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Note: My non-web-designey friends might not take anything away from this post, but hey, I’m not going to stop you from reading it.

People on the internet tell me that a philosopher named George Santayana was the first person to say (or probably write) the quote that is the title of this post, not contestants for Miss America who don’t study history. But that is not what this is about. I recently finished Jeffery Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards, a book that has become a must read for web designers. As I enter my second year of school, I realize that this web design thing is what I want to do, but coming late in the game, I have a lot of people to compete with. Zeldman, for instance has been designing since the birth of the internet as we know it today, he knows exactly where we are, because he knows where we have been.

I originally picked up the book because I felt that my understanding of web standards, a topic for another post, was not where it needed to be. I knew valid XHTML and all the related mojo, but didn’t really know how it all fit together. Instead of coming out and saying where X, Y, and Z fit into the equation, Zeldman first talks about U, V, and W, and inadvertently the reader is given a crash course on the history of not only the web standards movement, but of the web design industry itself. The book answers not only how we as web designers do what we do, but also addresses the more important why. Zeldman’s answer is presented in logical steps, presenting a functional solution to several known problems we as web designers face, all while providing both real world solutions and a test site that we are led through in developing.

One thing I learned, but haven’t applied yet (because it’s so deeply ingrained into my designs), is the ridding of “divitis”, that is, using too many div tags. I’ve been guilty of this since I learned of the crimes of the table layouts several years ago, and I know it will be a hard habit to shake, but it’s not a huge worry.

Another idea that really stuck is the difference between semantic code and standard code. The two go hand in hand, but are not the same thing as I previously believed. Just what semantic code is has been a topic of debate that I hadn’t really read much into, but Zeldman’s definition is satisfactory:

Markup is “semantic” when tags are chosen to what they mean. For example, tagging a headline h1 because it is the most important headline on the page is a semantic authoring practice. Tagging a headline “to make it look big” is not. – Ch 2, page 56

Valid code, on the other hand is just code that contains no errors. I knew this much, but didn’t realize that the idea is not necessarily to be valid, but rather to be semantic; to make the markup stand up by iteself and have a meaningful structure (it is also referred to as “structural markup” in the book). Semantic code that is valid is an extra bonus.

I’ve come to realize over the past year or so, that people don’t really care if code is valid anyway. Sure, as a web designer you want things to be error free per W3C’s specs, but I’m no longer going out of my way to make it valid. I’ve only designed two sites since I finished reading Zeldman’s books, Scrupulo, and another site that is not at a point where it can be launched, but I’ve already had plenty of opportunities to really apply what I learned. I didn’t experience a paradigm shift after reading the book, but it did change the way I approach design.

I can’t recommend the book enough. So, if you know me, you can borrow my copy (but you can’t have it, this is getting a place on my book shelf, once I own one) or you can buy it from amazon.

And in case you are wondering, I’ve moved on to Steve Krug’s book on web usability, Don’t Make Me Think.