Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Book Review: “Designing with Web Standards” (1^st Edition)

I’ve been mak­ing a con­scious effort to read more “industry lit­er­at­ure” lately, in as much as I’ve star­ted seek­ing out books on web/software devel­op­ment and design that I feel, as a sup­posed pro, I ought to have read (pos­sibly some time ago).

This endeav­our even­tu­ally brought me to Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards, which I’d never actu­ally read des­pite it being revered as the book for any­one remotely ser­i­ous about web design. Feeling nought but dust in my pock­ets, I hunted out a second-hand copy on the Amazon Marketplace, which I found for the princely sum of £0.01 plus post­age. How do they do it?

This turned up not long ago and turned out, unsur­pris­ingly, to be the orange-jacketed first edi­tion from 2003. What sur­prised me in read­ing it, how­ever, was just how much of this book is still spot-on des­pite eight years matur­ing on the shelf.

A great deal of what was writ­ten about the web three years ago is now laugh­ably out­dated — let alone eight years ago — and yet Zeldman man­ages to skewer the fun­da­mental truths of what it means to design for the web such that at least 75% of this first edi­tion is still com­pletely valid, valu­able advice in 2011.

The web of Designing with Web Standards, 1^st Edition was IE6; Netscape 6 and 7; Mozilla 1.0. Firefox was still a way from 1.0, and doesn’t get a men­tion. The mobile world had just begun to stir, with the pro­lif­er­a­tion of devices like the Palm Pilot and Pocket PC. I remem­ber that time as being dom­in­ated by Internet Explorer alone, but in real­ity the web land­scape of 2003 was just like today’s: it was con­stantly in flux.

The web stand­ards move­ment arose out of a desire to unify the frag­men­ted browser land­scape with a set of con­ven­tions that tran­scen­ded browser– and vendor-specific design — an object­ive even more import­ant today as it was then.

Today’s browser mar­ket is orders of mag­nitude more diverse than that of 2003, and the web has shif­ted towards the mobile space with incred­ible speed, with new types of mobile Internet device being launched every week. Now as then, we must design for “browsers” not “a browser” if our sites are to have any hope of a long-term future.

At the core of Zeldman’s mes­sage is this: write clean, con­cise markup that can sens­ibly stand apart from its stylesheets; con­sider a wide gamut of user-agents; strive for access­ib­il­ity; fol­low the agreed stand­ards as closely as you can. Designing for spe­cific browsers or plat­forms wasn’t sus­tain­able when this book was first writ­ten, and it’s even less sus­tain­able now. In read­ing this inad­vert­ent snap­shot from ‘net his­tory you can see the com­mon thread of fun­da­ment­als that run right through to today, and should still be the found­a­tions of any web work.

And all this for £0.01 plus post­age. Value doesn’t get much bet­ter than that.