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Todd Libby: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Front End Nerdery podcast. I'm Todd Libby, your host, and I am excited to bring you the listener, the first of hopefully many podcasts to come speaking with people in tech about front end development and design and other design and development topics as well.
Today for the first episode, I wanted to have my first guest be that not only one who I am honored to have with me today, but who has been one of many who has shaped the course of my career with one book, which we will get into shortly. I have with me, among other titles, speaker, conference co-founder and cohost. Designer author and publisher. I am thrilled and honored to introduce the godfather of web standards. Jeffrey Zeldman. Jeffrey, thank you very much for joining me
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:00:55] Hi Todd. How are you?
Todd Libby: [00:00:59] I am doing fine. How about you?
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:01:01] And–– I'm the, I'm the bystander, but I'm not bystander, but I feel like web standards–– was like–– A car accident.
I was driving by. So I like nobody, there were much more qualified people, but nobody was getting out of their car to help. So I, I had to do it, but yeah. Yeah, pretty cool. It's really nice to be here on the inaugural podcast. Designer–– at the Front End Nerdery.
Todd Libby: [00:01:30] Thank you. I appreciate it.
Todd Libby: [00:01:32] Could you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself?
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:01:35] First, I want to hear from you one quick question, as to come up with the name.
Todd Libby: [00:01:42] It just, it was the first thought in my head when it came to a title and I said, well, instead of pondering too much and overthinking it I'll run with it.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:01:54] So you trusted your instinct?
Todd Libby: [00:01:56] Yes.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:01:57] Cool. Yeah.
Todd Libby: [00:01:58] Yeah.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:01:59] Yeah. [00:02:00] We don't always get to do enough of that.
Todd Libby: [00:02:03] No, no, we don't. And it's actually people at like the title actually, so I got to stick with it now.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:02:12] It's very nice. Yeah. I think we did agree.
Todd Libby: [00:02:15] Thank you.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:02:16] Plus–– you're kind of the perfect representative of your title. There you are with this good, my good headphones in a kitchen sitting at a laptop. Yeah.
Taking a break–– it's fun. It's fun to see you. And–– I'm really glad you're doing this.
Todd Libby: [00:02:33] No, thank you. I appreciate that.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:02:35] You had a question for me that I completely bypass.
Todd Libby: [00:02:38] Yes. Could you tell, could you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself?
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:02:44] I'm a very old man who failed in a bunch of careers before I got onto the web in 1995. And I was fortunate enough to be working at an ad agency at the time with too much smarter people, Alec Pollock, and Steven Aaron.
We were–– we had a really good client in Warner Brothers and they were, they were releasing the third–– of the third Tim Burton produced movie, a Batman movie but this one was directed by Joel Schumacher. It was called–– “Batman Forever”. Do you remember this?
Todd Libby: [00:03:21] I do remember the website. Yes.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:03:24] And do you remember the movie?
Todd Libby: [00:03:26] I do. I do remember the movie too. Yeah. Yep.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:03:30] So, so Don Buckley, our client was smart enough to know the web was going to be a big deal. I certainly didn't know that at the time. And he asked our agency, president–– folks do websites and the agency, the president lied instead of yes. And then the president came to us and said, Can you tell us, make a website?
And we lied said yes. And that was my first website. And I had so much fun. It was so mind blowing and it felt so empowering that I knew that's what I wanted to do when I grew up. And after failing at a bunch of other stuff, I really had like these abortive careers in–– journalism, music–– things I wanted to do, like art.
Filmmaking, like every creative kid thinks they're going to be Martin Scorsese or whoever, you know, where they think they're going to be the who or what, whatever, whatever fantasies that you have. , the most of us don't get to do but this hit all the sweet spots. I was, I was writing, I was coding and I was designing.
And I was playing with pic and it was all these limitations, which went really well for me because I didn't have formal design training, but you couldn't really do that much in the early web. So my ignorance and that of my teammates who were–– they were more skilled than me, but none of us were skilled in web design.
Nobody, nobody knew what it was. So we just, we did a bunch of things wrong. Like we made a website that only worked in Netscape 1.1, you know, all the things that I would hate today, we get a website that before you got to any information, it started with this mysterious. Well, there wasn't flash yet, but we had a little animated intro.
Yeah. Anyway, I, I, I guess then I can end here. The next thing I knew I wanted to do was–– do this full-time and the next thing I knew I wanted to do was make a website for me. Not for a client. And so I did, I started a website and it had entertainments and experimental art and stuff, but it also had–– something called “Ask Dr. Web”, which I was basically giving my uninformed poorly poor understanding of how the web work and how you could do art direction on the web and all these things. And–– There were, so there was so little web content at the time that, you know, if you had a half baked idea, you could get a lot of followers.
