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Designing With Web Standards
from the aren't-standards-banners dept.
| Designing With Web Standards | |
| author | Jeffrey Zeldman |
| pages | 456 |
| publisher | New Riders |
| rating | 9/10 |
| reviewer | Carl Anderson |
| ISBN | 0735712018 |
| summary | An excellent guide on designing a Web site with the latest Web standards |
Jeffrey Zeldman is one of the best technical writers whose work I've had the pleasure of reading. He is obviously well-educated with regard to the subject, and his passion for the work really shows through. Still, he never comes across as a zealot -- his style is even-handed, thoughtful, and easy to comprehend.
The first part of the book ("Houston, We Have a Problem") is the reason I give a rating of "9" rather than "10." Zeldman spends a perfect length of time on background and history of Web standards (why they're here, and what designers did before they emerged). However, this section seems to suffer from what many technical books suffer from: a case of "We'll see this soon"-itis. While this is perhaps unavoidable in such a treatise, it is nonetheless apparent. Still, it's only marginally distracting.
The meat of the book comes with "Designing and Building." Zeldman first talks about modern markup, then explains the variations on XHTML (i.e. Strict, Transitional, Frameset) and how each ought apply to your design. Here we see more theory than practice, though, but this is welcome -- it lays the foundation for a more cerebral look at distinguishing markup from design. Once Zeldman explains the nuances of that topic, we moveon to the redesign of a Web page constructed with a hybrid table/CSS design complete with all the excellent effects we hope to see in modern pages.
After working through this redesign, Zeldman talks in more detail about the CSS box model (and the browsers that break it), typography, and some of the quirks that Web designers must deal with. Next he touches a bit on Web accessibility--a must-read for everyone, whether you think so or not.
While Zeldman isn't incredibly thorough here, he doesn't need to be--it's a book on Web standards, after all, and this chapter serves to show how accessibility can still be achieved within those standards. He also suggests a couple of other books for more information.
Finally, Zeldman walks the reader through a redesign of zeldman.com, basically as a hands-on summary of the book, and as a guide for future projects. Also included is a "Back End" (i.e., appendix) showing some excellent information about each major browser.
Too often, a book or Web site on XHTML/CSS will dwell only on the "how"--this book shows the "how" and still explains the "why": Here's how you set up an id'ed element; here's why we do that, rather than using a class. It's already opened my eyes to many things I thought I had a handle on, but now realize that I only knew in a cursory fashion.
So, ask yourself: Do you want to design a Web site that will work for everyone, regardless of their platform? Do you want to make sure your Web site is future-proof? If so, you need this book.
You can purchase Designing With Web Standards from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The back cover (Score:4, Informative)
You can get off the merry-go-round.
It's time to stop living in the past and get away from the days of spaghetti code, insanely nested table layouts, tags, and other redundancies that double and triple the bandwidth of even the simplest sites. Instead, it's time for forward compatibility.
Isn't it high time you started designing with web standards?
Standards aren't about leaving users behind or adhering to inflexible rules. Standards are about building sophisticated, beautiful sites that will work as well tomorrow as they do today. You can't afford to design tomorrow's sites with yesterday's piecemeal methods.
Jeffrey teaches you to:
* Slash design, development, and quality assurance costs (or do great work in spite of constrained budgets)
* Deliver superb design and sophisticated functionality without worrying about browser incompatibilities
* Set up your site to work as well five years from now as it does today
* Redesign in hours instead of days or weeks
* Welcome new visitors and make your content more visible to search engines
* Stay on the right side of accessibility laws and guidelines
* Support wireless and PDA users without the hassle and expense of multiple versions
* Improve user experience with faster load times and fewer compatibility headaches
* Separate presentation from structure and behavior, facilitating advanced publishing workflows
Re:The back cover (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.link2communications.com/)
XHTML & CSS are tough sometimes, and Zeldman's realistic approach to transitioning to a standard web language is refreshing - he's not a zealot.
I hope more web designers will jump on board this movement - if we ever want to get paid really well and escape the image of the teen with frontpage coding his uncle's website we need to embrace these kind of ideas.
Re:The back cover (Score:4, Funny)
*sniff* So long, Slashdot, we'll miss you.
