You code. And code. And code. You build only to rebuild. You focus on making your site compatible with almost every browser or wireless device ever put out there. Then along comes a new device or a new browser, and you start all over again. You can get off the merry-go-round.

It's time to stop living in the past and get away from the days of spaghetti code, insanely nested table layouts, tags, and other redundancies that double and triple the bandwidth of even the simplest sites. Instead, it's time for forward compatibility.

Isn't it high time you started designing with web standards? Standards aren't about leaving users behind or adhering to inflexible rules. Standards are about building sophisticated, beautiful sites that will work as well tomorrow as they do today. You can't afford to design tomorrow's sites with yesterday's piecemeal methods.

Jeffrey teaches you to:

• Slash design, development, and quality assurance costs (or do great work in spite of constrained budgets)
• Deliver superb design and sophisticated functionality without worrying about browser incompatibilities
• Set up your site to work as well five years from now as it does today
• Redesign in hours instead of days or weeks
• Welcome new visitors and make your content more visible to search engines
• Stay on the right side of accessibility laws and guidelines
• Support wireless and PDA users without the hassle and expense of multiple versions
• Improve user experience with faster load times and fewer compatibility headaches
• Separate presentation from structure and behavior, facilitating advanced publishing workflows

"Jeffrey and his web standards coconspirators have made it possible for those old enemies--beauty, usability, and accessibility--to play nice together in any website."  — Louis Rosenfeld, publisher, Rosenfeld Media

"Zeldman explains complex technologies in a way that designers can not only understand, but actually get excited about.  If you are serious about web design, you need this book.  — Hillman Curtis, author, MTIV: Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer

This guide to web standards - writing code once for use on today's and future browsers - provides code snippets and web site examples of compliant code in use so that when done correctly all web sites look the same regardless of the browser.

Jeffrey Zeldman is among the best-known web designers in the world. His personal site www.zeldman.com has welcomed more than 16 million visitors and is read daily by thousands in the web design and development industry. In 1998, Zeldman co-founded The Web Standards Project www.webstandards.org, a grassroots coalition of web designers and developers that helped end the Browser Wars by persuading Microsoft and Netscape to support the same technologies in their browsers.