Update: As of  Jan. 26, 2009 – there are over 4,800 members.

Designing With Web Standards - Facebook Group

Quoting from the DWWS Facebook group page:

Designing With Web Standards is “the foundational web standards text”. “A core text cited by many as the beginning of the true revolution.”

“Web standards” didn’t really exist until Mr. Jeffrey Zeldman, and his colleagues, coined the term, applied it to a set of ill-enforced W3C and ECMA recommendations, and persuaded browser makers to support these core technologies accurately and completely. That was “The Web Standards Project.”

Designers still weren’t using these hard-won standards, so Mr. Zeldman pushed A List Apart in the direction of web standards evangelism, and this had a great effect. An underground of smart, forward-thinking designers and developers embraced web standards.

Still, most people didn’t get the concepts of web standards, and the industry was oblivious to the benefits or even the existence of web standards.

So the book was written, and published, revised and re-published and the story of web standards continues. It’s the book that launched a thousand other books, from Web Standards Solutions on. It changed some people’s careers, launched others, shook up the industry. However imperfectly applied, web standards are behind most “Web 2.0″ apps.

And yet web standards are still a semi-underground movement, and standardistas are still a rare breed.

Back on November 2nd, 2007 – Jeffrey Zeldman wrote about the group in his blog.

In July of 2008, we wrote an update about DWWS group activities, and related events.

In the past year, 4,171 members have to joined the DWWS Facebook group – to ask questions about the Designing With Web Standards book, and dialogue about Web Standards.

The DWWS Facebook group is already very global. Members are from the following countries, or regions: Australia, Argentina, Bangladesh, Belgium, Belize, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Finland, Fiji, France, Ghana, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya,
Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, UK, USA, Venezuela, Vietnam, etc.

Join the DWWS FB group and let’s learn about web standards together.

Just getting started with web design or web standards? Check out Jeffrey Zeldman’s DWWS page, or our recent book review of Jeffrey’s book – Designing With Web Standards.

Remember — this is a survey of books, blogs and magazines that people are recommending to me. I haven’t distilled the list down yet… still collecting suggestions from friends… My friend Antoine told me to look at Digital Web Magazine – they publish a variety of articles of interest to web designers, web developers, etc.

Here’s a few books that Antoine mentioned:

1. Designing With Web Standards, by Jeffrey Zeldman, published by Peachpit Press, 2007, ISBN:0321385551, 410 pages (and you know I’ve recommended Zeldman’s book a Zillion times)
2. Web Accessibility, Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance, by Jim Thatcher, Michael R. Burks, Christian Heilmann, Shawn Lawton Henry, Patrick H. Lauke, Richard Rutter; published by Friends of ED, 2006, ISBN:1590596382, 648 pages
3. The Zen of CSS Design, by Dave Shea, and Molly E. Holzschlag; Published by Peachpit Press, 2005, ISBN:0321303474, 296 pages
4. The Business Side of Creativity, The Complete Guide for Running a Graphic Design Or Communications Business, by Cameron S. Foote, Illustrated by Mark Bellerose;Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2002, ISBN:039373093X, 432 pages

Context is Everything – For architects, computer programmers, lawyers, philosophers, and theologians – context is everything. The essential reading list for a lawyer is different from the essential reading list of an architect, physician or pastor.  I’m also searching for common themes, and patterns to reuse…

Is there a book (or a blog) that should be essential reading for architects (who build large buildings)  — and for computer architects (who build large computer systems)? I think there might be… and I’m getting to that… hang on a minute…. Are there books and blogs that every designer should read, whether they are designing websites, bikes, book covers, or baby-clothes?

The quest for the best – There are a lot of dead end streets on this quest. For instance, sometimes you find a really cool blog, but alas — the blogger quits blogging. Example: Loosely Coupled – a great blog for software developers and systems architects (covering SOA) – but the last entry appears to be from May 2006.

So, I sent emails to a few friends, saying:

What do you consider essential reading each day, each week, each
month? Books, journals, magazine, blogs?
What technical journals to read each month?
What do you read that keeps you going and growing?
I’m interested in your thoughts.