Yeah. So I was very fortunate with that. And then I started A List Apart–– with, –– Brian. Oh gosh, I want to say Brian Alley, but that's wrong. I'm really sorry, Brian. Wrong. Brian. I'm blanking on Brian's last name by second (Brian M. Platz) I apologize for that. But we started as a mailing list and it was, we curated it, I really liked developer mailing lists.
I was learning a lot on them, but there was also a lot of flaming just bad internet behavior.
Todd Libby: [00:06:36] Yeah.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:06:37] So I said, wouldn't it be great if we could remove the bad behavior, but keep the content. And Brian reached out to me and said, well, I've got a, you know, I've got a mail system. MailChimp didn't exist. Things like that didn't exist.
So you had to be a developer. And he said, I built a mail system and I I'd be interested in partnering with you. So we did that. And after a year–– I turned it into a [00:07:00] website and gradually the mailing list kind of went away for various reasons. But––
But the–– magazine survived and a whole bunch of stuff has arisen from that, including the Web Standards Project. An Event Apart conference and A Book Apart publishing over the years, a bunch of stuff has arisen for that, but–– it's just–– you know, community. And I was part of, a lot of community started by other people too, from K10K to Dreamless to, pretty much you name it–– And those were fun times on the web.
Todd Libby: [00:07:31] They were. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely agree. So with the “Designing With Web Standards” book, which I'm going to hold up here, because this is the book that changed the course of what I was doing. And for the audio listeners, I'm holding up Jeffrey's first edition book, “Designing With Web Standards.”
I went into a bookstore in Northern New Hampshire and God, geez. A long time ago,
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:08:05] Long time ago.
Todd Libby: [00:08:07] And I've always been the one that bright colors have always seemed to catch my eye very quickly. And I saw that book and I sat down in the store and I read the intro. I read , pretty sure. The first chapter in instantly bought the book, brought it home it was one of the first books along with Jen Robbins–– “Web Design in a Nutshell” is it?
Jeffrey Zeldman: Yeah
Todd Libby: And–– Eric Meyer's first CSS book–– And I mean, there was a slew of others, you know, Dan Cederholm's, –– book and the stuff from,
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:08:49] Yeah, about a year after the first division of “Designing With Web Standards”, there was this wave of web standards, theme publications by, oh, well, Molly Holzschlag had been really writing about web standards from the beginning to, by she collaborated with Dave Shea on this great book.
And with Andy Clarke on a great book and Dan Ceder–– there were lots of–– really fantastic things came out then.
Todd Libby: [00:09:19] Many, yes. So what was the impetus behind writing your book?
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:09:24] I didn't think it should be written. I think it needed to be written because, I mean, I'm, I'm so obsessed with whatever I'm doing that.
I think everybody's doing it. Do you ever have that feeling?
Todd Libby: [00:09:35] Yes.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:09:37] So from almost the A List Apart started in 1998 and the Web Standards Project started like two months later and there were a bunch of developers on this list. George Olson wrote this letter, like maybe we should do something as Steve Champeon was on that list.
Dori Smith was on that list. [00:10:00] Jeff Veen–– And–– the guy, Glen Davis, who ran cool, who it's done Cool Site of the Day and was now doing Project Cool. And we just, we kept talking about it. And this was when Netscape 4, Netscape 3 and, IE 3 I think Netscape 3 and IE 3 and they had, you know, Netscape had J script and.
Sorry, Netscape had JavaScript and the windows browser had a J script, which was a reverse engineer version of JavaScript, but had some different syntax and they supported CSS. Well, Netscape didn't support it at all the first edition. And the second I, it was, it was when the 4.0 browsers came out. That's when we started, it was the height of the browser wars.
And while most people thought of this as just like a software problem, like gee, which software will be more popular and probably the one that was free.
Todd Libby: [00:11:02] Yeah.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:11:02] Right. Microsoft was giving there's away Netscape. Their business was selling browsers. And so their business, you know, they couldn't give them away free.
They couldn't compete. And Microsoft was saying, Hey, if you buy a windows computer, we'll, you know, as long as you pre-install IE and don't install Netscape, we'll let you have the operating system for like pennies on the dollar. And so every Dell and every manufacturer was kind of put in a position where they had to release.
