I’ve been reading Jeffrey Zeldman’s new book, Designing With Web Standards, in my spare moments at work. It’s delightful (as tech books go). It makes me giggle at least once per chapter.
If you’re already a convert to CSS/XHTML design, this book might not do you much good, unless you want to be an evangelist and give it to all your friends. It doesn’t get into the technical stuff until chapter 10 or so—everything prior to that is about why standards matter, how browsers (and then designers) got everything wrong, and the basics of CSS-based design.
Flip to p. 195 for an entertaining assessment of Microsoft.com‘s source code. (The phrases “toilet junk” and “tragic effort” make an appearance.)
Don’t miss the chicken dinner discussion on p. 307.
Seriously, Zeldman does an amazing job of covering the ins and outs of standards-based, accessible design. The one thing I think he missed in his discussion of accesskeys is the brute-force method of letting people know they’re there, the accessibility statement. I’ll let that one slide, though, because he’s the first author who’s been able to write about Javascript in a way that makes sense to me. In fact, based on the examples, I’m going to run right out and build a couple of sortable tables for work. (Saves me building a couple of databases, it will.)
He devotes chapter 13 to the ridiculously difficult subject of text sizing. An appropriate chapter for that subject, methinks. Here’s the closing:
This has been Chapter 13. Now, in the words of Clint Eastwood, “Do you feel lucky?”
Who would, faced with esoteric subjects like 16px/96ppi default browser settings?
Someone who has this book, that’s who.