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While I was going through this video to add titles and intro/outro music etc., then writing the text intro, I kept thinking about the anybrowser movement and the guy I first heard about it from, Jeffrey Zeldman - http://www.zeldman.com/

I think I'll do an interview with him. He is like the original godfather of web design, and a great guy in general.

Google has tons of data from which to trawl for edge cases. What precisely did you think that the Google Voice transcription service was all about? People let Google transcribe their voicemails by algorithm and Google gets more data. I doubt very much they even bother looking at messages which aren't reported to them as inaccurate.

Do you realize how many more people are using Siri compared to how many let Google transcribe their voicemails? Do you really think that's a widely-used Google feature?

So, I'd venture to guess that they're actually a lot more used than Siri is. I have a hard time believing that Siri is so used that it's been used more in 4 months than Google Voice in a couple years.

Siri's current system is based on the data from the third-party Siri app that Apple purchased, so the core technology is older than four months.

As for sophistication, Google's implementation might be significantly less sophisticated, but it does work reliably, Siri from what I've heard, not so much.

Well, Siri is in limited beta, and by the time Majel comes out, Siri will almost certainly be significantly more reliable. That leaves the core differences in presentation, and Google insiders have been claiming that they are intentionally not including any of Siri's human-like personality attributes. It's really going to be an inhuman query machine and not as fun because of it. That's why I said it signifies everything about the difference between Google's and Apple's approaches to usability. Google is so strictly engineering-driven that they often don't get what it is people like. There's no design instinct, no human touch. Like typical engineers, everything they do must be based on data, such as the infamous survey on 41 shades of blue just to decide on an interface color.

To a developer for many platforms, every statement of yours shows fanboi bias.

Frankly, I should've stopped reading here. Step back and accept there are people with opinions that are different from yours to paint them all with a broad brush and call them "fanbois" is lazy. It shows a willingness to disregard the opinion of others based on stereotype. OK got that out of my system, lets continue.

Oh, yeah, they put thought into it! Gee, why didn't anybody else think of that!

Some people (many of them) are code wizards but can't do design, you see this all over the open source world as well. A lot of the "boutique" developers that came over from the mac side put a lot of thought into the user facing design and it sets a higher standard. Tapbots are a good example of this. You want to put out a cheap Twitter app, then you've got to have a well thought out and attractive user interface because that's the kind of competition you are up against.

On the OS level this is true as well. Apple is a company that hires UI designers, puts out Human Interface Guideline documents and actually follows and enforces them. Google is the kind of company that when it has to pick a shade of blue runs a test testing 41 different shades, the last great UI design they put out was the original starkly minimalist Google Search and they've been messing it up ever since. I'm exaggerating somewhat here but there is a culture difference between a company where the engineers call all the shots and one where the designers have a say and it shows in the products.

I can't imagine favoring a touch screen keyboard over even a 10 year old Psion. Instead of using half the screen for a keyboard, having a real keyboard and a shorter screen is orders of magnitude better for more serious tasks.

Stop everything ! Aighearach can't imagine it. Pack up your stuff we must've been wrong :-)
You're confusing opinion with fact again.

And for niche business users that really do need something like a tablet to carry around, the walled garden isn't what you want at all. You want to be able to install your own proprietary updates, and have full system control.

There exists iOS Enterprise Developer Program, used to distribute in-house apps. No walled garden. People are doing all sorts cool stuff, like the iPhone heart monitor.

Conclusion: iPod and iPhone are here to stay, iPad is a fad that will make a lot of money but not influence computing in the future.

I disagree. I think the iPad(-alikes) will become ubiquitous. It will be used for small tasks so you won't need to be hidden away behind a bulky computer but can integrate it better into your day-to-day activities. For some, the barely tech literate who just do email, IM, facebook and webcam chat; it will probably become their preferred way of accessing the internet. as always IMHO, YMMV, etc, etc.

Just Do It.

In addition to all the good advice I've read in the replies already, here's a good list of signs to watch out for when attracting new clients: 20-signs-you-dont-want-that-web-design-project It is of course about web design and not web development, but that shouldn't really make too much difference.

