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See us at Web Design World Seattle 28–30 July.

JEFFREY ZELDMAN’S Designing With Web Standards (Indianapolis: New Riders, 2003) is available at Amazon.com, Amazon Canada, Amazon UK, Amazon France and other fine booksellers. [Printing history and availability.]

Design now, pay later?

There was a time not long ago when many drivers thought nothing of tossing empty bottles out the windows of their cars. Years later, these same citizens came to realize that littering was not an acceptable way to dispose of their trash. The web design community is now undergoing a similar shift in attitude, and web standards are key to this transformation.

Designing With Web Standards is for every web professional who wants to reach more users on more browsers, platforms, and devices – including wireless and hand-held devices – with less work, less maintenance, and at lower cost. It’s for designers, developers, site owners and managers who seek to end the costly spiral of obsolescence, where each new browser or Internet device means a whole new coding cycle and another line item on the budget. Few organizations today can afford the merry-go-round of coding and re-coding that has characterized web development until now.

Designing with standards breaks that costly cycle, enabling you to create sites that will work as well tomorrow as they do today. It also allows you to work seamlessly with XML-based web services and tools, and can help you stay on the right side of accessibility laws and guidelines.

The history of our medium has been to solve today’s problems at tomorrow’s expense. Designing With Web Standards shows that the build-now, pay-later approach is no longer productive or necessary, and lays to rest the notion that designing with standards means leaving some users behind. In fact, it most often means just the opposite.

“A Rosetta Stone of web design”

“Zeldman delivers a witty, wise, and important companion for designers and programmers. The mechanics of the art are examined and challenged in depth and the result is a rosetta stone of web design.”

Don Buckley
Senior Vice President
Interactive Marketing
Warner Bros. Pictures

“The definitive guide to understanding and implementing web standards”

“I now have a new goal in life: to remove the presentational markup from my code and focus on creating forward-compatible websites for myself and my clients. I have no doubt that the ideas of this book will help improve the quality of my work and give me an edge in a competitive marketplace. This book will become the definitive guide to understanding and implementing web standards.”

Chad Brandt
Manager, Web Services
Best Software, CRM Division

“Shows you the way out”

Zeldman clearly exposes how web design got stuck in the last century and shows you the way out. By implementing his techniques, you’ll learn to design pages not just for Internet Explorer but for today’s modern browser’s and tomorrow’s Internet as well.

Håkon Wium Lie
CTO, Opera Software
Co-architect of CSS

“Clear, entertaining, insightful...”

“Many of my peers struggle with this topic, mostly from lack of digestible information on the subject. Being able to tackle this subject – and not make it overly dry – is important, and this book does it in a clear, entertaining and insightful manner.”

Jen deHaan
Interactive web architect and author

“Addresses all the issues that have plagued us”

“Designing with Web Standards is the bomb, all right – just what you’d expect from Zeldman. It addresses all of the issues that have plagued us at one time or another and then gives us options for dealing with them. It’s the nuts and bolts and the how-to manual for creating timeless code.”

Kathy Keller
Texas Parks and Wildlife
Communications Web Group

More is more

For more reader reactions to Designing with Web Standards, see the Press section of this mini-site.