Designing With Web Standards

Trent Lucier writes "If you've browsed the web design section of any bookstore lately, you've seen him staring at you. The blue hat. The mustache. The blinding neon background. He's Jeffrey Zeldman, publisher of the influential web development magazine, 'A List Apart' and author of the book Designing With Web Standards (DWWS). The first edition of the DWWS was published in 2003, and now 2006 brings us an updated 2nd edition. In a market flooded with XHTML, CSS, and web standards books, is DWWS 2nd Ed. still relevant?" Read the rest of Trent's review for the answer.

Designing With Web Standards, 2nd Ed.
author	Jeffrey Zeldman
pages	410
publisher	New Riders
rating	8.5
reviewer	Trent Lucier
ISBN	0321385551
summary	Foundations for creating standards-based websites using XHTML and CSS.

DWWS is more of a survey course than a deep dive into a particular topic. In fact, a large part of the book is dedicated to the philosophy of web standards, as opposed to their specific implementation. The reader is given background information on the turbulent early years of the web, when Netscape and Microsoft battled each other with proprietary features, driving coders crazy and sending development costs through the roof. Inconsistent support for HTML, JavaScript and CSS often meant that a single page had to have multiple versions written to support different browsers. Predictably, many companies decided to "standardize" their websites on one browser (usually Internet Explorer), causing much pain for users who wanted or needed to use other programs.

Out of this mess came the web standards movement, whose goal was to encourage browser-agnostic design practices. However, the web standards proponents faced several problems at the outset. "Standards compliant design" was synonymous with "ugly." CSS was a 4-letter word, due to buggy and inconsistent browser support. Additionally, few people understood that standards compliance was a continuum and not an all-or-nothing affair.

Which brings us to Zeldman's book. Part 1 of DWWS explains the concepts above in terms that non-technical people can understand. The book states that it is for "designers, developers, owners, and managers..." Of course, the idea that a non-technical person would choose to read a book on web standards doesn't comply with what I like to call "reality." But tech leads may find some ammunition in these chapters for their arguments with management about the benefits of browser-neutral web design.

XHTML and CSS are the main focus of the second part of the book. Readers without any HTML experience will likely have difficulty following these chapters. Those with some experience will learn to master the DOCTYPE, tame font sizes, and conquer annoying Internet Explorer bugs.

Zeldman is a pragmatist, never forgetting that his readers live in the real world with real limitations. Some developers still have to support older browsers, or integrate with proprietary technologies (ex: Flash and Quicktime). He recommends solutions for these circumstances, letting his audience know the pros and cons of each approach. Early in the book, Zeldman states his motto of "No Rules. No Dogma." The book adheres to that statement, explaining that some standards can be maddeningly vague, or that the XHTML Strict DOCTYPE isn't for everyone.

As always, Internet Explorer 6 requires special attention. The (in)famous CSS box model hack is explained, in which jujitsu-like techniques are used to fix one IE bug (the way width is measured) by exploiting another (broken support for the CSS voice-family rule):

.content
{
width:400px; /* All browsers read this line */
voice-family: "\"}\""; /* IE chokes here and bails out of this block */
voice-family:inherit;
width:300px; /* Other browsers make it to the end and use the correct width */
}

Every time someone codes this, a kitten dies. But it is valid markup, and it is used by many standards supporters. A few references to IE7's improvements are sprinkled here and there, but this book was published before the browser was formally released so don't expect too much info.

One of the hottest topics in CSS is the pure CSS-based layout. Pure CSS layouts usually involve the concept of floating elements and calculating widths. In DWWS, we get a chapter dedicated to the hybrid layout. Hybrid layouts make use of CSS and HTML tables to layout a page, although the table usage is minimized. Zeldman is correct to take this approach, which gives readers practical advice and then lets them decide if they want to move on to more complicated CSS layouts.

The chapter on accessibility is one of the most illuminating. Zeldman has well-reasoned retorts to all the common graphic designer excuses for ignoring accessibility. Accessibility does not mean that a site has to be ugly. Rather, accessibility is something that happens under the hood, in the markup itself. The business case for accessibility is also strongly made. Think you can ignore blind users because your flashy site targets a small, hip audience? Be prepared to get punished by Google, since the GoogleBot is the most powerful blind user on the web ("The Blind Billionaire", as it is called in the book).

A brief chapter is dedicated to DOM-based scripting (aka JavaScript), and the discussion is mostly limited to what scripting can do, and not how to do it. The DOM (Document Object Model) is the model for describing the hierarchy of content on a webpage. Modern techniques like AJAX make extensive use of the intimate relationship between XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript DOM support. However, accessibility, usability, and maintainability are still challenges in the hyper-scripted world of Web 2.0. Zeldman doesn't offer much advice on these topics, but provides a book list for further reading.

