Students in the Web Application Design and Development course at Bryn Mawr College wear blue beanies in support of Web Standards!

This photo is one of many from the 2008 Blue Beanie Day collection at Flickr.

You can read more about the history and purpose of Blue Beanie Day 2008 here on vvn.net, Jeffrey Zeldman’s recent post about Blue Beanie Day, or Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Read-Write-Web news article about Blue Beanie Day 2008 and web standards.

Paul Cripps posted this cute photo to the Blue Beanie Day 2008 collection on Flickr.

The book cover shown is from Cascading Style Sheets – The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition, by Eric Meyer. You can see Eric Meyer wearing a Blue Beanie here also.

Jason Beaird of Refresh Columbia recently quipped that Zeldman’s Blue Beanie image “is now the Che Guevara icon for web standards revolution.”  The Blue Beanie Day symbol (in the context of Web Standards) was made famous by the original Standardista ( Jeffrey Zeldman ) and his book covers.

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…

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.”

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.

While we’re on the topic of Zeldman (and DWWS) you should participate in (yes, if you are a web designer, you should take the survey too!) the 2008 Survey of People Who Make Websites.

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?

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.

It’s called “Design Coding”

Here’s an excerpt from the lyrics…

make it easy for the spiders to crawl what you provide
remove font type, font color and font size
no background colors, keep your coding real neat

tag your look and feel on a separate style sheet
better results with xml and css
now you making progress, a lil closer to success
describe your doctype so the browser can relate
make sure you do it great or it won’t validate

check in all browsers, I do it directly
gotta make sure that it renders correctly

Monday, November 26, 2007 is the day thousands of Standardistas (people who support web standards) will wear a Blue Beanie to show their support for accessible, semantic web content.

It’s easy to show your support for web design done right. Don a Blue Beanie and snap a photo. Then on November 26, switch your profile picture in Facebook and post your photo to the Blue Beanie Day photo pool on Flickr.

Next Steps:

1. Make a personal commitment to fight Web Standards Apathy. Show solidarity with the Standardistas on November 26th, 2007.
2. Buy, beg, or borrow a Blue Beanie (blue hat or cap, even a black or grey one will do in a pinch.)
3. Take a photo of yourself wearing the Blue Beanie. Or take a cool group photo of you and your friends wearing Blue Beanies.
4. Post your photo, or photos to Facebook, Flickr, and other social networks on November 26th, 2007. Remember to switch your Facebook profile photo that day. While you’re at it, switch all your social network profile photos. Flickr, Twitter, Last.fm, iLike, Pownce, you name it.
5. Promote Blue Beanie Day in your blog or wiki starting today, and tell all your friends to get ready for Blue Beanie Day. Start by inviting all your Facebook friends to this event.

Check the Blue Beanie Day event notification on Facebook to see more Blue Beanie heads and to make a comment or ask questions.