pages much faster and with fewer cross-browser hickups than with old-school markup and nasty table nests. Get this book and get an edge on your competition now!
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Summary: Great case for using standards.
Review: Being still in the beginning of my webdesign endeavour, I do appreciate the updated and especially the unbiased view Jeffrey Zeldman provides in his book. Respecting Flash as an emerging standard (though proprietary), and more up-to-date than Jacob Nielsen's Web Usability one might settle just for Jeffrey Zeldman. Standards sound dry and boring but Jeff manages to keep the reader motivated with lots of wit and an excellent writing style, complemented by a very good structure of this book. (There are not too many text books out there that can be read from beginning to end without getting bored or wandering off topic.) This book continues and updates the attempts by Nielsen and McLellan and deserves a spot right next to them in your library. In fact, you should keep it upfront since it's probably the best advice you can get these days. Printing quality and overall design and craftsmanship are very high. more detail ... http://www.epinions.com/content_144513404548
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Summary: Mostly hype, didn't teach me much
Review: I learned HTML back in 1994. I barely updated my HTML skills until a couple years ago where I picked up very basic CSS but all my HTML was still table based, font tags, etc.. everything you could do that's bad according to XHTML. I decided that now is the time to update my skills. I hear from many people and reviews that this is -THE- book to buy to learn web standards. 150 pages into the book, he is STILL trying to sell me on the idea to use web standards! Jesus, I bought the book already! I bought this book expecting to learn the latest XHTML tags and some CSS. Instead it was a lot of hot air and wasted time. Sure I learned a bit, but I'm sure I would have gotten more out of some other book. After reading it, I don't feel much further ahead than I was before. Time to buy another book.
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Summary: Reads like religious tract
Review: So far I've read up to page 127 -- and I've still yet to glean even a single useful bit of information about CSS or web standards. Lots and lots and lots of case studies and explanation after explanation of how much better life is now that we can all use web standards. Okay, already -- I get it! That's why I bought the book in the first place. Now where's the expert advice on how best to do it?
I was getting annoyed after about 30 pages of blah blah blah. But after more than a hundred pages -- where is the content?
I think a more appropriate title for this book would be: "Well Over 100 Pages of Why I Think You Should Use CSS".
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