Not the real Zeldman mind you just his book. Designing with Web standards should be recommended reading for all web developers especially if you want to have your sites exist in the future with out much upgrading needed. He does a great job explaining the why coding against the standards is a good thing and how it helps not only in the upgradability of our sites but also some really good business cases for using standards. Some ones that stuck with me are some no brainers like reducing page weight will consume less bandwidth reducing costs there and how using the standards can also aid in not having to create seperate pages for Mobile devices and print versions.
A very good read for those, like me that are trying to make my development easier and to make sure that I can retain all my users no matter what browser or device. Now that Whidbey will make XHTML generation easier maybe I'll be able to get rid of TopStyle/Dreamweaver combo for interface development and move everything over the VS.
For those of you that are unfamiliar with Jeffery Zeldman, here is a snippet from his Bio on Happy Cog Studios:
Founder and Creative Director JEFFREY ZELDMAN is an internationally known web designer and book author, a chief architect of the web standards movement, and the creator of some of the web's best-known brands. His personal site has welcomed over 23 million visitors and is a daily industry read. For nearly a decade, he has helped shape the medium's zeitgeist in the areas of content, design, publishing, and technology.
Zeldman is the publisher and creative director of A List Apart, an influential magazine "For People Who Make Websites," and the founder of Happy Cog Studios.
So over the past few months I've been devoting more and more time to actual interface problems with apps then actual plumping of the apps. Yep, I embarked on the adventure of learning everything I need to know about
CSS. It's been a very, very bumpy ride. Everything from the
Peekaboo Bug down to the
box model hack. I now slightly understand the need for
XHTML compliance and why
CSS3 is so important. All in all it has been a very nice ride and not one that soon will end. Below is a list of sites that should be bookmarked, added to SharpReader or just memorized.
The most important lesson of all?
ASCII is not 8 bit.
UTF-8 is.