Editors Note: Special guest author, Daniel Vos (son of Douglas Vos) was invited to write a book review of Designing with Web Standards. Daniel is a graduate of Washington and Lee University (and also studied at Oxford.) Currently, he is an academic coordinator, budding web designer, and occasional writer for Roanoke area newspapers and business journals.

This is the first in a series of posts on a book that has become essential reading for web designers. The book is the second edition of Designing With Web Standards (DWWS) by Jeffrey Zeldman, published in 2007 by New Riders in association with AIGA.

Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman

Two reasons you might hate this book:

1. If you’re a sloppy web designer who doesn’t care about making the content of the web site you’re designing both beautiful and accessible to the widest possible audience of users, you’ll hate this book. Mr. Zeldman chose the title – “Designing With Web Standards” carefully: His book is about designing web sites using the most up-to-date standards published by W3C and ECMA, whose web sites have never represented the vanguard of graphic design. Mr. Zeldman cut his teeth in the “paper publishing” graphic design and copy writing business before the web changed everything in the 1990s. DWWS is not an encyclopedic catalog or desk reference to the fundamentals of web standards. It’s a playful Wonka-esque romp (as in Willy Wonka) through the wonders of web standards which gives copious examples of practical ways in which you can use web standards to optimize both your products and processes to result in more effective, more usable, and more attractive websites.

2. If you read W3C specifications for fun and pleasure, and keep the most recent edition of the U.S. Tax Code along with a well-worn copy of Immanuel Kant’s collected works on your bedside table, you’ll probably hate this book. To which I say, in the words of my wife: “You’re far too smart and far too serious for your own good.” The W3C specifications are publicly available on the web for you to peruse at your leisure, and every web designer should be familiar with them. But if you’re expecting a thorough desk reference to XHTML, CSS, and the Document Object Model (DOM), then this may not be the book for you. Sorry.

Jeffrey Zeldman - Designing With Web Standards

The top five reasons this book is a classic:

1. It’s a clear, witty, and often entertaining introduction to web standards from the perspective of a working web designer, as opposed to a W3C specifications wonk. XHTML controls the structure of a web page, CSS defines its presentation and DOM scripting directs its behavior. The power of web standards lies in learning how to use each standard for its intended purpose. For example, XHTML should not be used to define the presentation of web page: colors, fonts, positioning, and the rest. Au contraire, presentation is a job for CSS. This sort of thing is potentially a sterile topic, but Mr. Zeldman is an engaging writer and as I read the book the pages often seemed to turn themselves.

2. Few have a better grasp of the history, politics, and economics of web standards than Jeffrey Zeldman. As a co-founder of The Web Standards Project in 1998, Mr. Zeldman fought on the front-lines of the battle for a more elegant, usable, and accessible web. In fact, the first hundred pages or so of DWWS contain an eyewitness history of the browser wars and the emergence of web standards. Why is this important? Why bother with the nitty-gritty of early battles between Internet Explorer and Netscape? Because, in the midst of those battles, many web designers formed bad habits which web standards were designed to fix. Not to mention that it makes for great David vs. Goliath story.

3. Great explanations of real-world objections to web standards in a business setting and detailed refutations of these objections. Designing attractive standards-compliant websites is appealing in its own right as an art form, but Mr. Zeldman recognizes that even high-minded web designers need bread for their tables. Well he knows, too, that the typical business website needs a bit more panache than, say, the W3C homepage. For example, DWWS has a chapter on accessibility standards: Section 508 in the U.S., and WCAG in the European Union and most other countries. Everyone who supports human rights – including the rights of the blind, the deaf, and the disabled – should be interested in such standards. But Zeldman also shows how using accessibility standards can improve web sites’ visibility to “blind” web crawlers such as the Google search engine. And who’s not interested in that?

4. Tons of case studies. Zeldman gives us all the gory details. Like Dante in the Divine Comedy, he leads us first through web-site hell (web sites based on inelegant, non-durable proprietary technologies), then through purgatory (transitional strategies for converting web sites from sloppy proprietary HTML into well-crafted Transitional XHTML and CSS), and finally into paradise, where we are afforded the opportunity to gaze upon the beauty and utility of XHTML, CSS, and the DOM (“the trinity of web standards”). See, I told you this book was a classic of web design!

5. An emphasis on practical, standards-compliant workarounds and hacks for problems that still remain in current browser implementations. Web standards have steadily continued to win acceptance since the first edition of DWWS was published in 2002 (e.g., try this Google Trends query), and the most popular web browsers are more standards-compliant than ever. Moreover, web browser software publishers and web site designers are finding that the costs and risks of using proprietary web technologies are growing. But despite the increasing ubiquity of web standards, problems remain. Neither Internet Explorer 7.0 nor Firefox 3.0 are fully standards compliant, untold millions of Internet users still use older versions of browsers, and more and more people are accessing the web from crippled web browsers in cell phones and mobile PCs. Remember those case studies I was telling you about? Lots of them explain standards-compliant solutions for annoying quirks in supposedly standards-compliant browsers, such as different implementations of the CSS box model.

Case closed. Designing With Web Standards is well worth your time and money and highly recommended.

Update, 29-July-2008 /  See Part 2 – Designing with Web Standards Two Year On — or what’s happened in the two years since the 2nd edition of the book was published.