They'd love to, but when the community manager of Pownce (a twitter clone with a few more features) wants to sully the name of Twitter as Pownce is failing, you've gotta be a loud damsel in distress, don't you?

#

I have a list of 13 tweets that Ariel sent us as examples of the abuse from the account she wanted banned. According to our records, this is everything she sent us, except for those from the âoeconfessionsâ account, which Ariel says was not the main problem. (I couldnâ(TM)t look those up, because the posts themselves were deleted before we could look at them.)

I would *love* to post the whole file of these examples. I think it would clear a lot of things up. Unfortunately, since this content is the source of all this strife, and itâ(TM)s now off the Internet, that seemsâ¦well, not quite right.

What I will tell you is this:

Out of these posts, exactly one mentions Ariel by name. It calls her âoeexperienced.â The others do not personally identify Ariel.

One of them uses the word âoecuntâ (with a quote, presumably from Ariel). None contain either âoecrackâ or âoewhore.â None contain threats, physical or otherwise. Most are insults about physical or personality attributes without referring to anyone specifically. If you were following both Ariel and the account of this woman when these posts were made, it may have been clear who she was referring to. Out of that context, you would probably have no clue. But even if they would have mentioned Ariel by name, most of them are not actionable, because we donâ(TM)t have a rule against insulting people or hurting their feelings.

Caveat: Many of the examples she sent us were from Flickr. I didnâ(TM)t look at all of these, becauseâ¦well, we donâ(TM)t run Flickr.

Our stance is this: We stand by our TOS. We have deleted accounts for abuse of various kinds. We had to make a judgement call here, as one does in all such cases. This didnâ(TM)t meet the bar for being banned, in our opinion.

You can disagree with our judgment call. And thatâ(TM)s fine. But youâ(TM)re choosing to do that without seeing the content, and someone has very carefully painted a picture that has misled many people. (One might ask why Ariel didnâ(TM)t post the full tweets in order to strengthen her case.)

Even if you do disagree with our judgment call, this is not an argument about whether or not weâ(TM)re enforcing our TOS; this is an argument about how we define âoeharassmentâ or âoeabuse.â

THAT IS ALL.
# Evan Williams said on May 23rd, 2008 at 6:45 pm:

One more thing:

@Russ: âoeâ¦a lawsuit, seems to be a concern of yours correct?â

No, not correct. That is a total red herring that was probably constructed to make us look like a cowardly corporation (clever!).

Not that we canâ(TM)t be sued â" sure, we can. But that has not motivated our actions here.

# Ariel Waldman Says:
May 23rd, 2008 at 12:52 pm

@ericabiz youâ(TM)re right and I have worked with kosso and thanked him in the past and I very much appreciated his objective understanding of the issue.

I chose not to mention him because the majority of the harassment I reference was created by a different account than the one he had created and I didnâ(TM)t want to drag him through this.

I'm trying to read the http://www.zeldman.com/2008/01/22/in-defense-of-version-targeting/ page, but get error 400?

Microsoft ignores standards, goes off in their own direction.

Actually... It's the web standards community that gave Microsoft the green light to go off in their own direction (and hoping other browsers will do the same).

IE8's new scheme and those supporting it are being met with an equal level of criticism.

Yeah, if you're a web designer, it's best you read the stuff that's flying around out there. It's an pretty big and important change being proposed for web development standards.

Cheers,
Fozzy

Get over it. Detect your browser version and render your custom CSS. Play like everyone else plays.

News flash. This is 2008, not 1998. As for detection, you should be using object detection, not browser (or even version) detection since not every version of every browser supports the exact sae specifications and standards (or as the W3C calls them, "recommendations") 100%. But that's beside the point.

The problem which resulted in this "solution" (I think of it more as a stopgap measure and ironically, Jeffrey Zeldman feels the same way) is two-fold.

