Review

My Rating: 9 out of 10

If there would be one book to call the “bible” of standards-based web design, it would be Jeffrey Zeldman’s “Designing with Web Standards”. The first edition made way for frontend web development based on Web Standards and educated developers on how to use them correctly.

The updated second edition, published in 2007, once again, serves the same purpose with up-to-date content.

Zeldman starts off by explaining how we got into the dilemma of table-layouts, font-tags and developing proprietary code for different browsers. The journey quickly moves on to explaining what Web Standards are and what they can do for you as a Web Developer.

In Part 2 of the book, Zeldman gives some hands-on examples on how to build web sites these days using Web Standards—in a transitional way, using basic tables for layout. He also, of course, touches on the power of CSS, but not only without mentioning the problems with browser bugs and pointing out resources on the web which provide solutions.

The book closes with introductions to Accessibility, DOM scripting and finishes off with a glimpse at the techniques used designing the author’s website, zeldman.com.

“Designing with Web Standards” is, without a doubt, the most comprehensible guide to modern Web Development out there and gives a great introduction into Web Standards—the why and the how. It could be argued whether references to 4.0 browsers are still necessary in a book published in 2007, but people working in pretty restricted IT environments might still face the fact that they can’t upgrade by themselves. But that is really the only point of critique I could think of.

Bottom line

If you are a Web Developer, this book has to be on your bookshelf. Seriously.