Designing with Web Standards Two Years On

July 26, 2008 at 11:12 am · Filed under History, Webdesignology, Webstandardology

Editors Note: Special guest author, Daniel 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.

In my last post, I explained five reasons why Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman is a must-read classic of web design. In this post, I want to start a conversation about new developments in web standards since the second edition of the book was published two years ago.

As DWWS 2nd edition went to press in the second half of 2006:

  • Internet Explorer 6 was the most popular browser, with about 77% of the market share; meanwhile, Firefox 1.5 ran a distant second in popularity, at 10.5% of the market share. (Source: Market Share).
  • Internet Explorer 7 was just being released.
  • Not long after its first birthday, Ajax was already (to quote Zeldman) “stealing the rich applications market from Flash and generating nutty and probably unsustainable excitement.”
  • Microsoft was about to release Expression Web, a relatively standards-compatible WYSIWYG web page editor to replace its notoriously bad FrontPage editor and compete with Adobe’s standards-compatible Dreamweaver.
  • Implementations of CSS across browsers remained inconsistent: Zeldman documented the Float bug in IE6/Windows, and other standardistas recommended the Simplified Box Model Hack to address different interpretations of the CSS box model.

Here’s where we stand today:

  • Internet Explorer 7.0 has less than 50% of the browser market share, although IE still dominates nearly 75% of the market. But Internet Explorer use overall has been steadily declining as Firefox, Safari, and Opera continue to win more users. (Source: Market Share).
  • Browser bug watchers are still at it, and still finding new bugs and workarounds: See, for example, Position is Everything.
  • The Web Standards project has launched AcidTest 3.0, which tests CSS, DOM, ECMAScript, and XML compliance. Verdict? All browsers still have plenty of room to grow — some more than others, I’m afraid!
  • Opera recently announced their Web Standards Curriculum, which they plan to complete by Sept 2008. Here’s hoping they finish what they’ve started. This could be a big help for those educating the next generation of web designers.
  • Finally, the ability to separate content from presentation via semantic XHTML markup and CSS will continue to be crucially important as the mobile web browser market grows. The W3C Mobile Web Best Practices are worth a glance, given predictions that there will be 82 million Internet-enabled mobile devices within three years.
  • Adoption of web technologies which promote greater interactivity continues to grow. Was Zeldman right about Ajax generating unsustainable excitement?
  • Big software publishing companies such as Microsoft and Adobe seem to be making their products more and more standards-compatible.

Web standards remains an exciting field, because new standards are still emerging, and using them (rather than proprietary solutions) is still the best way to publish elegant, attractive, findable, and accessible content. Books like Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman got the ball rolling, and now it’s up to us to use the Web to market our products and services, target our audiences, and (perhaps most importantly) to build and sustain relationships.

I’ve said my bit. What do you think? What are some of the most important developments in web standards in the past 18 to 24 months?

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