The first one is obvious because it is so easy for people to (in this case correctly) place blame. Microsoft. After the release of Internet Explorer 6 and the demise of Netscape's popular browser - which came about not primarily due to the problems with Netscape 4.7, but instead the company waiting too long to come out with the Gecko rendering engine that would become the cornerstone of Mozilla Firefox and other Gecko-based browsers -Microsoft simply saw no real need to "update" the browser. As far as the company was concerned, they had "won". Their browser was the dominant browser on the market, everyone used it and it was installed on every new PC, whether people wanted it or not. At the time, Opera's browser sucked worse than a box of rocks (as far as I'm concerned Opera didn't truely become ready for "prime time" until Opera 8.5 was released), Safari really hadn't come on to the scene yet, and Konqueror was the "browser" of choice for those using Linux (at least KDE anyway). Microsoft had crushed the competition at the time and figured that the "war" was over. That is until Netscape open-sourced their new rendering engine, the Mozilla Foundation got started on their Mozilla Suite (and its eventual successor, Firefox), and Opera finally pulled their collective heads out of their rectums and did what many thought was impossible - rewrite the rendering engine and make a product that worked (which again, was a process that culminated in the release of Opear 8.5). Now Microsoft finds itself in the unenviable position of playing "catchup", especially after five long years - talk about having to eat crow while having egg on one's face.

The second part is the Web designers and developers (which I happen to be). Now, as a Mentor on the Design Team over at the SitePoint forums, I probably shouldn't be saying this, but a lot of designers and developers just flat out don't know any better. And a lot of the ones who do think they know actually don't. Thankfully this has changed a lot (at least over at SitePoint anyway) in the year and a half I've been helping people on their forums, but if you look just about anywhere else you'll see one of two types of designer. The "Code for Firefox, Hack for IE" crowd, and those who build for IE, and pray that it works elsewhere (or just flat out pretend that IE is the only browser out there).

What both camps should instead be doing is writing clean, minimal, semantic, and valid (X)HTML (I honestly don't care if they use HTML or XHTML, even if served as HTML, as long as they are aware of the limitations of each DOCTYPE and don't abuse the languages) to mark up the contents and structure of their pages and then write clean, minimal, valid and warning-free (the latter is optional, for those who care) CSS to present the appearance of that well structured content to the browsers.

The HTML part isn't hard, I mean if you don't know how to mark up a masthead, menu, content area, sidebar(s), and footer, use headings correctly, mark up blocks of code, quote other pages and people, cite your sources, et cetera, and have the markup be independent of the design (within reason, of course), then you need to learn PDQ. At most it'll involve "unlearning" what you already thought you knew (who thought Homeritis would be a good thing? If you're wondering it's "Eve

I used to keep Camino around to deal with websites Safari won't work with, but to be honest, I haven't run across such a site in a looong time. Besides, WebKit is faster and renders text better, and it also recognizes embedded color profiles in images. That it supports more of the CSS standard is a bonus, too. What site(s) are you finding that Safari has trouble with?

To be fair, Firefox renders text like shit on OS X, compared with Safari or any native Mac application.

Well, IE 7 reportedly only supports 50% of the CSS standard, so if Mac IE 5's CSS standard is worse than than IE 7's, then it would still be pretty awful.

IE 5 for the Mac supported xhtml, ECMAScript, nearly all of CSS1, much of CSS2, and most of the DOM according to Jeffrey Zeldman. So, I guess IE 7 doesn't support standards as much as IE 5 for Macs did.

Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman.

And it's cheaper .

Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman.

And it's cheaper .

Skip the review. Read Zeldman's awesome Designing With Web Standards. It will change your life. At least until you read the next life changing book.

Zeldman is also teaming up with Eric Meyers, the CSS God for An Event Apart.

My 2 kopeks. If you use web standards you won't have to worry about supporting older browsers. If a site is designed correctly the CSS will degrade gracefully. See Zeldman's and Meyer's work. As for supporting older software, as long as someone is paying you enough to support it then it's worth it.

Jeffrey Zeldman is the author of Designing with Web Standards (and who was somehow never adequately punished for writing that book; please look inside to see what I mean).

I recently made the mistake of buying that book a while ago, as it seemed to present information on ... well ... designing with web standards, you know, xhtml & css. Instead, I found it's a 400+ page rant on oldfashioned non-standard design. There's no information at all about design and hardly anything helpful on web standards.

So, though Jeffrey himself may think differently, IMHO it's silly to regard him as a authority on anything web related.