Re:The back cover (Score:5, Informative)
(http://limpet.net/mbrubeck/)
Re:The back cover (Score:4, Funny)
(Last Journal: Monday May 17 2004, @07:10PM)
or at least he thinks he is!
Mmmhmm (Score:2, Funny)
(Last Journal: Wednesday June 09 2004, @07:46AM)
Re:Mmmhmm (Score:4, Informative)
(Last Journal: Tuesday September 14 2004, @08:18PM)
Flash probably runs faster and has more support, plug-ins and editors on most computers at the moment but SVG is catching up (also SVG supports compression which is cool so it can match flash in file-size).
So basically the book would talk about SVG if it talked about any vector/animation system.
(And without trying to sound like a troll:
Flash = Cheap Hack, SVG = Potentially Structured Nirvana)
Re:Mmmhmm (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.ancar.org/)
Ladies and gentlemen, we now have proof of the existance of the Anti-Christ, here on Earth! First, the user name "illuminata" is too Luciferian to be denied. Next, note the Slash UID 668963 containing "the Number of the Beast". Finally, we have the demonic message itself!
Prepare for the Apocalypse, for it is surely at hand! Slashdot has spoken!
Related resources (Score:5, Informative)
http://zeldman.com/externals/
Re:Related resources (Score:5, Informative)
(http://pe.ter.dk/)
A site worth visiting is http://www.csszengarden.com/ - having lots of alternate stylesheets.
I'm currently working on a project with a designer w/clue. Everything regarding looks and design has moved into stylesheets. All I have to do is to structure the data in suitable divs/blocks (with regard of continuity for the simple text-based browsers).
You mean... (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.xposse.com/)
Re:You mean... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://phroggy.com/)
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/main.css" type="text/css">
<style type="text/css"><!--
@import url(/not-netscape4.css);
--></style>
Any browser except Netscape 4 will load both stylesheets, so the standards-compliant code in the second one will override the Netscape 4-specific code in the main one.
So, ask yourself (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/~GillBates0 | Last Journal: Tuesday July 10, @04:36PM)
YES!!!
Do you want to make sure your Web site is future-proof?
ABSOLUTELY!!!!!!
If so, you need this book.
oh
A good follow-up book is... (Score:5, Informative)
First Book is Better (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.carotids.com/)
A Review Can Be Found Here [codekit.com]
Although I am not very good at web design... what I have learned, I learned from this guy. He rocks.
Davak
The only standards on web code is.... (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Thursday June 05 2003, @09:57AM)
Standards? What standards? (Score:3, Funny)
Check out the css Zen Garden... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.csszengarden.com/ [csszengarden.com]
So, where's the web site? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.networkmirror.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday July 05, @04:34PM)
future-proof? no such thing (Score:2, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday September 10 2004, @12:41PM)
How do we know the W3C won't change the standard AGAIN in three years?
Buy It Link (Score:3, Informative)
If only the boss could understand the virtues (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.devinmoore.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday May 24 2007, @06:16AM)
Zeldman.. Hmmph! (Score:2, Insightful)
(http://cyphertube.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday May 21 2006, @11:10AM)
I like standards. I like accessibility and usability. I hate Zeldman's site. It's like hypocrisy in motion. If I lectured on web design and make sites usable, I might improve my site from where it is.
Zeldman makes life tough on older viewers, disabled, and newbies. His labels are quippish and arrogant, his colours too similar, fonts too small and not resizeable in the most prominent browser out there.
Take a look around and you'll probably find better books on standards. Or, if you must, take the gospel of Zeldman and water it down with a little Jakob Nielsen.
What about CMS solutions? (Score:5, Interesting)
task of setting up a web site are going to be looking at ways to not
have to do it from scratch. There are a lot of CMS (Content
Management Systems) out there, some free, some not. What *I* really
need is an O'Reilly book about CMS that helps wade through all the
stuff that's out there right now so the reader (me) can make an
informed decision about which way to go.
I did a quick check of the O'Reilly web site and all their CMS info
revolves around XML and Java. This does not help me.
Someone get this guy a GF (Score:4, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/~Greedo/journal | Last Journal: Thursday February 12 2004, @10:27AM)
Maybe he should take a break from writing and get out to the bar a bit more.