IE. And so IE had one set of standards and Netscape had another, and then there was this third set. That were actual standards that were being set by the W3C and Opera supported them. And in America, nobody was using it, not using Opera, but in Europe, they were, and–– early mobile browsers were also using Opera and you know, by the 4.0 versions Internet Explorer had a more robust, incorrect, but robust implementation of CSS. Their implementation was incompatible with Netscape’s.
So even their box model was incompatible. You couldn't really do layouts yet. We were still in those early days doing table layouts with CSS, for typography and color–– which kind of defeats the purpose of CSS.
It, it allows you to not have to name the font family. , you know, every time you declare a paragraph, Yeah, right. But–– it wasn't, it, the browsers weren't good enough yet to really support the CSS layout. And in fact, CSS hadn't been designed with layout in mind. It was really a docent structuring language.
So you could do layout, but nobody really knew how that should work. Eric Meyer did.
Todd Libby: [00:12:54] Yeah.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:12:55] He made these–– tests W3C. [00:13:00] I don't know whether they commissioned him or he volun–– I don't know how I've known Eric for 20 years and I've never asked him. And I'm just like, how incurious are, am I that I wouldn't ask this guy talked to every week.
Todd Libby: [00:13:14] Yeah.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:13:15] Either way. But anyway, so we started it, we started the Web Standards Project because the browsers were incompatible and we knew that the next version was going to come out. Cause that's how software works and that would be incompatible again and soon we were going to be doing four and five versions of a website just to handle all the browsers.
And a lot of developers liked this because it was a way of charging. They got to charge a lot of money for their expertise. Oh, I can't just make you a website. I'm going to have to make you four websites all with the same content, but yeah. So we had to develop argents to get. Designers and developers on our side and agencies on our side, because, you know, we, weren't saying you can charge your clients less we've we were, you could, if you only had to make it one way, but also if your client has a million dollars to spend, not that I ever worked on a million dollar website or.
But if your client at a million dollars to spend, maybe they could spend it on, you know, three quarters of the budget on typography–– you know, on using, well, they couldn't use phones yet. Maybe they could spend that money on photography, on editorial, on hiring writers to keep the content up to date.
Like there were lots of things you could spend a client's money on if they had it. Budget is corporations, you know, but anyway, so, so I didn't think I needed to write a book. Because by 2000 a standards project was ready to prematurely declare victory. You know, the browsers were, the browser makers had all signed on to attempt to support CSS, correctly, support HTML and JavaScript correctly and in A List Apart in the early two thousands people like. Dan Cederholm and Dave Shea and lots of other really creative people were writing. These articles were like, so here's how to make a background that, you know, here's how to make a full screen background, even though CSS doesn't allow for it, or here's how to do multiple columns.
I, I worked with Tantek Çelik to replicate the db, ugly layout, my, my db, ugly layout of A List Apart, which I had done in tables where it was easy. Yeah. And we spent like a week making it work in CSS. And that's when Tantek invented the box model hack, like lots of stuff happened, but I thought all that was very visible.
We had a lot of readers on a list of part seemed like everyone who was in the industry was reading it. So I thought everybody knows this. We don't have to do this. And this guy, Michael Nolan, this really brilliant acquisitions editor from Peachpit who worked on the new writers in print, which. Was the imprint that they had published–– Lynda Weinman and David Siegel's first web design books, which were the first web design books.
I just loved and absorbed. And, and I'd written one book for new new writers a few years earlier called taking your talents to the web. The problem was it came out during the dot com crash. So it was a book that told art directors. How to leave print and get into the wonderful field of internet design, but then theater.
And that was like eating its own hat. So, can we swear on this podcast?
Todd Libby: [00:16:38] Sure.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:16:39] It was eating its own balls. So that makes me feel better. So, so nobody wanted to buy, like nobody wanted to buy a book about how to get into a field that was dying. Yeah. , but after, you know, a few years later that stabilized. The economy after nine 11, stabilized a little bit blogging, sort of picked up where a [00:17:00] lot of other stuff had left off.
So now there were all these new people and Michael Owens said, you really should write a book about web standards. I said, everybody knows, I don't need to write that book. They've already said they haven't. And then I talked to Carl Malamud, who is this, brilliant thinker who is already elected. He and his partner at the time ran the Internet World's Fair.
Todd Libby: [00:17:24] Okay. Yep.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:17:25] And Carl Malamud. I said, I don't want to, I mean, everyone's re read my stuff. He said, no, they haven't. I said, well, half the book will consist of like minor edits to things I've already written. He said, that's fine. I said, but people will go, Hey, you're cheating. You already wrote that.
