Book review: Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman

Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is one of the most popular web design books, and for good reason. Zeldman has been around the Web for a long time, and his experience shows. This book teaches the concepts, history, and technologies behind web design for beginning and intermediate designers. It’s unexpectedly funny; I laughed out loud several times at Zeldman’s puns and wordplay.

The book is about why and how to "write structural, semantic markup styled with CSS for sites that are relatively lightweight, portable, findable, and accessible." It emphasizes the importance of following web standards set by the W3C.

The book covers the “trinity of web standards”: structure, presentation, and behavior. Topics include HTML and XHTML, CSS, typography, accessibility, DOM scripting, and JavaScript. This third edition of the book was published in 2010, so it also covers HTML5 and CSS3. It’s more conceptual than instructional, but there are plenty of examples and even a few reverse-engineering exercises.

I enjoyed reading about the history of the various web technologies, the evolution of browsers, and the people and organizations who influenced them. I was already familiar with much of this history, but I learned quite a bit that I didn’t know about the Web’s dusty past.

I’ve been looking for the best web design books, and this book was consistently ranked near the top of lists. Zeldman is well-known in the industry for his advocacy of web standards and his involvement in A List Apart. A few months ago I started listening to The Big Web Show podcast, a 5By5 show that Zeldman co-hosts.

Notes
For SEO, 1) write great content, and 2) mark it up semantically.
Ems are the ideal unit for font sizes, but pixels (px) are OK because browsers support Page Zoom.
Making a site accessible benefits not only the disabled, but also mobile device users and search engines.

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