Designing With Web Standards

There was a time not long ago when many drivers thought nothing of tossing empty bottles out the windows of their cars. Years later, these same citizens came to realize that littering was not an acceptable way to dispose of their trash. The web design community is now undergoing a similar shift in attitude, and web standards are key to this transformation.

Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing With Web Standards is for every web professional who wants to reach more users on more browsers, platforms, and devices — including wireless and hand-held devices — with less work, less maintenance, and at lower cost. It’s for designers, developers, site owners and managers who seek to end the costly spiral of obsolescence, where each new browser or Internet device means a whole new coding cycle and another line item on the budget. Few organizations today can afford the merry-go-round of coding and re-coding that has characterized web development until now.

Designing with standards breaks that costly cycle, enabling you to create sites that will work as well tomorrow as they do today. It also allows you to work seamlessly with XML-based web services and tools, and can help you stay on the right side of accessibility laws and guidelines.

The history of our medium has been to solve today’s problems at tomorrow’s expense. Designing With Web Standards shows that the build-now, pay-later approach is no longer productive or necessary, and lays to rest the notion that designing with standards means leaving some users behind. In fact, it most often means just the opposite.

Designing With Web Standards (Indianapolis: New Riders, May 2003) is available at Amazon.com, Amazon Canada, Amazon UK, Amazon France and other fine booksellers. In Amazon.com’s “Best Books of 2003,” it ranked #4 in Editor’s Picks and #7 in Customer’s Picks.

Taking Your Talent to the Web

ZELDMAN’S FIRST BOOK, Taking Your Talent to the Web: A Guide for Transitioning Designers, was published by New Riders on the tenth anniversary of the WWW, 17 May 2001.

Based on a curriculum in web communication design co-developed by Happy Cog and Pratt Institute for Populi, Inc., the 400+ page text is available at Amazon.com, where users accorded it a five star rating, Amazon’s highest.

A downloadable version of Chapter 3, “Where Am I? Navigation & Interface,” is available for your reading and printing pleasure. Forty pages, illustrated, zipped PDF file, 1.1 MB download.

More thinking

See Articles, Publications, and the Colophon for more of Happy Cog’s thinking about the web.

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