There is no piece of Web development for big sites so often viewed as critically important and at the same time pushed into the background of the process than Web standards. Because Web standards can mean different things depending on who’s describing them, and are often the subject of intense debate, they can be hard for a team to keep pinned down in the face of urgent development schedules and limited resources. Adapting to Web Standards, CSS and Ajax for Big Sites is a useful book for those of us who recognize the value of standards but who need a hand shaping a realistic approach to moving toward a more methodical approach to them. The book provides plenty of practical advice on how to apply Web standards to HTML and XHTML, CSS, Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), and Web software applications.

Having worked on and managed development for relatively large sites with small teams, tight project deadlines and plenty of content and advertising demands creating unexpected sidetracks that need to be immediately addressed without breaking stride on longer term efforts, I know how easy it is for the focus on standards to blur. Adapting to Web Standards doesn’t take an all-or-nothing approach. The authors (Christopher Schmitt, Kimberly Blessing, Rob Cherny, Meryl K. Evans, Kevin Lawver and Mark Trammell) allow for many of the roadblocks to perfect standards that big sites frequently encounter – including vast amounts of legacy code and the need to acknowledge vendor or other third party code that must be integrated into many big sites also may not observe standards.

The book defines "Web standards" as "a term used to mean Web pages built using the open and compatible recommendations from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and other standards bodies as opposed to closed, proprietary corporate feature sets." The benefit of creating standards compliant pages is that they are readable by the broadest possible variety of browsers (and assistive technologies), are easier to maintain, render faster, use less bandwidth, are better for SEO, and for all these reasons, should make life easier for your team and bring more readers to your site.