IE for the Mac was a steaming pile

Really? I thought it was widely regarded as better than IE5 on Windows. Hence:

When it debuted, Mac IE 5 was the best web browser in the world, primarily because of the Tasman rendering engine that provided unprecedented levels of standards compliance.

Eric Meyer said, "I don't think people realize just how much of a groundbreaker IE5/Mac really was, and how good it remains even today."

Just as I always suspected. Lawrence Welk--Closet Spliffmeister.

http://www.zeldman.com/classics/welk/

A few good places to start:

• Position is Everything
• A List Apart
• CSS Zen Garden

On the book front, must-reads include: Designing with Web Standards by Zeldman, Eric Meyer on CSS and More Eric Meyer on CSS, and Dan Cederholm's Web Standards Solutions.

Also, Veerle Pieters has a very useful hyperlinked PDF of CSS resources; the associated blog page has more details.

That lot should get you started :-) Hope that helps.

But be warned: like you I'm a hard-core, long-term technical bod, who's done everything from embedded systems software to web development, and it's only after 3 years, absorbing everything I could learn about CSS in theory and practice, and particularly how to conquer the Great Satan IE, that I've finally got to the point I referred to in my original post. To be perfectly honest, I couldn't believe it when I only needed 13 lines of hacks to tame IE on a very complex design.

So when you start, the best bit of advice I can give you is: code and test to Firefox first. If something looks a bit off, check it in Opera 8, and in Safari if you have access to a Mac. Once you've got it working across those three, everything that goes wrong in IE is IE's fault, not yours. That's when you start applying the hacks found at Position is Everything and other places, until IE finally falls back into line.

It's not as bad as it seems; if you have the kind of logical mind that goes with writing code, you'll soon begin to discern the patterns underlying IE's peculiar behaviour. (Virtually everything can be tamed using the Holly Hack, explained at Position is Everything, linked above.)

Good luck, and Enjoy :-)

What a coincidence - Most web designers* I know haven't a clue how CSS should be used in real world situations today. Check out e.g. Designing with web standards by Jeffrey Zeldman - IIRC, he argues that as long as CSS support is as broken as it is today, the transitional approach of tables for layout and CSS for other styles is perfectly justifiable for businesses which do not care about SEO and blind people.

Also, there are plenty of examples(1, 2, 3) of how to make a table-free site look just as good as one with tables.

*These are not primarily web designers, but creators of data-driven web interfaces who use e.g.

<TD ALIGN="LEFT" WIDTH="10%" NOWRAP BGCOLOR="#000099"><FONT COLOR="#FFCC00" FACE="Verdana, Arial" SIZE="-2"><B>&nbsp;</B></FONT>&nbsp;</TD>

Am I the only one who would kill to see a Princess Bride reunion?

Well, I guess that's one way to get them all together again...

I reccommend http://www.zeldman.com/ for all your web-standards reading. He's even re-worked Slashdot using current web standards.

since everyone bitches about how they have no content, let's see how many present their content, or rather: how many are black text on white background...

EVIL

* underlined+bold
* drop shadow
* cream background, not much of an improvement. some of the header text is glossy (shiney / embossed / see above one / other various "auto-artistic" trash ).
* the tiny images illustrating each entry, are dithered (i guess with a "web palette" [making it look even more horrible], which people stopped doing 5+ years ago) then jpg'd.
* cyan background (the name of 100% green + 100% blue)
* purple text, orange links. no, that's not better.
* yes i really want to be tortured with your family album pics
* half of the people leave directly (or die) with the header
* light yellow (piss-water yellow?) background.
* "I.Mter-
views" ?
i don't get it. dashes in headlines are satan.
* scary vector portrait
* horrible. evil. tasteless.
* scarier than the sixapart girl.
* yellow background.

GOOD

* pear/white background. title with first letter biggie, first line in different font from rest.
* greenish tasty tone over everything ...which i didn't follow. great. thanks. as for the equally bad link-colours being that horrible default-blue/purple, it was only around 10%. this was checking 70% of the a-list. methinks those popular people should hire someone to design their site

good design = pyros, don't remember any other. and yeah, it's not a blog.
says intersting things = ms g33k. who i'm not sure is a good thing to link, i won't link myself.

http://www.zeldman.com/goodies/dirt.m4a.zip

http://zeldman.com/goodies/dirt.m4a.zip

Zipped AAC file from Zeldman (requires iTunes)

If you don't believe me, ask Zeldman, or read here.

