Web guru Jeffrey Zeldman opens Web Directions North with wide-ranging keynote
Jeffrey Zeldman, the web design and standards expert behind zeldman.com, alistapart.com and myriad other websites, delivered the opening keynote at Web Directions North on January 30th in downtown Vancouver. After fighting for standards and accessibility on the web for the past decade, Zeldman gave a state of the union address to a rapt audience of his fellow designers and developers.
In a talk dubbed “Web Standards: The Return of the King”, Zeldman broke down the early history of web standards advocacy, and explained how in the early days, the mere adoption of the term “standards” forced people to think of web design in different terms. In Zeldman’s words, “if you make something that looks like crap, no designer will want to sign on to work on it.”
It was the adoption of CSS that web standards hit a new milestone, though in the late 90’s CSS implementation across all browsers was in a woeful state. He also covered font scaling, the eventual adoption of the Gecko engine by Netscape (which later became Firefox) and the DOCTYPE switch, which allowed support of older browsers for new standards-compliant content. Selling web standards to designers consisted of sites like CSS Zen Garden, which demonstrated how beautiful standards-compliant design can be, and selling standards to Web 2.0 startups and developers was a matter of explaining how much quicker, more efficient and cost-effective standards compliant sites are compared to custom solutions. In terms of business, standards don’t waste the user’s time or the site’s bandwidth.
Importantly, standards compliance is in effect “honest SEO,” a way to let Google find a site easily while making the web a better place for designers, developers and end users.
January 30, 2008 | 2:29 pm
[…] Jeffery Zeldman’s opening keynote this morning was most excellent. He basically told stories about the bumps along the road to getting web standards in browsers and ended up talking about where we are today. It was very interesting to hear what he was thinking about and doing relative to what I was thinking about and doing at the same time. For instance, in 2001 I was furiously fighting to add Netscape 4 support to a Learning Management System that had only supported IE 5. Meanwhile, he was firing up The WaSP to help with a lot of those problems. […]
January 31, 2008 | 12:52 am
Oddly absent from the article is any mention of Jeffery discussing the latest industry hullabaloo following the A List Apart articles on Version Targeting.
My only guess is that he indeed did not mention it so soon as the fracas has not died down yet. Pity, I’m curious as to whether he’s steadfast in his support of the new meta tag or if there’s been any changes in his opinion.