Designing with Web Standards

I've always shied away from web design. To me, the HTML code of all but the simplest web pages was totally unrelated to what you see in the browser. Content and layout were buried in a sea of tags and attributes. Graphical (WYSIWYG) design tools often made it even easier to create this confusing HTML code. Even Cascading Style Sheets seemed to me like only a minor improvement for setting colors and fonts. And working around web browser incompatibilities was the last thing I wanted to deal with.

This impression changed profoundly once I learned more about "Designing with Web Standards" (the best introduction being Jeffrey Zeldman's book with the same title). It is possible to create web sites with clean HTML without neglecting good web design (I don't consider this web site a good example - it uses clean HTML, but I'm not a designer). Cascading Style Sheets are a lot more powerful than their simple syntax reveals. If you would like to learn how to design with CSS, I highly recommend Eric Meyer's "On CSS". It is one of the few books explaining not just the techniques, but why and how to apply which tool.