Yuk! How about because it's unnecessary, unreliable, harder to maintain and extremely kludgy to boot?

Browser sniffing is the worst way of making web pages, the way that was favoured around the time of the dot-bomb. Instead of testing for actual abilities and using what is available, it relies on assumptions, which are often wrong. Why restrict something and say "sorry, your browser can't do that" when instead you can just do a general, easy test for it and use it if it's there?

The correct way to cope with the capabilities of different browsers is by using feature detection to weed out the ones that don't support things fully, and giving the more advanced stuff to the ones that do - entirely on the client side.

Browser sniffing based on user agent strings really needs to die the death it should have died many years ago. I suggest you buy a copy of Designing With Web Standards and get reading about the right way to do things.

Reading this review, instantaniously Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman sprang to mind. It has also been reviewed on slashdot here.

I don't want to be looking down on the book by saying this but judging by the review it sounds like Web Design Garage is kind of a light version.

Then you need to read this... about the Google Toolbar Autolink "feature."

To each their own. But I should probably point out that she's married, to another big name in web design, no less.

that Carrie Bickner happens to be the wife of Jeffery Zeldman. It's also funny that NYPL happens to be his biggest client. For more examples of her writing, check out her articles on A List Apart

The sites of the "Others" you mention are (IMO) not very good themselves

http://www.zeldman.com/ - Darkish Green on Light Green poorly readable colours. No sitemap. Search box filled with a junk phrase that needs deleting before starting, and as filled not much space to click after this existing contents when about to delete it. Unclear section titles, alt text no better.

http://www.joeclark.org/ - Bigger than users chosen size text (as every thing is in lists) makes page too long. Use of non-standard 8-bit characters. No Sitemap.

http://www.webstandards.org/ - No search. No sitemap. Otherwise OK.

http://www.alistapart.com/ - No sitemap. No contents or short titles list in each section, you have to "More articles->" 10 at a time instead. Instead of link "Home" it is "Up Front" (Never heard of standard practices?)

The ALA site publishers include Zeldman, the Zeldman site contributors includes Joe Clark, the web standards site former major people includes Zeldman. The AC probably just likes this circle of styles, but on the other had maybe he is Zeldman himself? ;-)

After installing Firefox on a PC at work, I wanted to run a Windows Update but when you visit the link, the screen is just blank. What's up with that?

I've also noticed that some sites (like Zeldman.com) are very slow and practically unusable.

You don't need fancy software to write in a blog. Jeffery Zeldman used to write his blog exclusively in a text editor, in fact! I think Tim Bray and Norman Walsh use still use Emacs to do the majority of their writing (augmented with some client-side scripts) before uploading their content, but I may be wrong.

Nice to see they design with web standards in mind; the page looks pretty funny in Opera (7.50 B1). All the menus (genres, tech guide, newsletter) appear on top of the actual content, pushing everything else below them. And yeah, I know opera has its clitches with markup (which browser doesn't?). It doesn't take much to design web pages that are standards compliant and appear right in all the major browsers.

Sorry, but you're stuck in the past. Think outside the box (model) and cast off your ideas of table based layouts. It's amazing how the web has become so inflexible in terms of design in such a short time.

There are loads of good examples of CSS layouts that would have required huge nested tables to reproduce.

I put it to you that table-based designs are holding back the imaginations of web-designers. The web-programmers are probably going to realise that soon. The reason why corporate sites are yet to realise that (but they are realising it - slowly but surely) is because - and this may be a shock - the majority of web people, like programmers, and many other professions simply do what they know; the easy stuff. The good ones learn new tricks and make the best end-products.

• Separate presentation from content
• Maintain stylistic consistency throughout the site
• Make the pages more lightweight and faster loading
• Simplify future design modification
• Meet accessibility guidelines
• Follow current web standards while allowing for 'graceful degradation' in older browsers

All the wrongs in the world are not, in fact, the fault of President Bush. But the overwhelming majority are :)

Although it is hard for many Americans to understand, between Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, many people in this world are more afraid of the U.S. than they are of terrorists whose objective is to wipe modern civilization off the face of the earth.

