Ambition No.337

To be featured in the book that inspired me to learn more about standards is a wonderful feeling.

Way back when the web was young and active volcanos spewed molten rock into the sea just north of Morecambe, I dodged falling boulders and lava flows and headed into my local bookcave. In between books about wheel-making and 'SAMS Teach Yourself Fire in 24 Hours', I spotted a small orange book with more bite than a sabretooth tiger: Designing With Web Standards.

I'd been trying to drag women around by their hair understand how to work with semantic markup and CSS for some time before that, and Designing With Web Standards provided the spark that lit my fire. All the resources that I had found were there and so many more that I read it from cover to cover without pausing even for a hunk of mammoth meat.

This book, along with the many more that it inspired other designers to write, has made the lives of web designers far less difficult than they would otherwise have been. It has become a fixture on the bookshelves of almost every designer I meet.

Now the orange book has gone green and since colour printing has also been invented since it was first published, it's full colour too. Jeffrey Zeldman has revised and updated it and it was with a little surprise and I big smile that I found my own portfolio site gleaming from page 337.

Designing With Web Standards, page 337

To be featured in the book that inspired me to learn more about standards is a wonderful feeling.