He said, no, they won't. He was like, he basically schooled me in humility.
Todd Libby: [00:17:45] Right.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:17:46] You think everyone reads every one of your precious words or they remember that memorable turn of phrase. I've read that, heard that before. And they said, no, nobody cares. Just write the best book you can. So I did. And it was a huge, huge, huge, huge for, for books about web development it was a huge hit, which–– Is weird. Cause I never had a hit. I wasn't bad. I mean, I was in, I did all kinds of things that were never hits the idea that you could actually have an effect on many people was not something. And the idea that you needed to write a book to do it, that just blogging wasn't enough.
All this was all new information to me. I trusted Michael Nolan. He was right at one point I wanted to call the book–– phew. Forward compatibility. Because the reason a lot of people wouldn't adopt web standards, they said, but what about backward compatibility? And I thought, yeah, but what about forward compatibility?
What about the future? Right. It's kind of like the future friendly meat thing that came later. It's the same idea. Like, yeah. What if we could make something so it won't break a year from now. Wouldn't that be cool? Yeah. No, we don't. I agree.
We don't want to break our old websites and we don't want, we want people with an old browser to be able to get our content, I agree but if we're worried about pixel for pixel rendering, we're going to be stuck doing table layouts and all this other garbage forever and if we actually concerned about making a much more robust web where the kinds of sites that we can make, we can't even imagine right now folks and things besides desktop browsers can access them.
Well, that's all in these web standards that these brilliant people at the W3C and–– and other standards bodies had figured out and. Why don't I think I was sort of a translator in my book. I like how you didn't invent CSS. I didn't. And I wasn't the brilliant person who thought of like, you know, that was taunted, who thought of the–– the box model hack to, to be able to make a layout that would work in older versions of IE which had a box model.
That wasn't the way it was intended and Netscape, which was supporting the box model correctly. When I say that correctly, I have to add that the correct support of the box model was actually db as hell because the actual box model was like, you had to be amount of mental arithmetic and things you couldn't do because of that mental arithmetic, learning things.
Like you couldn't make something the width of the screen, but then subtract a percentage or subtract the number of pixels from it, or you couldn't have one thing be of a fixed width and the other be of a floating with, because there were all these complications, just because, and that wasn't the fault of the geniuses that came up with CSS, like Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos because at the time they weren't layout artists, they were scientists and nobody came to them and said, You know, a multi column layout, like on a, like on a, and if someone had, they would have said on what, on this tiny screen, because everyone had little screens that were low risk, so they weren't dumb, they were geniuses, but screens were getting bigger.
Everything was happening really fast. And we wanted to do certain things that were very hard to do in CSS, but I mean, I had to sort of. Glide over. This is hard. It's an adjustment. You're going to have to be tricky. Cause I didn't like that part I wanted to get by. But to me there was two things we needed to sell.
You need to sell developers on supporting these standards fully and correctly before they implemented new features. Cool. New features. Yeah. I remember getting really angry at I E E five when they had colored scroll bars and there was nothing wrong with that. Giving a vendor. You know, the opportunity, if your ups and your slogan is what is Brown done for you lately, or what can Brown do for you today?
And, you know, a Brown website and you want the scroll bars to be Brown. There's nothing wrong with that first get CSS. Right.
Todd Libby: [00:21:58] Right.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:21:58] That's all we were saying.
Todd Libby: [00:21:59] Yeah.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:22:00] But so, so the book was there to catch folks up with the struggle that we'd already done and what was left to do, and to also help. Designers get with the program and give folks ammunition to take to their bosses because, you know, if you just said, Hey, we'd like to use CSS for the layout because it has to say it will, it will mean that when we have to redesign next year, we don't have to rebuild everything from scratch and we can actually store all our content in a database.
Where, you know, as content markup as content, instead of storing it as these weird meaningless chunks.
Todd Libby: [00:22:45] Right.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:22:46] So the impetus to write the book was to get browser makers, to solidify their support for it, but mainly to get designers psyched about it. And like I said, I wanted to [00:23:00] call it forward compatibility.
Cause I had my head so far up my ass that I thought everyone was with me was already thinking. Yeah. But what about forward? Nobody was, and Michael Nolan again said, just get designed in the title and get web standards in the title. Like that's what you're talking about. And I said, man, that's so cool.
He was brilliant. Like that's basically SEO for books, big, clear, and plain. In your title so that people who might be interested in that title, understand what the book's about as opposed to act like you're Marcel Proust or, and, you know, an English class will decipher your meaning someday right here are the poet hid their meaning behind clever veils Madrid.