...

Taking out bin Laden while leaving nuclear weapons in play [in North Korea] is like firing Michael Eisner and expecting Disneyland to close. One fanatic with a bomb down his pants could take out Manhattan, or London, or Rome. Three fanatics with three bombs could do all three.

XHTML elitists such as Zeldman

Zeldman is certainly not a table-shunning XHTML-elitist. He is very pragmatic in that regard and, for now, recommends a 'transitional' technique with light use of tables for page layouts for cross-browser compatibility.

See his excellent book Designig with web standards.

JP

Build and test your CSS in the most advanced browser available before testing in others, not after. If you build a site testing in a broken browser, your code begins relying on the broken rendering of that browser. When it comes time to test in a more standards-compliant browser, you will be frustrated when that browser renders it improperly. Instead, start from perfection and then hack for the less able browsers. Your code will be more standards-compliant from the start, and you won't have to hack as much to support other browsers. Today, this means Mozilla, Safari, or Opera.

(From the CSS Crib Sheet)

You see, if you design for IE flaws and the market shifts, you'll have designed yourself into a corner.

You're also hindering the adoption of alternative browsers because "it only works in IE."

Also, IE-only sites tend to be inaccessible, and inaccessible sites may have nasty consequences, like ADA lawsuits.

It takes only marginally more effort to create a cross platform site.

Designing with Web Standards is an excellent book on cross platform design.

And for those not convinced of CSS's inherent flexibility, there's the CSS Zen Garden. Cross platform, any browser. (Yes, even Lynx.)

Perhaps they're going to revamp the vibrator function of their cellphones afterall?!

like this? :-)

IE has support for a large deal of things I wish were standard.

But IE has a lot of things in it that I wish it didn't have (screwed up box model, improper handling of padding, stupid colored scrollbars, et. al.). And, quite frankly, I'm glad they aren't standard.

However, too many internet bodies can't make decisions and standards are simply corrupted leaving Microsoft to run around generating their own sudo standards.

You know, if only there was some kind of standards body to make standards and such for the web. *cough*W3C*cough*

But you can't be serious about that last statement. There ARE standards. MS just refuses to abide by them. It is to the Internet's detriment and only they stand to gain from it.

As far as web development goes and building high quality, web-based applications (trust me, the backend to all sites I work on are served by one the last servers VA's sold) IE simply offers more flexability, creative applications, and...well, a larger userbase.

Really? IE offers what flexibility? What can you do with IE that you can't do with Mozilla, Opera, Netscape, or Firebird? I can't think of a thing. Sure, you might not be able to use some kind of propietary IE plugin. But there are other, better, and more universal ways of accomplishing anything that a propietary plugin can do.

I suffer wasting time making sure the stripped down version of these sites work in Mozilla.

No my friend. You suffer because you write poorly coded, non-standards compliant web pages. Once again, W3C. Check out the XHTML 1.0, CSS 2, DOM, and other standards.

As Jeffrey Zeldman and others have pointed out, coding to standards and then tweaking for IE is *much* easier than the other way around. If you code to IE first and then try to back port compatability, you end up with a hacked together mess that conforms to no real standards at all. In fact, many Web Design/CSS gurus prefer to preview their pages in Mozilla/Firebird/Netscape/Opera first to ensure that their pages will look right in a standards compliant browser. Only after they do this do they tweak their CSS to make it look right in IE (which has many woeful CSS issues).

Aaron Giuoco

Designing with Web Standards was recommended here, in a recent discussion on DHTML and javascript.

While the review I've seen on Amazon point out that it's more of an evangelical book (with a decent explanation of the technologies involved) than a technical roadmap, the table of contents (pdf) looks good. It seems that the book addresses the real world issues of refreshing an existing site (what to update vs. what to leave as-is) and instead of flash-bashing, a somewhat objective analysis of where it belongs on a site. I haven't bought it myself, but we plan on refreshing 18 global sites sometime soon (with a team of 3), and hope to do them in a way that expands our use of standards without having to burn a million hours grepping out <font> tags.

