Designing with web standards
by Jeffrey Zeldman, Ethan Marcotte · first published 2003
43% recommend57% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Foundational introduction to standards-based web design, covering CSS layout and the box model without tables; often the first book recommended to people new to HTML and CSS who want a design-focused path.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Best-selling author, designer, and web standards evangelist Jeffrey Zeldman has revisited his classic, industry-shaking guidebook. Updated in collaboration with co-author Ethan Marcotte, this third edition covers improvements and challenges in the changing environment of standards-based design. Written in the same engaging and witty style, making even the most complex information easy to digest, Designing with Web Standards remains your essential guide to creating sites that load faster, reach more users, and cost less to design and maintain. * Substantially revised—packed with new ide
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After learning HTML and CSS, a good followup book to recommend is Designing with Web Standards by J. Zeldman (http://www.zeldman.com/dwws/). Even though it's written for individuals who are designers or are serious about web design, it has many helpful tips and information such as the box model…
on “CSS Techniques I Wish I Knew When I Started Designing Websites ” ↗…starting with a huge disadvantage. Google is the most important blind user on the Internet. If the blind can't read and navigate your site, then Google can't index it. Check out Jeffrey Zeldman's book Designing with Web Standards, 3rd Edition, for advice on making sure you site is as accessible as possible.
on “Ask HN: how to buy SEO? Can SEO be automated?” ↗…prototype your concept. Once you know enough to prototype the visual design, learn just enough javascript to make the front end behave the way it would for the end user. My suggestion is to start with "Designing with Web Standards, 3rd Edition" by Jeffrey Zeldman, then move on to a more complete HTML/CSS book like the Head First book on the topic. Finally, pick up the book DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith. Ideas are worthless without…
on “Idea guy needs help” ↗…Essentials of Interaction Design Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become Bulletproof Web Design Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide Designing Web Usability Designing With Web Standards Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense…
on “Ask HN: Typography—How?” ↗The definitive book is Designing with Web Standards. Not all CSS per se, but it is requisite reading if you're just getting into the whole CSS-based design thing. That book goes hand in hand with Eric Meyer on CSS.
on “What is the best CSS book?” ↗here here. I am very thankful that when i started out a decade ago the first book i read was Designing with Web Standards. I still recommend it to noobs but i can’t necessarily blame them for not getting through it when there are more shiny things like React and Vite to learn about. To read that book now would be largely…
on “Htmx Is a Erlang” ↗Designing with Web Standards was the bible during the web's golden era. Peer's minds were being blown that we could lay stuff out without tables and spacers.
on “Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen” ↗…Gone! Operating Systems 2e (Deitel) Agile Web Development with Rails 1e -- Gone! Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java with JUnit -- Gone! The Rails Way 1e (Fernandez) -- Gone! Eric Meyer on CSS -- Gone! Designing with Web Standards 1e (Zeldman) -- Gone! Here are some pictures of what's available: http://imgur.com/3FgKs.jpg http://imgur.com/mrV6E.jpg http://imgur.com/OFkw7.jpg http://imgur.com/zBKQg.jpg
on “Tell HN: Free Book Giveaway” ↗…body. However, some people who wanted to see the ideas from the W3C gain more traction (i.e. XHTML) started referring to W3C docs as standards, and the W3C as a standards body. Jeffrey Zeldman, in Designing with Web Standards [sic], says the use of the word "standards" when referring to these specs was, in fact, "a guerilla marketing maneuver." This is not mere semantics. There is great value in making a distinction between…
on “This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C” ↗…especially since it's the same Apple who had for years an obsolete, nonconforming, slow browser that was dead last in performance and implementation of Web Standards, so much so that Zeldman, in his "Designing with Web Standards" recommends IE 5 for Mac over Safari. Imagine that, for years (until Apple forked KHTML and KJS from KDE), the best browser running on Macs was made by Microsoft.
on “Adobe & HTML” ↗…at the same time MS beat Netscape? That they were even capable of "bullying" a company like MS into stopping development on one of their products? My own exposure to web standards was Zeldman's first "Designing With Web Standards" book, published in 2003. My experience has been that the standardistas have spent most of their time trying to push MS to further develop IE to support standards (which it still lags at), not trying…
on “The State Of Web Development Ripped Apart In 25 Tweets By One Man” ↗Just a reminder: csszengarden.com was created back in 2004 (I think). Zeldman's "Designing with Web Standards" came out in 2003. "Modern CSS" is over 17 years old. The CSS itself is not yet 24 years old.
on “CSS Layout – Grid vs. Flexbox” ↗Sure, but developers continued to use tables long after there were alternatives. The first edition of Zeldman’s seminal book Designing with Web Standards [1] was released in 2003; two additional editions were released in 2007 and 2009. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designing_with_Web_Standards
on “My favourite 3 lines of CSS” ↗Every time I work on a website's UI/UX I have that image of Zeldman staring at me from "Designing with web standards" https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/df/Designi...
on “Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen” ↗I was once on Zeldman's semantic CSS bandwagon - Designing with Web Standards was the Bible for me. Not anymore. Now I think it is a huge mistake that creates unmaintainable CSS. Here's why: Let's say I want to style a box to hold an image and a caption that goes in a blog post.…
on “Please stop embedding Bootstrap classes in your HTML” ↗