Geesh, don't be silly... (Score:5, Funny)
web page
Voila! You have now created the perfect web page in ten seconds!
Microsoft takes care of all of the standards stuff so you don't have to worry your pretty little head about that. No really...don't worry.
No...don't do "View Source"
NO! Don't! EVERYTHING IS OK!! STEP AWAY FROM THE KEYBOARD
Standards make life easier for everyone. (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Tuesday March 09 2004, @01:55AM)
I've found that standard compliant web pages tend to be more interoperable between browsers (sadly, there will still be differences). This makes it easier for you since you won't have to work as hard to find ways to make your site look good in several browsers. It makes it easier for viewers because they can use the web browser they like the best.
The only problem is that there are a lot of people who still browse on old hardware that has Netscape 4.x on it. Netscape 4.x tends to mangle CSS pretty badly.
This book is excellent (Score:1)
(http://www.startsiden.no/)
The first historical overview mentioned is very nice, but can be skipped. However I feel it is an important part of the book, and gives weight to the arguments on why using the standards way later on. It also gets designers new to the web up to date on what has passed, and highlights mistakes that were made (so we can possibly avoid them again).
Otherwise I agree fully with the author, the book is indeed both well written, has a nice flow and really gives good arguments why this is the right way, and how to do it the right way. The authors attitude is never arrogant, and the solutions are always practically oriented and work well in real-life (unlike a lot of other books on HTML and CSS).
My take on this book is that if you want to read one book on web design this should be it. Of course after having read this book you probably change your mind and start looking for other literature by the same author
Perhaps... (Score:2)
Granted, some parts of the W3 standards are worth breaking (wrap attributes in textrea inputs, for instance), but c'mon.
J
Here's to reading books from start to finish (Score:3, Insightful)
Standards aren't standard (Score:2)
(http://harry.blogdns.com/)
Unfortunately, very few sites out there that work in all browsers correctly are compliant.
I guess it's a toss up: have a little validator button proudly displayed somewhere on your site and have a few display errors in Internet Explorer or have a messily coded site that is slow, but works.
Too bad nobody follows standards (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Tuesday September 27 2005, @05:01PM)
Another unfortunate tidbit...I work for one of those places. I know the aggrivation of trying to get compliance through to people who just won't listen. *sigh*
Usings standards to save size (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.coyote.org/~jonas/)
Imagine having to tell our users (many of which are using GNU/Linux or Macintosh) that our web site only works reliably in Windows with Internet Explorer 6.0 and above. Just because a PR agency can't develop web pages. It's impossible. I had to do something about it.
So when I implemented the layout for our department (scheduled to go live later this month), I scrapped everything they had done. I took a printout of their page (as it looked in Internet Explorer) and marked up what colors and fonts they had used.
Then I set down and wrote the same thing using XHTML/1.0 Strict and CSS1. This was about two days work, but the finished result now validates using w3c's validate tools, and it works reliably in all browsers I've managed to try, all the way back to Mosaic and Netscape 3, with or without images (yes, Lynx, Links, w3 and other text browsers work very well indeed too).
Not only did I get the pages to validate. By using CSS, I was able to get rid of several images they had been using with their design. The overall size of a page, including graphics and CSS, now weighs in at about 35 kbytes. This is compared to around 120 kbytes with the proposed code.
And even better, most things can be cached by the browser (CSS code and images). The only thing that needs reloading when you hit subsequent pages is the dynamic XHTML code, which weighs in at around 5 kbytes, compares to 40 kbytes in the proposed code.
Now, I think our students will like us. This result is even better than the pages that we have today. They render quickly and effortlessly even on old equipment or on extremely slow links.
I havn't been able to convince the faculty to make my code the "default" yet, but they might get the idea once people start noticing that our pages load much more quickly than the rest of the faculty pages.
So, using standards isn't always about making things render nicely in all browsers. It gives you a while heap of nice side effects that isn't worth sneezing at.
Stop IE Now! (Score:2, Offtopic)
(http://www.object404.com/)
Microsoft declared IE6 SP1 as the last standalone browser for lame-ass reasons. The truth is, they're only truly integrating IE into the next Windows Operating System for the first time, to prove their 'point' in the anti-trust case that they couldn't remove the browser from the OS.