No, it's not 19th century poetry. It's mass. So I was lucky. I had Steve Champeon as a technical editor and I was very lucky. Our relationship was cantankerous because every time I exaggerated or simplified, he would come back to me like, no, that's not how it works and I'd go, well, I know, but I don't want to complicate the argent.
And, and he'd say, well, then I guess you want a lie and then we'd have a fight. But then I ended up figuring out how to say what he was saying without confusing the reader or getting into too much of a tangent, being able to go. There's more to it. And you could find out here about that, but I'm going to use this simple analogy.
Like I had a really great team and the cover–– Michael Nolan hired some really brilliant graphic designers. Who'd came up with conceptual covers that I hated–– even though their work was beautiful and I admired them, one of the best, one of my design heroes. Get some of the covers and they were like, gorgeous.
I said, they're gorgeous, but they don't seem, you could almost change the title and make it about something else. And that I would still buy that book because it was beautiful cover, but the cover isn't communicating. And in the end, I went with my ego. Jeff Veen had a book with his face on the cover. And––the flash guy who became a movie guy. And I'm blanking his name because I'm old and it sucks. I suck with names now.
Todd Libby: [00:25:13] Oh yeah. I...
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:25:14] Know what I mean?
Todd Libby: [00:25:15] Yeah.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:25:16] Beautiful–– He died very young, he died at 50 colon cancer. (Hillman Curtis) I will eventually think of his name because–– I'll just continue. I feel really bad. He was a wonderful guy.
I was fortunate, I got to know him he was a really, really strong designer and a lovely human being and I–– but he had his picture on the cover and I was like, yeah, but we're not going to get a concept. I just put my picture on the cover. And then we, I had this low res picture. I'd picked it out myself, wearing a blue beanie like this when I had the flu.
And I looked really sick and terrible, but I'd use it as a model to make this little animated GIF at the bottom of my website. And I thought people who like my website know this little character in the beanie is me.
Todd Libby: [00:26:06] Yes.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:26:06] They know that it's face slides up from the bottom of the website. So let's cut.
Let's cut the picture off right at the nose so they can see the full face. And new writers was like, this is such a low res picture. We can't use it to print. And I said, let's pixelate it. That will say web pixels say, well, so we get an, I pixelated it for them, but they thought what I had done was a rough demo and they handed it to a much more experienced book designer who then made what was arguably a better quality image, but also looked like Hitler rising from his gray.
If anybody bought a copy of that book, because it was this unknown. Weird creepy, man, me like with this weird, it was like Jewish Hitler–– or like Kilroy, you know, and pixelated and
somehow their pixelation brought out the, the red in my eyes from the flu, as opposed to making me look more like a pixelated character, which was what I had anyway.
You know, the nice thing about my talking so long about that question is. You don't have to ask me anymore questions.
Todd Libby: [00:27:20] Well, that's the cover is actually, I, I, you know, along with bright colors, being something that catch my eye, you know, interesting covers to books, catch my eye as well. And that was also one of the reasons I said, now, this guy, he looks interesting––that never did it–– did it cross my mind–– the, the sickly part, but yeah, and I mean, like I said before, the, that book changed, the, what I had planned to do was just, you know, skate along in life and, and. You know, just be content wherever I was, but I said, well, you know, I'm going to give this stuff a try.
And then I bought HTML books. And when we used to have magazines that used to have–– code samples and tutorials and stuff–– you know–– I bought it. Yeah. And I ran with it and you know, it. It afforded me a very good career. So, you know,
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:28:25] Cool.
Todd Libby: [00:28:25] I could never thank you enough, especially for writing the book, because it was like, you know, there is a rhyme and a reason to doing this and doing it right.
And I started, you know, I, this was my Bible for a while. And when I used to go into old chat rooms or BBS, you know–– bulletin boards–– I was–– you know, a member of some–– communities–– online. And I'm like, you know, this, this is the Bible. And, you know, preach, preaching the gospel, I guess you could say.
So. With we just celebrated Blue Beanie Day on November 30th,
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:29:10] Right, a couple of days before recording this.
Todd Libby: [00:29:12] Yes. And so I, from the Wikipedia page, in November, 2007, yourself–– Douglas Vos, And yourself started Blue Beanie Day
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:29:26] Douglas Vos. Again, I've just been really, if I have any skill it's being around talented people, attracting smart people, people that are smarter than me, more talented than me.
