An interview with Jeffrey Zeldman: art, love, web standards and George Clooney

We are delighted to publish an interview with Standards Samurai Jeffrey Zeldman of Zeldman.com, AListApart and the Web Standards Project. Zeldman discusses the human aspects of Standards and their adoption (or lack of adoption), why the W3C should listen to the Web Professional community a little more, the difficulties of being constantly mistaken for George Clooney, and gets all romantic.

Why is it that Marketing departments seem actively to boast of their standards compliance now?

The same reason car makers tell you about air bags or other product attributes: because they're perceived, correctly, as desirable features that provide genuine benefits. The browser companies don't necessarily tell you why they've added support for these standards - they figure people who care about them already understand the benefits.

Then too, they've done a lot of work and they're justifiably proud of having done it. By doing that work, they've not only addressed the needs of a core section of their audience (designers and developers), they've also helped the wider public they serve, by enabling designers and developers to do a better job of creating impactful, usable, accessible experiences.

"One browser company may also talk about its standards compliance to offset perceptions that it is an anti-competitive giant that makes its own rules."

One company may also talk about its standards compliance to offset perceptions that it is an anti-competitive giant that makes its own rules. Another, less successful company will tell you that it supports standards to show that it can compete with the dominant player; and if its standards compliance exceeds that of the more successful company, saying so gives the browser maker a slight competitive edge, at least among developers and geeks.

What changed? What was the moment that WaSP realised that you were winning the PR battle? How did it *feel*?

There were always signs. In 1998 or early '99, when Netscape announced that it would scrap its legacy browser in favor of one built upon the standards-compliant Gecko rendering engine, which is what we had strongly suggested they do, some of us started thinking, "We're making a difference, this might actually work."

There was a bigger sense of that in 2000, when the world got its first generation of browsers that could be said to useably support CSS, (X)HTML, ECMAScript, and the DOM. The version of Opera released in 2000 still had some DOM compliance issues, but essentially all leading browsers supported the core standards WaSP had been promoting since its inception.

I can't speak for other members of The WaSP, but as one standards-supporting browser after another was released in that year, I felt a profound sense of happiness and a stronger and stronger feeling of hope. The timing was odd: the global economy was constricting, IT was down the tubes, web agencies were closing or shrinking, but in the midst of the bleakness there was this hopefulness about the medium - that it might actually move forward in a balanced, rational way.

"As one standards-supporting browser after another was released, I felt a profound sense of happiness and a stronger and stronger feeling of hope."

The next phase, as I've mentioned, was getting other designers and developers on board. Soon after A List Apart converted to CSS layout in February 2001, a whole bevy of indie sites did likewise, and people like Eric Costello and Owen Briggs began publishing free CSS templates anyone could use and adapt. That was exciting: you could see the change working. And then came the public sector sites and finally the big corporate sites. So I'd say, in the first few years of WaSP, we had glimmers of hope but most often felt like Don Quixote. But as the 20th century expired and the new millennium began, over and over again we got proof that people were "getting it," that the desired change was manifesting.

The WaSP reformed last year because "tens of thousands of professional designers and developers continue to use outdated methods that yoke structure to presentation". Why are the web professionals the last ones to get standards?

They are not the last to "get" standards. Without the support of thousands of designers and developers who signed early WaSP petitions, the browser companies would have been far less likely to change so much so quickly. When the WaSP said it spoke for thousands of developers, that statement was not hype, it was fact.

But many others in the web professional community couldn't really be expected to "get" standards until browsers actually supported them. So browser makers were the first audience we needed to convince. We did that - and the browsers changed. We then began deepening our outreach and educational efforts, sometimes by publishing tutorials and such, and other times by more radical means.

"Did the campaign really persuade uncle Ralph to drop Netscape 4 like a hot rock? Probably not, and realistically, we never expected it to."

The campaign empowered many designers and developers to start using these technologies. The response came in waves: first independent sites did it, then public sector sites came aboard, and finally big commercial sites like Wired.com and ESPN.net redesigned with standards. Did the campaign really persuade uncle Ralph to drop Netscape 4 like a hot rock? Probably not, and realistically, we never expected it to. Did it coax entrenched corporate and public sector IT heads into upgrading their organization's browser? Possibly, in a few cases, it might have done that. Mainly, it was a designer-developer outreach program, and on that level it worked.

So when the WaSP re-formed "to focus on developer education," it had actually already been doing that. Now it will simply do it in gentler ways - because, now that the climate has changed, it can do it in gentler ways.

During the reformation, the group also began working with leading tool-makers. Because if Dreamweaver didn't generate standards-compliant mark-up, styles, and code, even those professionals who "got" it might not have time to bother with it. The WaSP's Dreamweaver Task Force, led by Rachel Andrew and Drew McLellan, helped Macromedia enhance standards compliance in the leading visual web editor. Macromedia was receptive because they're smart, and because they were hearing about standards from their user groups. Which again suggests that many web professionals already do "get" it.