Re: Standards Freshness

At 09:32 AM 7/18/2002 -0700, Joseph wrote:
>Lastly, it terms of good general/technical info books for today's XHTML/CSS
>standards (and real-world browser environment), do my esteemed colleagues
>have any recommendations?

I agree that there's not a lot of books on the subject right now - well, at 
least that I know of. A quick search on Amazon for "web standards" turned 
up diddly. But funny you should ask today; by coincidence, Zeldman just 
posted a rave review of a new book on CSS. It's by Eric Meyer, the author 
you mentioned in your post, I guess it's his new one.

http://www.zeldman.com/

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/073571245X/ref=ase_jeffreyzeldmanprA/002-1048969-8576811

Zeldman himself is publishing a book on web standards that's not out yet, 
see his July 15th post. I love how Amazon can let you order books that 
aren't out yet, though, and I hope we end up being able to do that with 
this one as well. I've already done that for a couple of books that I just 
HAD to have, like Personal Web Sites by Joe Shepter. On the 
inspiration-ometer, it's right up there with Curt Cloninger's book.

<rant type="mild">
Not to get sidetracked, but there's a lot of how-to books out there for the 
technical issues of site development and not enough books that actually 
survey the scene and see what everybody's up to. I've heard opinions on how 
that's inherently hard to do, since the web changes daily, but so does art, 
yet there's a ton of art books chronicling how people are innovating and 
tracking the evolution of different trends. That's when I'll know 
standards-compliant sites are finally mainstream - when there's more than 
just online and printed tutorials, but cool sites with various styles to 
check out and draw inspiration from. At this point, all XHTML/CSS sites 
kind of have a common feel to them, as explained more eloquently in this 
article: http://www.chunkysoup.net/opinion/boringcss/
</rant>

Enough whining! A great step towards pushing the standards envelope is the 
Life Is But A Dream competition for XHTML design:

http://333creativecentral.com/contest/

Check it out - the deadline hasn't passed yet, Oct.3.

Al

Received on Thursday, 18 July 2002 15:28:18 UTC