That's my skill. Like a magnet for that. And so–– Before I go, and that was Douglas Vos. And he came to me and said, this could be a holiday. And I thought it was ridiculous and nobody would do it, but he convinced me and he was right. And it was really cool. And he was a very smart guy from Detroit area.
I don't know if he still lives there, but he was from Detroit at the time and my daughter's mom, my ex-wife was from Detroit and we were. Had been had recently visited Detroit. It just seemed like kids met–– by the way, before you go further, I want to thank you for all that evangelizing that you did.
Todd Libby: [00:30:14] Oh, you're welcome.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:30:15] The, the book wouldn't have had any effect. If it was limited to the, I don't know, the first few thousand people that bought it it's that other people took it. And took it back to work or took it to the chat rooms or took it to that's. I mean, that's the web standards movement. It's a movement.
It's not me. And I want to thank you for being part of that. And I want to thank you for being, I mean, I see you on Twitter every day. You're a very enthusiastic–– and giving. Generous member of the web design community. And I want to thank you for that. That's a real service.
Todd Libby: [00:30:55] Well, thank you.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:30:56] You said you, you, at one point were thinking of just drifting along in life and we all go through periods like that, but you can clearly do not just drift along.
You touch people and you have a lot of friends in the industry who had, you know, a lot of people and you share a lot of information. So I want to thank you for that.
Todd Libby: [00:31:19] Well, I appreciate that. Thank you. That, that means a lot. So, as with you, I speak to a lot of younger designers and developers–– and why staying on blue beanie day?
Why do you think, well, do you think web standards are important today and, and why?
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:31:48] I do, although it it's less and less acknowledged, what do they say in “Spinal Tap”? Their appeal is becoming more selective.
Todd Libby: [00:31:55] Yes.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:31:56] I mean, it's gone from like arenas to Tom Waits to putting a coffee shop with a couple of people who come here and play.
But–– I think there's a lot of real. Web standards made possible all the revolutionary ideas that are happening on the internet. Now in turn, as the industry scaled, and it took 10 engineers to make something where it used to take one–– a lot of new technology to make it easier for developers came along and a lot of, you know, from platforms to languages and.
It's gotten very complex. And I think if you were new, so there's several things. If you were new and you saw what you have to learn to be like a react professional or something. I think it could daunt you and keep you from entering the business altogether. We're lucky that when we started, there were like 12 HTML tags and that was about it.
And plus Netscape had a couple of extra ones you could use to stick an image on there. And so it was really easy to learn and easy to start playing when we had constraints and it was like learning to play a three string guitar. Right. And you've got a two track studio. You're not going to do orchestra.
You're going to do like some kind of very simple, direct music, folk music, punk, music, whatever. You're going to do something very simple and direct. It doesn't require great expertise, but you do do that and you build on it then. And eventually because you have that expertise, you layer in more and more expertise, but for.
Kids now for people's changing, here's a people of any age changing to this career. Now it's a lot more complicated and daunting another. So I like the idea that if you learn the basics, don't be scared by all the tools you don't know how to use and all the platforms that other people are using. Just learn the basics of semantic, markup and CSS.
And just enough JavaScript to be dangerous and you can make pretty much anything and you'll have a future in there in the industry. So that's one thing for people. Another reason web standards are important. Inclusive design is iron that–– works for people regardless of what device they're using, regardless of their abilities, accessible design, much easier to do.
If you start with semantic markup, like no matter how many layers you eventually add in progressively, that will enable someone with a super-duper browser at a super-duper phone or whatever, to, to experience a super-duper. Wow. These sheets really slide around when I do this, but if at the bottom. Someone else can go.
I don't get the sheets, but I still have a checkbox. I can still participate as long as people can still participate. I think if you do it with web standards, if you build with web standards first, then you build with simple markup first. And you've seen, I know Jeremy, Keith, talk about this.
Todd Libby: [00:35:12] Yes.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:35:12] These are masterful speaker on this topic, but if you start with these basics, then it's easier to make an accessible site.
An inclusive site. If you start with these principles in mind, then you can use web standards as the basis. Then if you start with a very sophisticated platform and then later have to try to retrofit. So you can, you can start with a twin engine, plane, and put seats in it and gradually work your way up to a big plane with seats in it.
Or you can have a–– an air force fighter. Playing come at you and try to put seats in that plane as it's flying overhead. And that will be much more difficult. Retrofitting inclusive design, just like retrofitting, retrofit, fitting a–– an inclusive user experience is much harder if you first use a bunch of tools.
