Don Marti

Sun 17 Apr 2005 08:33:53 PM PDT

Ten Most Influential Books of the 21st Century, Part I

Everybody go buy Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman. I've been messing around with CSS, and it's nifty and all, but I actually took a real corporate-type page full of table and font tags and cleaned it up as an experiment this weekend. In a couple hours I got substantially the same look from 24k to 8k—and that's with the stylesheet in the page head, so there's plenty more bandwidth to save in real life, assuming people visit more than one page on the site. And the HTML is actually legible—no more "oh, crap, how many tables down the rat hole am I now?"

Why does it matter if a page is 24k or 8k? Because that can make the difference between fast enough that it works like an application and slow enough that it feels like just another web site.