Review: Designing With Web Standards

by ComputerBob

October 18, 2003

Web Standards - Who Needs Them?

Like many Webmasters, for the past several years, I had mostly negative feelings about "Web standards" and those who promoted them. The whole subject seemed to me to be an academic, "ivory tower" exercise that just didn't have much "real world" applicability. After all, what good does it do to have "standards" if the world's Web browsers don't support them?

Zeldman - We All Need Web Standards

Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman (published by New Riders - $24.50 plus shipping from Amazon.com) is informative, entertaining, and an absolute delight to read. Through a surprising amount of humor, plenty of relevant examples, and good-natured logic, Zeldman argues that if Web standards are driven from both ends at the same time, they will be successful -- driven by standards proponents (like him) who work with Microsoft and other companies to convince them to make their browsers standards-compliant, and driven by Webmasters, who redesign their sites to meet current and future Web standards. More importantly, Zeldman argues convincingly that Web sites that comply with established Web standards will load faster, will be easier to update, and will be much more accessible to a wide variety of computers, Web browsers, and Web devices than sites that do not comply with standards.

I'm Convinced

By the time I had finished the first two chapters of Designing With Web Standards, Zeldman had caused me to seriously reconsider everything I had thought about Web standards for the past several years. By the time I had gotten halfway through his book, he had convinced me that I needed to completely redesign my 2xx-page ComputerBob.com site to be standards-compliant.

There's Work To Do

DWWS motivated me to read tons of online articles and forum postings about XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and then to spend more than 500 hours in 8 weeks, completely redesigning my entire site in XHTML with CSS layout. DWWS assumes that you're already familiar with HTML, so it explains the differences between HTML and XHTML. It then includes easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions for creating a simple, standards-compliant, accessible site, with lots of examples of XHTML and CSS code, along with lots of photos and links to online examples of how the code examples work and look. Because my site is large and relatively complex, it took a lot of work, and a lot of additional research to complete its redesign, but, as you can see from the 4 logos to the left, my Web pages now meet all of the standards for XHTML 1.0 Strict, CSS, U.S. Section 508, and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.

Reaping The Benefits

My pages no longer contain any complicated presentational tables-within-tables or bloated presentational markup. As a result, their XHTML code is easy to understand and edit, and their file sizes are much smaller than they used to be, so they load like greased lightning. While I don't have the means to prove it, my pages should now display and be fully functional on any computer with any Web browser, as well as on all Internet-capable devices, such as palmtop computers, cellular phones, and the text readers that are used by the sight-impaired, both now and in the future. And my future site redesigns should be much easier, because now I can completely change my entire site's layout, colors, fonts, sizes, margins, borders, and other presentational elements almost instantly, by simply changing a few lines in one stylesheet.

Conclusions

I was so impressed with this book that I presented a CB Award to Jeffrey Zeldman for it. I highly recommend Designing With Web Standards to anyone who's serious about Web design, and especially to anyone who feels the way I used to feel about Web standards.