If IE really was such an integral part of the current slew of windows versions, how come it takes ridiculously long to load when you enter a URL into the address bar of an explorer window, and that the people at LitePC [litepc.com] was able to remove IE from the Windows operating system?
Bunch of liars. Guys, help educate everyone and have people switch to either Mozilla [mozilla.org] or Opera [opera.com] -> Makes Windows boxes more secure and gets rid of the need to buy those stupid superflous pop-up killers. (you can pick up viruses or spyware just by surfing a maliciously coded website and hitting the wrong button)
None of my family and friends use IE anymore after I educated them about the dangers of IE.
Web Standards? (Score:3, Funny)
*cough*
Standards are about more than multiple browsers (Score:3, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/~Infonaut/journal | Last Journal: Tuesday July 31, @02:22PM)
But Really doesn't everyone have IE (Score:2)
Can't wait till we need to apply for visas for our Passport access to other countries.
I don't mean to be rude.. (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm not saying your review is wrong or bad, but maybe get some experience in what you're doing before preaching to others?
And Slashdot's score... (Score:2, Redundant)
URI:
Encoding: iso-8859-1
Doctype: HTML
Errors: 407
Revalidate With Options
:
Show Source Outline
Parse Tree
Validate error pages Verbose Output
* Note: The URI you gave me, , returned a redirect to
* Line 71, column 115: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "alloc_id"
* Line 71, column 129: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "site_id"
* Line 71, column 139: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "request_id"
* Line 161, column 62: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "group_id"
* Line 161, column 76: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "atid"
* Line 241, column 74: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "tid"
* Line 241, column 156: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "mode"
* Line 241, column 184: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "threshold"
This page is not Valid HTML!
Line by line of errors
---
Nice!
407 lines of errors...
Speaking of standards... (Score:2)
(http://goldspider.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday March 18 2005, @10:54AM)
What's it called when someone tells you do do something, and then does the opposite?
Oh yes, that's hypocrisy.
here's one thing to make sure you don't to (Score:2, Interesting)
zeldman.com: a case study in usability? (Score:1)
yawn (Score:1, Troll)
Three words: NON RECTANGULAR SLICES (part of FWMX2004). God's gift to the Internet, Fireworks is Moses.
Quit wasting your time and get stuff DONE.
This stuff is important (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://manyrobots.blogspot.com/)
I know most of the /. crew thinks of web design as a frivolity [the people who manage /. certainly do] but adopting CSS [yes, even for layouts] is important for a number of reasons. It introduces structure to the content that makes it easier to generate, maintain and manipulate. It means that people using old/weird clients [yes, even line-mode browsers] can still use your site. It means that search crawlers have a better chance of getting good info from your site. It means that engineers won't have to support wonky javascript for rollovers or browser sniffing. It also means that programmers never get that Friday at 4:30 pm phone call from angry marketroids who are upset that something is a pixel off. Isn't that worth it?
For designers this is important as well, as it can make your job easier in some ways. It can also make it more difficult, explaining to your client/marketing person/product manager that it's not going to look identical in every browser is a tough sell at this point. Also, web design is finally becoming its own discipline. As designers we are now responsible for helping our clients and coworkers structure their information in ways that is more flexible and useful. We're not painters anymore, we're part of the construction team.
Is support perfect across all clients? Nope. Will it ever be? Hell no. Is it good enough? YES.
Here's some links that show off the potential of CSS:latest web standards != largest audience (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://linuxhomepage.com/)
If you want the largest audience possible, then using the latest web standards, such as promoted by Zeldman, is not what you want to do. The reason for this is because not all web browsers in current use work with these standards. And there are many reasons people won't or can't upgrade those browsers.
There is a way to make web pages so that they can use standards, and still work on older browsers. However, you might not like the end result. What you get on the older browsers is a very poor presentation. For example, if you define the look of your page in cascading stylesheets, when viewed on a browser with no support for CSS, you get crap.
Boundary conditions are even worse. If the browser is a version that tries to support something, and does it wrong, you can get even worse that crap. It might not work at all.