If the tools ultimately output standards, compliant, web code, and, and most of them do then. If you know what you're doing, there's no harm done, but I still think it's best to start with HTML and CSS and prototype from there. Then maybe you turn it over to an engineer who uses the fancy platform that enables everything to jiggle around while it's doing this stuff.
But, but you can keep testing and you can keep having people with disabilities or. Test it, you can have people with old phones come and test it. I think web standards are what makes all of this possible and standards compliant.
Todd Libby: [00:36:54] Yeah.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:36:55] Standard like accessible, inclusive design–– super–– Blue Beanie Day today to me nowadays isn't “gee, browsers should support CSS”.
Well, they do. They do. And they're, you know, they may. They may compete on who launches, which, which new CSS faster, or who comes up with an experimental thing like grid as Microsoft did that eventually becomes a standard. , but there's this basis that's forward compatible and backward compatible.
You can go to the oldest webpage, made in HTML, in the newest browser and it's still renders like supposed to, and you can–– make something now that will work a hundred years from now, HTML I've often said is the cockroach that will survive the nuclear winter. It's so basic that you can add more things to it. And if a browser doesn't know what those things mean, it'll skip them.
It's very robust. It's very. It accepts what it understands and it ignores what it doesn't understand, which is why we can be backward compatible and forward compatible. And it's harder to do that. If you say I'm going to use this tool that does everything in JavaScript, and if you don't have JavaScript, you can't see this page.
I experienced platforms where if the user didn't have JavaScript turned on. They couldn't look at a page, even though there was no other JavaScript, there was no JavaScript in the page, but JavaScript was used to render the page. And so like I've made accessible pages, very accessible pavers that were like entry-level accessibility, where anyone with a cheap phone could use it to do everything that, that page offered, but they couldn't because.
The it department filtered on. I hate to get Ektron, let's say at the time, right Ektron at that time, I have no idea if Ektron is still that way. I think like WordPress uses React, but it renders HTML and CSS that are accessible and compliant and it doesn't, it doesn't alter the HTML and CSS. Right. It's a platform, but it doesn't alter that stuff.
So you design in HTML and CSS, you test it prototype in HTML and CSS. You may then replicate what you've done using the native tools of Gutenberg, but when it renders, it renders a standards, compliant, accessible HTML and CSS. So there are some accessibility issues still in the admin part of the tool.
Right. in terms of what inputs and outputs. Not at all. And–– I think, yeah, I think they're hugely important. I, I'm sad that I'm proud and happy when I see people wearing that blue beanie or talking about web standards and accessibility, but I'm sad when so many folks in our industry don't seem to care about that.
I feel like that's ,that's baseline, that's 101.
Todd Libby: [00:40:06] Yeah.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:40:07] Yeah. To be able to do that stuff.
Todd Libby: [00:40:09] Yeah, totally agree. I tell that to–– you know, the, the younger people that I talked to in different communities that, you know, web standards is definitely the, probably the best place to start out with the learning, the fundamentals of HTML and CSS lips itself.
I know that you have a hard stop and I have a hard stop.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:40:34] Okay.
Todd Libby: [00:40:35] So...
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:40:36] Right. Hopefully, sometime...
Todd Libby: [00:40:38] I would love to do another, another part to this episode–– because I have a, I have a few more questions. So I want to try and get this one question in, because I definitely wanted to talk about this–– an event apart you co-founded with Eric Meyer back in 2006. My first one was in 2008 in Boston.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:41:04] I remember, I remember meeting you then.
Todd Libby: [00:41:06] Yeah, it was quite the, quite the memorable meeting.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:41:11] It was. We’ll save that for another time too.
Yes. Can you let the listeners know the reason behind starting the conference in what, what makes it unique?
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:41:24] Thank you. That's a lovely question. Well, kind of enter part is, you know, three days of holistic web design, web standard web standards, accessibility content, strategy developments, and some user experience design, a little typography–– a lot of best practices and some new things and a better part is where Ethan Marcotte premiered.
Responsive web design, for example,
Todd Libby: [00:41:53] in Sea... in Seattle
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:41:55] In Seattle, that's right. Just standing on the stage. Yes. That's another story. We'll save that for another time, but why did we start it, Eric and I kept finding ourselves on similar talk circuits. I had no intention of becoming a speaker, but I felt like web standards needed a spokesperson.
And since I was passionate about it, Might as well be me and I wasn't uncomfortable in front of people because I was a ham and I done like I'd played in rock bands in my twenties and I'd been–– in advertising and made presentations to clients. So I wasn't afraid of getting up on stage and making a fool of myself.
