Zeldman is an idealist who devotes some of his book to explaining how much easier life would be if browser developers would just support standards properly (he's done a lot toward this goal in real life, as well). He is also a pragmatist, who recognizes that browsers implement standards differently (or partially, or not at all) and that it is the job of the Web designer to make pages work anyway. Thus, his book includes lots of explicit and tightly focused tips (with code) that have to do with bamboozling non-compliant browsers into behaving as they should, without tripping up more compliant browsers. There's lots of coverage of design and testing tools that can aid in the creation of good-looking, standards-abiding documents. --David Wall

Topics covered: Why Web standards (such as XHTML, CSS, ECMAScript, and DOM) are good for everyone, and why site designers and browser makers should move towards standards compliance.

Product Description
Best-selling author, designer, and web standards evangelist Jeffrey Zeldman has updated his classic, industry-shaking guidebook. This new edition--now in full color--covers improvements in best practices and advances in the world of browsers since the first edition introduced the world to standards-based design. Written in the same engaging and witty style, making even the most complex information easy to digest, it remains an essential guide to creating sites that load faster, reach more users, and cost less to design and maintain.

Readers will learn from Jeffrey's insights as he demonstrates how web standards are driving search engine friendliness ("findability") and the Web 2.0 applications that have reinvigorated the medium and the online marketplace. Readers will discover new techniques to make CSS layouts work better across multiple browsers and ways to make web content more accessible.

Designing with Web Standards is an AIGA Design Press book, published under Peachpit's New Riders imprint in partnership with AIGA.

Short version - very little content, tons of pretty obvious observations on css design. Nothing you can't find better done on one of the many css news sites/blogs.

Perhaps, the best way to describe this book is perhaps to compare it to Bill Gates writing a book about computers. Yeah, Gates is a big name in computers. Do you want to learn about computers from him? Probably not.

Zeldman seems like a good source to learn CSS from but is a poor teacher. The books spends most of it's time on common sense theory of css-design. Very, very little actual implementation.

The writing style is another issue - from early on the author informs that he'll be referring to himself as "we". Well, "we" are very bad at writing easily flowing text. Combine the lack of content with the very poor writing style and I'm sad to say I regret having spent the money on this one.


Mostly hype, didn't teach me much   February 10, 2005
 33 out of 38 found this review helpful

I learned HTML back in 1994. I barely updated my HTML skills until a couple years ago where I picked up very basic CSS but all my HTML was still table based, font tags, etc.. everything you could do that's bad according to XHTML. I decided that now is the time to update my skills. I hear from many people and reviews that this is -THE- book to buy to learn web standards. 150 pages into the book, he is STILL trying to sell me on the idea to use web standards! Jesus, I bought the book already! I bought this book expecting to learn the latest XHTML tags and some CSS. Instead it was a lot of hot air and wasted time. Sure I learned a bit, but I'm sure I would have gotten more out of some other book. After reading it, I don't feel much further ahead than I was before. Time to buy another book.