So, that’s the long contextual explanation as to why I’m building an essential reading list for various professions. Then I want to see if there are common themes — books, magazines, journals, and blogs that are considered essential reading by a lot of people from various backgrounds and professions.

So here’s a few books and blogs that my friends suggested, and guess what? Some of them were already on my blog roll, or books that I’ve read. This is not the distilled list of essential reading… yet… but here are some suggestions that are coming in from my initial survey of computer geeks and web designers…  not a comprehensive survey… (It’s kind of a list from A to Z – with the middle part still missing).

Suggested blogs:

1. 456 Berea Street – A blog by Roger Johansson. A Swedish web professional who has been working with the web and other interactive media since 1994.
2. AlertBox – Jakob Nielsen’s Newsletter on Web Usability
3. A List Apart – A List Apart Magazine (ISSN: 1534-0295) explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.
4. Authentic Boredom – A blog by web designer Cameron Moll.
5. UXMag – The User Experience Magazine – Elevating user experience one article at a time.
6. Zeldman – Online since May 1995, “Jeffrey Zeldman Presents” is the personal site of designer, writer, and web standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman. Zeldman was one of the first designers, bloggers, and independent publishers on the web, and one of the first web design teachers. We’ve mentioned (and reviewed his best selling book), Designing With Web Standards, several times before.

To be continued…

1. JavaScript: The Missing Manual, by David McFarland, published by O’Reilly Media, ISBN: 978-0-596-51589-8, 543 pages, US $39.99 ~ A great reference, and tutorial on JavaScript
2. JavaScript: The Good Parts, by Douglas Crockford, published by O’Reilly Media, ISBN: 978-0-596-51774-8, 153 pages, US $29.99 ~ A solid JavaScript reference and delightfully opinionated how-to manual for avoiding the bad parts of JavaScript and maximizing use of the good parts.
3. Dojo: The Definitive Guide, by Matthew A. Russell, published by O’Reilly Media, ISBN: 978-0-596-51648-2, 450 pages, US $39.99 ~ The definitive guide for powering up AJAX development techniques with the popular and powerful Dojo JavaScript library.
4. Mastering Dojo, subtitle – JavaScript and Ajax Tools for Great Web Experiences, by Rawld Gill, Craig Riecke, and Alex Russell, published by the Pragmatic Programmers, Pragmatic Bookshelf, ISBN:978-1-934356-11-1, 555 pages, US $38.95 ~ Dojo is a set of client-side  JavaScript tools that help you build better web applications.

She identifies the three major circles influencing current web technologies and web standards:

1. Academic and Scientific – the W3C
2. Revolutionary and Disruptive – independent working groups
3. Self Interest and Profiteering — proprietary technologies

“Can we figure out how to form these three circles into some working mechanism? Who knows. It will take mobilization, and it will take compromise. Beyond that, it will take a few hours out of everyone’s copious spare time to pay attention and participate in some way.”

Web standards are in our DNA and will always be a core part of our editorial focus. Standards fans, never fear. We will not abandon our post. But since late 2005, we have consciously begun steering ALA back to its earliest roots as a magazine for all people who make websites—writers, architects, strategists, researchers, and yes, even marketers and clients as well as designers and developers. This means that, along with issues that focus on new methods and subtleties of markup and layout, we will also publish issues that discuss practical and sometimes theoretical aspects of user experience design, from the implications of ubiquitous computing to keeping communities civil.

Bravo! 3 cheers for architects; 3 cheers for developers; 3 cheers for strategists.

That makes 9 cheers from people like me – an architect/developer/strategist.

What about you? Are you adjusting your web standards strategy during the browser battles of 2008? How are you maturing your business? Are your branches growing stronger, as your roots grow deeper?  Are you growing old gracefully, like the old oak tree?

Afruj Jahan also rounded up some excellent websites to learn CSS.

Every standardista knows you have to learn CSS to follow web standards. Speaking of which … did you hear that the Facebook Designing With Web Standards Group is giving away a few free copies of Designing with Web Standards (DWWS), by Zeldman.  ( We reviewed the DWWS book here, and the article is one of our most popular links. )

Want more help? Try following these 9 great web developers on Twitter.

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.