There is no piece of Web development for big sites so often viewed as critically important and at the same time pushed into the background of the process than Web standards. Because Web standards can mean different things depending on who’s describing them, and are often the subject of intense debate, they can be hard for a team to keep pinned down in the face of urgent development schedules and limited resources. Adapting to Web Standards, CSS and Ajax for Big Sites is a useful book for those of us who recognize the value of standards but who need a hand shaping a realistic approach to moving toward a more methodical approach to them. The book provides plenty of practical advice on how to apply Web standards to HTML and XHTML, CSS, Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), and Web software applications.
Having worked on and managed development for relatively large sites with small teams, tight project deadlines and plenty of content and advertising demands creating unexpected sidetracks that need to be immediately addressed without breaking stride on longer term efforts, I know how easy it is for the focus on standards to blur. Adapting to Web Standards doesn’t take an all-or-nothing approach. The authors (Christopher Schmitt, Kimberly Blessing, Rob Cherny, Meryl K. Evans, Kevin Lawver and Mark Trammell) allow for many of the roadblocks to perfect standards that big sites frequently encounter – including vast amounts of legacy code and the need to acknowledge vendor or other third party code that must be integrated into many big sites also may not observe standards.
The book defines "Web standards" as "a term used to mean Web pages built using the open and compatible recommendations from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and other standards bodies as opposed to closed, proprietary corporate feature sets." The benefit of creating standards compliant pages is that they are readable by the broadest possible variety of browsers (and assistive technologies), are easier to maintain, render faster, use less bandwidth, are better for SEO, and for all these reasons, should make life easier for your team and bring more readers to your site.
At the heart of Web standards is "100% separation of presentation from content and structure, as well as the scripting behavior of UI elements." The book tackles these one at a time, starting with the front end. From determining whether to use XHTML or HTML, to the proper DOCTYPE declaration during a migration to Web standards, to CSS file content structure, specifying media type for CSS files, best practices for JavaScript and UI interaction, "unobtrusive" scripting, server-side PHP, ASP and other scripting, the advice is pragmatic and easy to implement. It also includes plenty of hands-on tips for transitional techniques.
There's a good, forward-looking discussion of POSH (plain old semantic HTML) and some guidance on giving meaningful class and id names in your CSS. Bringing meaning to content through semantic markup is another key element of standards based development, and provides the foundation for microformats – which are among the developing "protocols for classifying objects and collections of information support application programming interfaces (APIs) and data-mining activities, but also establish simple models for those looking for naming conventions."
The book also provides some good models for planning and managing the site build, as well a discussion of standards development within an organization and training, communication and process management. Two revealing, real-world case studies of standards adoption are also included: EverythingTori.com, the site of singer Tori Amos, and AOL.com.
This isn't a thick book, and it's worth noting that in and of itself it’s not a definitive guide to all standards, but guide to standards adoption. There are, however, plenty of links to related resources, references and tools. I found both exciting new information and a much-appreciated review of familiar concepts in this book – enough to inspire fresh enthusiasm and motivation to work toward standards and the kind of practical advice that can help prevent that enthusiasm from waning while trying to find a spot – among the massive web of choices – to start.
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