Designing with Web Standards was recommended here, in a recent discussion on DHTML and javascript.

While the review I've seen on Amazon point out that it's more of an evangelical book (with a decent explanation of the technologies involved) than a technical roadmap, the table of contents (pdf) looks good. It seems that the book addresses the real world issues of refreshing an existing site (what to update vs. what to leave as-is) and instead of flash-bashing, a somewhat objective analysis of where it belongs on a site. I haven't bought it myself, but we plan on refreshing 18 global sites sometime soon (with a team of 3), and hope to do them in a way that expands our use of standards without having to burn a million hours grepping out <font> tags.

Separating content and presentation would be a good thing. But the currently supported web standards (HTML, XHTML, JavaScript, DOM, CSS) don't let you do it by themselves.

I'd have to disagree with that. Most of the standards movement for web design focuses on "semantic markup". Only headings, paragraphs, and the like should be included here. No fonts, colors, etc. This is your content. Yes it has tags, but when using XHTML 1.0 Strict it is also XML, meaning that an XSLT could be used to generate that content from some XML source on the server if necessary. Using CSS to do placement & styling of elements is very feasible for 95+% of the market.

As others have mentioned, standards compliant != cross-platform. However, standards compliance is very much supported by the technologies you mentioned.

Additional reading:
A List Apart - lots of articles on integrating useage of standards-based web design
Jeffery Zeldman's Weblog - a big proponent of web standards

If you're even thinking about DHTML, you probably aren't up to par with the latest web technologies that are designed to be more accessible and progressive. Please stop what you are doing and read Designing With Web Standards before you even think about building a website.

DHTML (really just the combination of HTML, CSS, ECMAScript, and DOM) is the "latest web technology". I'm not sure what you mean by "progressive" in this context, but well-written DHTML can be just as accessible as as well-written vanilla HTML. Please note my use of the words "well-written"; crappy code is crappy code, no matter what technologies you're using. The key is to make sure things degrade gracefully, so that your content or application is still usable in older or non-standard compliant browsers.

Also note that Jeffrey Zeldman, the author of the book you recommend, uses JavaScript on his own web sites, including the very page you link to.

I second this.

There is no better way to create a more useless website to more people. You might as well just close your site now since you're limiting it to as few people as possible.

If you're even thinking about DHTML, you probably aren't up to par with the latest web technologies that are designed to be more accessible and progressive. Please stop what you are doing and read Designing With Web Standards before you even think about building a website.

Chances are, there is no need for any JavaScript on your website. It only adds needless complexity and helps things break. Again, as the parent poster write, use XHTML and CSS.

Its good for image rollovers and validating forms but the moment you try and do anything fancy with it like manipulating layers you will be plagued by crossbrowser incompatibilities.

No, no, NO!

First of all, do not use JavaScript for image rollovers. It's a terrible idea and the person who thought of using JavaScript for image rollovers should be shot. You never put images in webpages where the image is not the content. That's presentational HTML. Instead, follow this example which uses pure CSS. The basic idea is that you use the :hover pseudo-class to change the background property of a hyperlink. That background image can contain all states or it can be separate files. Wrap the inner text with a span tag and specify that span tags within the scope of your anchor tag get a display: none propety. Its so simple, it works without JavaScript, loads faster, cross-browser compatible, and if the user is running a non-graphical browser, it's still accessible. Here's a quick example (where somepic.png contains both roll over states, one at (0, 0) and the other at (0, 20):

a.Foo {
display: block;
width: 100;
height: 20;
background: url("somepic.png") top left no-repeat;
}

a.Foo:hover {
background-position: -20px;
}

a.Foo span {
display: none;
}

Then in your markup, you put this:

<a href="foo.html" class="Foo"><span>link to foo</span></a>

Next, you should never rely on JavaScript to do your form validation. That's the most stupid, absurd thing I've ever heard. Leaving input validation in the hands of the client is to trust the user to not attempt to screw up your input. For forms to the useful, they have to be submitted to some kind of server-side logic. That is where the form validation should take place because then the user cannot side-step your input validation.

Yikes. With people like you building websites, no wonder the Web is such a disaster today. Please change professions ASAP or read Designing With Web Standards