I have not read the first edition of DWWS, but the second edition makes it clear where Zeldman has changed tactics and techniques. For example, the image replacement technique described in the first edition wasn't accessible in certain screen readers, so improvements are suggested in the second edition.

Overall, DWWS is a good book for web developers that already know the basics of HTML and CSS, but want to update their 1997 coding techniques. Those new to web design, however, may want to start with a book that is a little more comprehensive. Zeldman does a good job of explaining how to create leaner, lower-cost, and more maintainable web sites. On more than one occasion, I put down this book mid-sentence, loaded up my text editor, and was able to make a quick change to solve a problem that was bugging me. In a book dedicate to making the web designer's life easier, what more can you ask for?

Trent Lucier is a software engineer. His latest experiment is localhost80.com

---

You can purchase Designing With Web Standards, 2nd Ed. from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

In my experience.

In my experience, you can do it with standards, or you can make it look like the client wants it to look like, which requires at least two sets of scripts for the diferent browsers. Then you run into things like ActiveX maps and OWC objects and give up on it working in anything other then IE. Then you go have a stiff drink.

Re:In my experience.

Obviously you have not had to interact or work with other third party applications. Try having a Siebel app look exactly the same on Firefox. :-\

A lot of these applications use almost entirely ActiveX and simply do not work well with alternate browsers. It simply isn't possible, and sometimes you just have to resort to having the app supported on just one browser.

Then why do companies use them? Legacy.

You see, these apps have been around forever, and people have been using them forever with a lot of investment made into them, and folks aren't ready to just give it all up. Of course, they ignore such things as TCO (e.g. having a Microsoft environment with IE, money spent on security and combating worms etc).

So, the end result is problems like this.

Tables should not be used for layout!

For example, if the floating divs are acting different in each browser, use a table.

Standards-based design is not just about browser compatibility. It's also about separating style from content. Tables are for tabular data, not graphic design. What you describe is the HTML equivalent of spaghetti code, and it's one of the main targets of Zeldman [alistapart.com] and other of proponents of standards-based design.

HTML (unlike, say, PDF) is not a layout language. Tags are meant to describe the content they enclose, not specify how it is to be displayed. It is the job of CSS to present that content in different contexts. Violating that separation, for example using tables for layout, makes maintenance difficult because content and style cannot be modified independently. It denies users the ability to re-style your content (e.g. with custom stylesheets). It creates barriers to accessibility for those who do not interact with computers visually (e.g. those with disabilities), or who use other devices to access the web. It misrepresents the content of web pages to machine analysis - search engines, for example, use tags to determine the role and importance of text on a page.

Of course, the reality of the HTML and CSS standards and their support in popular (*cough*) browsers is somewhat different. It is sometimes necessary or practical to misuse HTML as you describe. But it should not be done without an understanding of the standards and the consequences of ignoring them. Books like Zeldman's give designers and developers the knowledge and tools they need to use HTML and CSS correctly where possible, and to minimize abuse otherwise.

For some reason, programmers seem to be trailing designers when it comes to understanding how to use HTML and CSS correctly. They figure if it looks right, it must be right. That was certainly my attitude. Perhaps it's because we don't take designers or HTML seriously ("it's not Turing complete!"). I don't know. But do read Zeldman or Eric Meyer or someone like them, either in hardcopy or online. Knowing how do this stuff right made me a much better web programmer.

Re:Tables should not be used for layout!

Standards-based design is not just about browser compatibility. It's also about separating style from content.

There's a strong correlation between people who adhere to the W3C's specifications and people who separate content from presentation, but that doesn't mean that they are the same thing. <font> and <table> are in the HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0 specifications.

Conflating the two leads to people claiming stupid things, like that they are writing "standard" code because they use CSS, when in fact their code is non-standard and full of hacks.

I know over the past few years "web standards" has become a popular buzzword, but there's a difference between best practices and conformance to particular specifications. Just because it's a good thing, it doesn't mean the specifications require it, and jujst because it's in the specifications, it doesn't mean it's a good thing.

Re:Tables should not be used for layout!

any more than tying a bow around a piece of shit makes it a present.

of course not, silly.

It's the thought that counts.

You're missing the point of separating style

"banner", "navigation bar", "links", "headings", and "columns" are some of the most common categories of tabular data used on the web. Just because the only information you, personally, want to display happen to be multiplication tables, doesn't mean you're the only one allowed to use a bunch of rectangles to display your content.

Let's hold our horses and calm down a bit. You are confusing data with presentation. HTML is for content description, CSS is for presentation. Use the right tool for the job, and you can get the effect you want - without using HTML tables. And you will gain accessibility, maintainability, and so on.

The banners, nav bars, headings etc. that you mention are not tabular data. They do not necessarily have rows and columns. A navigation bar, for example, is typically one-dimensional, not two: it's a list of links - hence current best practice is to represent it in HTML as a list (<ul> or <ol>). Because these things are not tabular data, they should not be represented in tables.