Mixing standards can cause problems as well. Here is an example. Lots of designers seem to like blue backgrounds for the side rail menus. But lots of web browsers default to blue for hyperlink text. If you specify the color of the text in a stylesheet, but specify the background color of a table cell (or worse, the whole page), in HTML, then you can end up with a situation where some of what you specify is acted on, and some is not. You'd end up with blue text on a blue background, and therefore unreadable.
It would be great if everyone could upgrade to the latest browser. But if you are trying to reach the widest audience possible, you do have to consider that many in that audience will be using older computers which have smaller drive space, smaller RAM space, slower CPUs, and can only run older versions of operating systems and browser software. While Linux might well be a great replacement for old versions of Windows on those machines, you still have the problem if shaving a recent version of some Linux distribution down to fit, and getting a huge obese browser to run on a tiny, slow, machine.
Here is an example of a real web site [state.tx.us] done in a way that displays terrible on some browsers. You can see what it looks like in Netscape 4 in PNG [ipal.org], or JPEG [ipal.org], or true color GIF [ipal.org] (works on Netscape 2 and later) formats. If you scan very close in the blue area on the left (this does not work with the JPEG image), you can see that the colors are #5a61a9 for the background, and #5b61a9 for the text (specified by their HTML in the body tag, so they intentionally did this). By radically exaggerating the red plane (e.g. everything #5a and below is made #00, and everything #5b and above is made #ff), you can see (PNG, [ipal.org] JPEG [ipal.org]) the text was really there. And you'd think that a state government would be concerned enough about making their site available to all audiences, including the economically disadvantaged who can just barely even get a computer and internet access. But no, they don't actually care (I talked to these people, and they really don't care). Here is another crappy web site [state.oh.us]. By comparison, this site [wv.gov] and this site [state.pa.us] look fine in this older browser.
Re:latest web standards != largest audience (Score:5, Informative)
Now, depending on your audience, you may have to make sure the Netscape 4 version looks visually impressive, but don't think for one second that building your site using tables, bgcolor attributes, and font tags will be done without sacrifice. In web design there is ALWAYS sacrifice, it's just a question of what. If you build a web site using Zeldman's method you sacrifice:
- Complex layout in browsers v4 and under.
- Certain techniques that were refined during the era of the v3 and v4 browsers for pixel precise layouts.
Now if you resort to tables and font tags and the rest you are sacrificing:- Size - pages quickly become bloated with nested tables, redundant font tags and unnecessary images.
- Legibility - Everything is nested in table after table with no clear meaning to different tags.
- Forward-compatibility - You are betting on browser makers continuing to support non-standardized metrics that arose by coincidence.
- Accessibility - You don't need standards to support accessibility, but the two really go hand in hand. Using HTML tags as they were intended improves accessibility for non-standard user agents. Adding alt attributes, summaries, skip navigation links and more advanced techniques that are possible with standards make your site infinitely more usable for a blind person.
- Degradability - If your tag soup doesn't work in a browser you likely get something messy. If a browser doesn't support a standards-based page then maybe you lose the text formatting, but the information is still there.
- Development time - sure standards are hard to use if you've spent 10 years perfecting image slicing and table nesting, but table-based layouts are much more difficult to modify, update, output from server-side scripts, screen-scrape, or otherwise mess with in typical ways that web designers/developers are often asked to do.
Your excuses for dismissing standards are all red herrings. No matter how you develop, you are going to have to test your pages in all your target browsers anyway. However, using standards gives you a better chance with untested and future browser releases. Of course they are far from perfect, but resorting to outdated techniques doesn't improve the situation, regardless of how comfortable you might be with it.Convince your PHBs (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://iamsam.org/)
Zeldman is annoying, buy Meyer (Score:1)
OK, I read the book and I agree completely with the message. And I read and enjoy Zeldman's site, it's a great source for what's happening in web design. But his writing style doesn't work on paper. He has a hugely irritating habit of adding unnecessary asides wrapped in parentheses into the main text of the book, often referencing other parts of the book. It's like he's itching to put in a link, but guess what - links don't work on paper. Have you heard of sidebars at all Jeffrey?
My other major beef with the book is the lack of meat. It's a history lesson on the browser wars and a white paper on why web standards are good. A book about building web pages using standards that doesn't get to "CSS Basics" until chapter 9?
