Currently, I’m reading a book about web designing, mainly urging not just the designers and developers, but the site owners to pay attention to web standards. The book is Designing with Web Standards, it’s already in its second edition authored by Jeffrey Zeldman, one the first web designers and an advocate of web standards. For Zeldman, a table based website is “yucky,†a “waste of time and money†and etc.
Though, I still have to read 300 pages more before I could call it done. But what spurred my interest to read is the “highlights†found in page 41, I will quote a few:
- Redesign in hours instead of days or weeks, reducing the costs and eliminating grunt work.
- Support multiple browsers without the hassle and expense of creating separate versions, and often with little or no code forking.
- Support nontraditional and emerging devices, from wireless gadgets and web-enabled cell phones fancied by teens and executives to Braille readers and screen readers used by those with disabilities-again without the hassle and expense of creating separate versions.
- Deliver sophisticated printed versions of any web page, often without creating separate “printer-friendly†page versions or relying on expensive propriety publishing system to create such versions.
- Ensure that sites so designed will continue to work in tomorrow’s browsers and devices, including devices not yet built or even imagined. This is the promise of forward compatibility.
Zeldman encourages the designers to create table-less layout using CSS. I’m about 6 months with CSS but my improvement is rather slow, and I hope with proper comprehension of this book, will accelerate my knowledge in CSS.