Again, HTML is not a layout language. HTML tables are more like database tables than a grid system; like database tables, the relationship between rows and columns exists regardless of what they look like. The browser chooses how to display that information - typically in a tabular format, by applying CSS. That's right, CSS that specifies the layout, not HTML. You can use <div>s instead of <table>, <tr> and <td> tags and still display your information in a tabular format by applying the correct CSS table properties. These properties are about presentation, they say nothing about the nature of the data.

In your case, the banner should probably be something like <div class="banner">, the headings should be <h2>, <h3> etc. (that's why they're called heading tags), and the columns should probably be <div>s, located correctly with CSS (there are some very clever ways of doing this involving negative margins and the like (see A List Apart [alistapart.com]), none of which force you to misrepresent your data as tables - though in a few cases, using a table for columns is the most practical solution).

No one is telling you what your web pages should look like. They are, however, recommending the most effective, flexible, accessible, and maintainable ways of getting that look using the tools available. Using tables for layout is seldom any of those things.

Too bad CSS isn't better at layout

Again, HTML is not a layout language.... That's right, CSS that specifies the layout....

True, but my question has long been: why is CSS not better at layout? Say I want a page with a header, three columns of content, and a footer that gets pushed down according to whichever column has the longest content. That's a very common layout task, and it's dead simple to do with a table, but so difficult with CSS that (the last time I checked) it was considered a difficult problem even for authors of CSS books! (I haven't tried your link to the Holy Grail on A List Apart, but you must admit that a layout solution that relies on negative margins is the very definition of a kludge.)

Don't get me wrong: I love using style sheets, and most of the time I'm grateful for CSS. But I hate it that some important things that were once easy have now become hard, all in the name of avoiding tables.

Re:In my experience.

Exactly.

I develop some pretty interesting apps with ECMA-script and CSS, and my practise is this:

1. Write a piece of code with standards in the back of your head, and test it with Firefox. Then retest in Konqueror (I'm an avid KDE-user).
2. Code the whole app this way
3. Boot into Windows, test with IE7. Not much changes needed, 99% works.
4. Fire up IE6. Cry, and regain temper.
5. Adjust so that IE6 works, without breaking the original functionality. Don't use browser-checks. They'll bite your ass later.
6. Test in Opera. Most just works when it already does in FF and IE6, so no harm there.
7. Retest everything cautiously in all five mentioned browsers and adjust as needed. IE7 might pose a problem due to the fixes for IE6.

All in all, the basic coding still is the major part of programming for me. The adjusting for the different browsers is not that much of a hassle.

Standards are nice, but when it works with Gecko, IE6, IE7, KHTML and Opera, it's good enough. For basic webpages, Lynx is also a testbed for me (with regard to spiders).

what I want

I would love to see a listing of all the CSS and HTML that is fully-supported by both IE7 and Gecko. That would allow me to Write-It-Once and still stick to what the W3C says. I have no interest in CSS that only works in one of the Big Two browsers.

Re:what I want

Now that would be a good book. "Designing with Web Standards that are Followed."

I must say.

As an owner of the first edition, it is a must own title for anyone into webdesign and programming. If only Microsoft started to adhere to the W3C specification, the world would be a better place.

Re:I must say.

Microsoft did start adhering to the standards. They just stopped long before they were done.

Interesting.

A book on standards that decries rules and dogma. Only on Slashdot could this garner an 8.5.

It sounds like this should have been two books -- one about the history of web standards, and one about how to design for the web, optionally complying with standards.

Picking and choosing which ones you'll follow is about as useful as just writing what you know will work for everyone, except it's a bigger pain in the ass. At the end, you have the same thing: A website that doesn't actually follow any standard. How much hair you pull out in the process is the only real difference.

yeah

Like I'm going to take advice on how things should look from a guy with a moustache.

If it was easy, everyone could do it

For old hacks who are thoroughly used to table-based layouts, as the only kluge that worked consistently, CSS is a tough sell. From an old rant on this topic [damienmjones.com] where I quote a friend of mine who builds sites:

See I'm not a fan of the pure CSS sites. [It] makes updates and general maintenance a pain. We've done a few sites that way and they are the ones I hate working on when [the] client calls with updates, enhancements, etc. ... I can make a table and format a page in two seconds, versus looking up styles or creating new ones, using guess and check, checking all browsers. ... Tables don't cause any problems if they're done correctly, so why make my life more difficult to use pure CSS, when 9 [out of] 10 times the site is going to be very graphically driven.

That was from a year ago. Now even he has seen the light and is starting to build standards-based sites. It just took a while.

One invaluable resource for identifying browser CSS support is this page [webdevout.net] which has nice pretty colors showing the amount of support.

