Adapting to Web Standards: CSS and Ajax for Big Sites

Appendix . Afterword

Inspiration Never Arrives in a Vacuum

Sometimes inspiration comes as a serendipitous lightning bolt, arriving through a programming trick from a book, a color scheme seen in a restaurant ad, or an online chat with a colleague.

More often it comes from experience—the well-earned lessons from past mistakes, put to good use for current and future projects.

However, experience can sometimes be a handicap. Time-tested, well-used advice can become glaringly obsolete in an instant, especially in an industry in which communication happens as rapidly across the ocean as across the office.

The maturing of browsers led developers to move away from Web pages bloated with way too much presentational HTML and toward semantically lean, elegantly ...