So–– Eric. I became a speaker and Eric became a speaker and we would often end up like speaking at universities or we see each other at South by Southwest every year. And we became friends. And every year at South by Southwest, we would meet at this little place. Doesn't exist anymore, a little Mexican restaurant that was wonderful.
We'd sit in there. They had this enclosed backyard and we'd sit there and have our burrito, breakfasts, and. Talk about the conference that we were in South by Southwest was an amazing conference. I'm sure it still is. I haven't been in awhile, but, but at, at the time it was just the “ne plus ultra”(?), but there were so many tracks.
We inevitably missed people. We wanted to see. And at other conferences we felt that I, there were some that were very instructive, like–– The way Jim Hyde ran the Thunder Lizard conferences was really effective. There were other conferences where there'd be a few speakers. We thought were really good.
And then some other speakers would contradict them and the speakers weren't listening to each other and weren't there. Wasn't an overall, there wasn't an overact arching narrative to the day. And he, and I would say, you know, we had to do this ourselves. We ought to put on a show, the kind of show we'd want to see.
We ought to dislike. So we, we prototyped it. We actually did our first show in Philadelphia in 2005 Christmas time in a tiny little–– you know, little room in the back of the, –– museum, right? The–– the guy who discovered who had the kite. This is terrible. Ben Franklin, the Benjamin Franklin museum.
That's how I do it now. It's like breadcrumbs. Okay, electricity, kites. Oh yeah. Yeah. Ben Franklin. So we did it in the Ben Franklin Institute, a friend brought his sound system. It was really, you know, and then eventually we hooked up with Marci Eversole and–– Toby Molina who produced and managed the bejeesus out of it's enough to make it a professional thing.
But as originally the community thing that we just put on, like let's put on a show in the old movies, you know? But we wanted to make a single track where, when you went out in the hall, you weren't like, what did you think about what she said, Oh, I didn't hear her. What did you think about what he said, Oh, I didn't hear him.
We wanted it to be, you go out in the hall and go, what do we think about what we just heard? Do we agree? So a single track was a must–– We wanted there to be a real emphasis on front end web standards in–– we weren't calling it inclusiveness then, but you know, accessibility–– and a bigger picture.
And we wanted it to be a sort of a representative group. You know, at first it was just a bunch of guys. Cause it seemed like everybody I knew in the field was, was some guy that looked like me, but eventually–– And it continues to become a more and more diverse group of people. But–– yeah, we just wanted, we wanted to put something on that we thought would add value to the web that would help people who want to do the right thing, who were inspired by the books.
You mentioned, you know, Eric's book, Dan Cederholm's book–– Molly Holzschlag's, but whatever. And wanted to know what comes next. That was great. But you know, the last, the most recent addition to that book was in 2009. So what comes next?
Todd Libby: [00:46:08] Right.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:46:09] And we wanted to have a holistic experience. We wanted–– it's funny, I'm on a team now at automatic that tries to make sure that designers at automatic have a great experience because if a designer feels supportive, they'll design a better product.
If the designer feels unhappy and unsupported, they're going to be–– less likely to care about what the customer thinks. And we have a really good, it's a really good place for designers to work, but we can always make it even better. So that's what we're doing. I'm on a team that's trying to make it even better because, so this was the same thing let's have.
If you're going to make a great user experience, come to a conference, that's a great user experience. Yeah, that was so. We talk to all the speakers beforehand, help them figure out what they're going to talk about curate the days, so that there's a rhythm to them. , and all that, it's, you know, I, right now we're doing it digital only because pandemic.
Todd Libby: [00:47:04] Yeah.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:47:04] But that's, we seem to be getting things out of that too. So I'm really sorry. I have to go. I'm really honored to have been.
Todd Libby: [00:47:16] That's fine.
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:47:16] Your first guest talk.
Todd Libby: [00:47:18] Well, I am honored that you joined me and I would love to, you know–– have a second part to this and keep, you know,
Jeffrey Zeldman: [00:47:25] There's certainly will.
Todd Libby: [00:47:27] So what I'll do is, I'll close it right here.
I want to thank you, Jeffrey for joining us for this first part. We'll coordinate to get to–– do a second part as well. And thank you listeners for tuning into the Front End Nerdery Podcast.
We'll be back in, you know, as soon as schedules permit to continue this conversation and as far as the podcast goes, if you would please rate this podcast on your podcast device of choice, I'm Todd Libby, and this has been the Front End Nerdery Podcast.
Thank you. And we'll see you next time.
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