Yet another standards book

Do we really need another standards book? First of all this thing is going to be defunct within at least 6 months and second I don't know a single self-respecting web developer that cracks a book when working on a site. Yeah, I just skimmed the article but it just seemed like a total rehash of the last five or six books that were thrown up here. I mean, if it were an E-Book of some sort then I might be into it because I could reference it while working at my station but honestly if its got a spine and paper then I dont have time to get my fat butt out of my chair and go to the shelf to look up a technique when I could just as easily find it in two seconds on google.

Tragedy

Hybrid layouts make use of CSS and HTML tables to layout a page, although the table usage is minimized. Zeldman is correct to take this approach, which gives readers practical advice...

I felt a powerful disturbance in the force, as if thousands of CSS-P zealots died reading this.

It's definately possible.

Just painful, at least until you get used to it. I'm trying to develop an entire web based (graphical, 2d overhead) MMO, following XHTML 1.1 and CSS standards. PHP and Javascript for life :)

This book is unsuggested.

Item 7 was a surprise:

http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester/1426655 [librarything.com]

Web Standards

As a web developer of 7 years as my main source of income, web standards is a waste of time. Personally I try to adhere to them as much as humanely [no, that's not a typo] possible. "Web Standards" changes constantly with what is "in" and "cool." Right now the big thing is AJAX. I, personally, have never used it and I suggest everyone else does the same. Except in situations like Google's Writely. Web Applications are useful, but not necessarily worth the effort. Because "Standards" never actually stay put, I have this to say:

Web Standards is an Oxymoron.

Thank you for your time.

Stop using a CSS as an excuse to produce poor HTML

Who was the idiot that decided now that we use css for our layouts that tables and such can just be deprecated. Tableless layouts are NOT a good idea, although the need for tables has dropped significantly since the introduction of css.

For example, in the header of my site, I want 3 columns, a left,right, center, with different aligns on each.

The "CSS" solution would look something like this.
<div class="header">
  <div style="float:left;text-align:left"> Left Content </div>
  <div style="float:right;text-align:right"> Right Content </div>
  <div style="text-align:center"> Center </div>
</div>

Now this may not have any tables in it, and produces 3 columns, the float order is odd (if I put the float:right after the center, it'll start on a new line since it's after a non-floating div). Also Floats tend to not resize that well in firefox for some reason, leaving ugly trails that look like dragging around a window on a frozen windows desktop.

Now when I start adding more and more content and fine tuning it in the floating div's, it starts to become a confusing mess and become hard to tweak and manage precisely.

With a table, the same effect is achieved with slightly less code.
<table width="100%"> <tr>
  <td align="left"> Left </td>
  <td align="center"> Center </td>
  <td align="right"> Right </td>
</tr> </table>

Also, lets not forget the fact that my table can be fully styled with css as well. So my point being that don't use div's for a solution where another tag exists to solve your problem.

It's good css practice (not professional practice, educational FOR LEARNING practice) to write a site completely in div or spans, but most these other tags are not going anywhere soon, and provide context for your document, for example, in a layout I'm working on now, I use styled <ol> to achieve the same effect that I would traditionally get from a table. I could also achieve the same effect using a series of divs or with styled tables. Although the <ol> makes the most sense when viewing the source because the nature of the content in it is a list, a series of divs or a table would make it a lot harder to immediately distinguish this list.

Css opens possibility of styling your html in many ways, but I can't emphasize this enough CSS IS NOT XHTML, it does not excuse you from ignoring tags because a div with the proper css can produce the same effect. Just because you can do an entire site with only div tags does not mean you have to.

HTML is there now to provide context to the document, and if something is a list, it should be stored in a <ol> or a <ul>, if something resembles a table, it should use table tags, etc.

The idea is that the implementation of the html and the css should be done in which the html document shows clear context, and the css should be based on that context so that there is a clear separation between data/display. using divs and spans only makes it hard to identify context (aside from the classes your using). And when you spend more time solving a problem with div's that a table would still solve in 10 seconds, then you are wasting your time.

future proofing the web

When someone makes a site that's IE only, he's not just hurting firefox and opera users. It makes it much more difficult for it to be compatible with future versions of IE. Such short sighted thinking...

Meaning and message can't be separated

CSS gurus tend to assume that style, form and content can be separated.

In reality, they're all mixed up.

Think of a really good poem or film or advertisment -- where does content end and 'style' begin? Likewise for web pages.

Of course it's good to get rid of font tags and separate CSS from HTML, but it's daft to think you can completely split semantics from presentation.

Hence the problems people have naming CSS classes: from a quick look at Amazon's code, I found .n2 .clickable and .whiteBG next to .internalLink. MySpace has #copyRight as well as .borDkGrey -- and so on.

Sometimes I wish we could just start again with something completely different: not HTML, not CSS.