Designing with Web Standards 3rd Edition arrived while cooking dinner last night at Hugga HQ. Much of what we do at Bike Hugger and for our clients at Textura Design is done with web standards. It’s not something I talk about everyday anymore — used to when I was a member of the Web Standards Project and lecturing about blogging in the early days. Have you been to a website or blog lately that looked like crap in one browser and not in another? Unlikely and all that standardized code is being read just fine by iPhones, Google phones, and the next whatever mobile device.
The arrival of the book reminded me about the importance of web standards, how far we come, HTML5, fonts on the web, mobility, accessibly, and so on. Back in the day it was a fight for standards and a good one. I’m sure our readers wish the bike industry had better standards …
I’ll start reading the book after dinner and post about it. My team has read, cited, and referred to the 1st and 2nd editions. More importanly, I’ve had the pleasure of knowing and working with the authors: Jeffrey Zeldman and Ethan Marcotte.
Earlier this year we had a Mobile Social while An Event Apart was in town.
Standards are great, when you have so many to choose from, and I’m not so sure the web does any better. There are enough JavaScript libraries, non-semantic wrapper elements, and CSS hacks out there that someone should write a book about it, so here goes:
JavaScript: you aren’t using jQuery? HTML: a “container DIV” for everything in the body is just a master table by another name. CSS: write one set of rules that all browsers understand — then another set with higher specificity and selectors that IE doesn’t understand.
It’s been a while since a Standards fanboy validated our site and reported that there was an unescaped character … my gig during the standards days was practical usage; especially for business and to use this stuff to your advantage. Example is when IE8 launched I demanded a rebate for any work I had to do on my sites and clients. It’s ridiculous for a browser maker to expect designers/devs to adjust for them. From where does that budget come? I even for a time, before we got busy with Bike Hugger was going to launch a “best viewed without campaign.”