Designing with Web Standards

The book that won the web standards war. In the early 2000s, Microsoft and Netscape were fragmenting the web with proprietary extensions, and Zeldman led the campaign — through the Web Standards Project and this book — to convince designers and developers that building to W3C standards was both ethically right and commercially sensible. Its political importance exceeds its technical content: it demonstrated that an industry could be redirected not by regulation but by persuading practitioners to adopt shared conventions. The separation of structure (HTML), presentation (CSS), and behaviour (JavaScript) that Zeldman evangelised became the foundation on which every subsequent web practice was built. A historical document as much as a technical manual.