If you want to get hands on with web standards, i.e. using css for layout, buy Eric Meyer's book Eric Meyer on CSS [ericmeyeroncss.com]. Read chapter 1, do the exercise, suddenly it all becomes very obvious.
using Mozilla+PHP to validate XHTML on the fly (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.cdbaby.com/)
This PHP code (and following head tag) put at the very top of any HTML page will tell Mozilla that the .html page following is actually application/xhtml+xml.
Then if you make ANY little mistake at all in your (X)HTML code, it will completely fail on you, as if it was a script, showing you the exact error and where it lies. It's been a priceless way to check my XHTML syntax without always linking over to w3.org
etc. (not sure why slashdot comment is adding ; before html xmlns
Title is Oxymoron (Score:1)
(http://www.geocities.com/tablizer | Last Journal: Saturday March 15 2003, @01:22PM)
Check with a lot of browsers, mainly with Lynx (Score:1)
(http://www.itweb.it/linux/)
Use Lynx to see what a search engine spider can see on your site.
Use PHP (true PHP, not thingies like PHP-nuke) to have a dynamic site with a good interaction.
You can also intercept the user-agent of the visitor to propose different layouts.
its not your decision (Score:1)
really though, i find that many of the ppl who post to sites like this act as if theyre working under no restraints. arguements about standards almost always lack the attention that must be paid to industry standards vs. best practices.
best practices would be what you are all talking about. no one can deny that complying to web standards would be one of the pillars of best practices in web development. unfortunately, most clients dont give a damn about web standards. in fact, nine times out of ten they could give a damn about the code at all.
Reasons
essentially clients care about two things: speed to market and cost. the thing about that is, those are two corners of the classic quality triagle (speed to market, cost and quality). the rule says you take one corner away and the other two suffer. when you take two of the corners away...forget about it.
yesterday we (here at ye olde agency) were minutes away from delivering a large, dynamically driven sub-site to a wireless carrier. this would be the second site we've made for a wireless carrier, and, like nearly every other project ive worked on, this company wanted it done in an absurd amount of time. how long, you ask? how long was i given to build, test and debug 22 templates? three days. you know what kind of crap you produce with a timeline like that? three days.
in three days time i knew i wasnt even creating code that could be exanded upon when changes may be required. in three days time i was able to test my html in one version of ie and one version of netscape on one platform. after my alotted three days i gave the site over to development. they also had so little time that the two original developers on the project (eventually that number doubled as we were forced to take two ppl off of a project in new jersey to fly them back here to chicago to work) that they were here working from 1pm to 9am everyday. and sure, we *could* kick out a site that *visually* looks okay in that amount of time. we could if the client didnt come back to us with a plethora of changes day after day, all the way up till the day before the site was to launch. do you really think it matters to management (on either side of the fence) that the design and content cutoff was passed weeks prior? in this economy? please. if you dont think that in these days its all about money youre sorely mistaken.
so after building sites for companies that make more money in a month then most small countries make in a year, it doesnt take long for one to realize that the deciding factor in the way you produce your work, be you in design, production or development, is entirely dependant on the amount of time your given. in a previous arguement ive had about this, someone said oh well your just jaded. jaded? hey, when you look back on months and months of work only to realize that in the end youd rather tell people no, i wasnt the poor son of a bitch who was part of *that* ugly-ass project when in fact you built the damn thing...jaded? no, its much more personal then that. this is my job, my life. i didnt fall into this like most people. i actually planned on ending up at a company which allows me to work on sites for microsoft, slate, sears, thermos, morningstar, etc. but now that im here...let me tell you, its very, very hard to reconcile with mediocrity when you know you can produce greatness if you were only given the chance. but i dont get to make those decisions. if you want to, either be a project manager or work for yourself. of course, if you work for yourself, get set to have a whole other world of problems which, not coinidentally, also revolve around money.
when i first started interviewing at agencies back i
Re:Standards (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.grub.net/blog/index.html | Last Journal: Wednesday June 27, @08:48AM)
Standards are for pussies
Don't you Microsoft people do anything but read slashdot all day?
