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You really sound like you're talking about two different things. First off, you say you want to learn better and more advanced web design. If this is the case, then you should check out the CSS Zen Garden for inspiration. Use that as a basis for learning about advanced CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) techniques, page layout, colour integration, and so on. They have links there for places you can steal from. Eric Meyer also has excellent ideas. A List Apart has excellent columns and tutorials.

Second, you talk about the alphabet soup of AJAX, XML, Perl, etc. This is web programming. It doesn't have anything to do with web design, it has everything to do with web content. I don't know about advanced web programming (I've done all mine in Perl, PHP, ASP, and ColdFusion, and those last two were five years ago). Others can chime in on that count.

A website doesn't really have much business selecting particular named fonts, content versus presentation and all that. If you use CSS then you can quite reasonably limit yourself to normal, sans-serif and monospaced [...]

Sure, that "Slashdot" in the upper-left corner would look great in 8pt Courier. :-P FYI, most if not all modern broswers let users force font settings and/or employ a user-specified CSS file. Users already have the choice.

If you want to bitch about bad designs (or celebrate good ones) on the web (or in print) then join the crowd. But the idea that CSS means the end of presentation on the web, as you imply, is inane. CSS specifies the separation of content and presentation, not the reduction of either. As Eric Meyer, the CSS Zen Garden, and others have shown, CSS+(X)HTML seriously improves the ability to maintain and enhance both content and presentation versus old-style HTML-font-tag-and-attribute-soup.

While content-based web pages need to be accessible (which sIFR achieves, FWIW), the idea that the web is the end of typography in design is also inane. Web typography does suck right now, but mostly because designers need to employ techniques such as image overlays and sIFR to do anything remotely interesting.

Personally I found Zeldman's book less than practical. It's good background material on the browser wars and the current state of accepted page layout best practices. It's very css oriented and for practical insight into page layout using css you can't do better than Eric Meyer on CSS, except perhaps for his more recent book.

Web Design Garage covers more than just css layout. The telling comment is perhaps There are many books available on basic Web design, but this one is unusually clear and well-expressed. High praise.

Agreed, MeyerWeb is great. As is his Eric Meyer on CSS book and related site. Which isn't /.ed yet, shame on you...

• Eric Meyer on CSS -- goes through several hypothetical projects that demonstrate techniques for laying out pages. I found ideas for navigation menus and sidebars a helpful start. Also, would have otherwise had no idea that you can specify a separate style sheet for printing!
• Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference by Danny Goodman who will actually explain to you the difference between relative and absolutely position layers. Also, as per the title, this book is a great introduction for manipulating pages with Javascript and includes references for HTML, CSS, DOM and Javascript. A great resource, it perpetually sits open on my desk.

Of course the most interesting way to learn the new standards is to practice coding and to look at how other folks have coded their sites. I think that what is interesting about XHTML/CSS is that there are several different ways one might go about coding a page to reveal the same layout. Its also interesting to see just how much you can manipulate what amounts to very simple HTML into something more complex and attractive.

The challenge, however, is to come up with a finished design that has the same visual polish as those you might have chopped up from Photoshop or some other graphics program. Not to say that it is impossible to have a graphics heavy design using new standards. Rather, I have found that in working with CSS encourages a bottom-up process in designing a page starting with your code, while earlier Web design methods follow a more top-down approach, starting from a design comp.

However, I think that the new standards also encourage a certain simplicity aesthetic. I think many Web folks are appreciating designs that aren't so clutered, that download and render really fast, and have built in accessibility and search engine performance advantages.

OK, I read the book and I agree completely with the message. And I read and enjoy Zeldman's site, it's a great source for what's happening in web design. But his writing style doesn't work on paper. He has a hugely irritating habit of adding unnecessary asides wrapped in parentheses into the main text of the book, often referencing other parts of the book. It's like he's itching to put in a link, but guess what - links don't work on paper. Have you heard of sidebars at all Jeffrey?

My other major beef with the book is the lack of meat. It's a history lesson on the browser wars and a white paper on why web standards are good. A book about building web pages using standards that doesn't get to "CSS Basics" until chapter 9?

If you want to get hands on with web standards, i.e. using css for layout, buy Eric Meyer's book Eric Meyer on CSS. Read chapter 1, do the exercise, suddenly it all becomes very obvious.

Andrew King's book Speed Up Your Site is the most enlightening book I've read in a year; well organised, well structured, readable, teeming with useful information, and it's published by New Riders. Eric Meyer on CSS, also New Riders, comes a close second. Rule of thumb, there's dog food in any stable.

There is one book I have found brilliant as a tutorial for css - Eric Meyer's Eric Meyer on CSS. It is a great way to learn css, each chapter is a project, and the projects are challenging and informative.

Also worth a mention (although why I should be giving him another free plug when his name is plastered over the sites and blogs of anyone who knows what CSS stands for - hint: it isn't cross-site scripting) is Zeldman and his new book designing with web standards. I'm a third of the way through it and it is an engaging read but I'm still looking for the meat.

Otherwise there are a bunch of on-line resources at W3C.

BTW, it's worth persevering, I recently replaced a gif menu and javascript rollovers with the equivalent xhtml/css and knocked over 20K off the homepage. Performance improved enough for customers to contact my employer to comment and that's feedback worth getting.

Dave

What I've done some places is write some SSI that detects the browser. If it detects Netscape 4 or lower, or IE Why not just use @import instead of SSI? @import blocks pretty much all CSS in the browsers you are talking about. Or you can use things like: div#id { /* stuff to hide from NS4 */ } Using techniques like this make your stylesheet much easier to maintain. You also put @import statements within stylesheets so you serve up your 'dumbed' down style sheet to everyone then @import stylesheets for everyone else. There are a lot of options to pursue without having to turn to server side code. I just find it much easier to maintain pages this way. more info here: (from CSS god Eric Meyer) http://www.ericmeyeroncss.com/bonus/trick-hide.htm l