The Book of Taliesyn
Ambling around a five storey bookstore in the Jinbocho area of Tokyo today, in the computer section I stumbled across a Japanese translation of my Transcending CSS and CSS Best Practice by Miki Ofuji.
CSS Best Practice made me smile because it features (on page 54) a tutorial about how I made text wrap around both sides of an image on my Stuff an Nonsense site home page, as well as work by Dan Cederholm, Cameron Moll, Veerle Pieters and my design for the Web Standards Project.
I still use the same technique on Stuff and Nonsense (although I have never written my own tutorial) but the screenshot shows a version of the design from last year. The examples of Dan and Cameron's work are out of date too and anyone visiting the URLs listed will find a different design from those illustrated.
This is a common problem for books that feature web sites. Jeff Croft launched a new design of his site the month after Transcending CSS was published in 2006. Jeffrey Zeldman and Ethan Marcotte's Designing With Web Standards (3rd Edition) and Dan Cederholm's Handcrafted CSS (both excellent, you should buy them) feature my For A Beautiful Web prior to this month's relaunch.
Bummer.
What's an author to do that will be in the best interests of his or her readers?
- Accept that web sites change and books may quickly become of date?
- Link to a screenshot of the site as it appears in their book?
- Make and host a copy of a page, complete with its HTML, CSS, scripts and images?
- Rely on the Wayback Machine?
- Something else entirely
I'm going to write a second book next year. So if you are an author, publisher or reader of books about web sites, design and development, I would love to hear your thoughts on how you think it best solve this problem.