Re:Standards (Score:1)
(http://www.xposse.com/)
Re:"the first IT book I've ever read" (Score:2)
(http://trolltalk.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 24, @08:16AM)
I don't agree (Score:2)
(http://feedharvest.com/)
If you know what things the different browsers can handle and what makes them puke it's not that bad. You end up with some legacy width and height tags for Netscape 4, but the CSS aware browsers will ignore them.
You also want to sniff the browser to feed it CSS that it can handle, I have found that some tag's will destroy a page in Netscape 4 and IE 5, so there a 3 CSS files for NS_4, IE_5 and everything else.
Don't get me wrong, I will never get Netscape 4 to look the way I want, but according to my logs, I don't need to.
Re:Ummm (Score:2)
I'd spend my time checking the site with Netscape 7.x or Mozilla 1.0.x or Mozilla 1.4.x instead. Can you give a specific example of "limited use" of tables and styles in one of those browsers?
Re:Ummm (Score:5, Informative)
(http://serios.net/)
- CSS level 1: Not full support despite MS claiming so. E.g.background-attatchment: fixed; works only on the <body element.
- CSS level 2: Quite a mess, lots of things are broken, e.g. the infamous issues with the box model, and lots of things are not implemented, e.g. position: fixed;
- XML support is flaky at best, it tends to complain about DTDs even though they are valid.
- Other nasty quirks such as when having a <?xml
... ?> declaration, then it ignores the doctype and reverts to quirks mode with all the broken box models and such.
- Violation of the HTTP specification by ignoring the media type received from the server. Internet Explorer will most of the time second-guess the media type instead.
h tml#sec7.2.1 [w3.org]
I design according to the standards and using Mozilla and Opera 7 as the design references, and then adjust the stylesheets for IE's buggy behavior, so that it renders fine there as well.http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec7.
Re:Dead issue (Score:1)
(http://www.dexworld.org/)
If there was nothing useful in this book, then statements like that wouldn't be made.
If it was such a dead issue, it wouldn't be a huge event when a major site (news.com, espn.com, wired.com) finally adopts a modern standard and aims for compliance.
This book would have been useful in '99, sure, but it's far from a moot point now.
Re:Ummm (Score:3, Informative)
(http://phroggy.com/)
It's what you get used to... (Score:2)
When Mozilla reached 1.0 I switched to it... I have never looked back. The support for PNG is better, transparent PNG graphics drive IE nuts sometimes. IE still leaves gaps around graphics and tables that you have to hammer out to a minumum but cannot eliminate. I think it has a lot to do with interpretations of the box model... padding, margin, border and such... Someone isn't doing their homework to comply. Personally the Mozilla way makes better sense to me. Netscape 4.7 sucked... no question about it, it was stagnent for a long time and didn't grow with technology standards. Gecko has made some great strides that are now leaving the MS browser lagging though in a a few areas.
Re:Ummm (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.fylo.net/)
First, a reminder that this is 2003, not 1998, which was the year IE4 and Netscape4 were introduced. Since then, Mozilla has come, and with it Netscape 6 and 7. Also, we've seen the arrival of Konqueror (and Safari) and Opera.
Netscape 4 is dead: don't worry about it beyond getting your sites to still be legible in it.
Gecko based browsers, Konq, and Opera all do very well with W3C standards.
IE, however, has not had a major rendering revamp since version 4. The biggest change was for IE6, which is actually less compliant than previous versions. Sure it fixed some things, but broke many more.
Among web designers I know, IE is quickly gaining the hatred that had previously been reserved for Netscape4, because they know that NN4 is irrelevant, and the hatred has to go somewhere: the least compliant browser out there... IE.
Now, why is IE the least compliant? Because MS doesn't see the need to make it compliant. They have their precious market share, which is all they care about... not the users, not the developers which must coddle to IE because it works the way MS sees fit, not the standards bodies which MS continually ignores while attempting to participate.
The only way to break IE and move to standards is to use them, and explain to users why sites don't work: it's not the site's fault, it's the browser's.
Given all this, most people who have a clue about W3C standards would say you're doing your development backwards. You'd probably save a lot of time if you coded to the standards first, then hacked up the code for IE.
Re:same price at amazon (Score:1)