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.

Did you guys ask Macromedia if you could work with them on Dreamweaver MX, or did they contact WaSP?

WaSP put the idea to Macromedia, but Macromedia already had a relationship with Rachel [Andrew, a DMXzone premium content author] and Drew, who are respected members of the Dreamweaver community, and it also had a relationship with Jeffrey Veen, who is one of the co-founders of The WaSP. So when we first talked to Macromedia in their San Francisco headquarters, it was a very friendly meeting.

"When we first talked to Macromedia in their San Francisco headquarters, it was a very friendly meeting."

And I have to say, the engineers were already very interested in standards and were already beginning to implement them far more rigorously in what would eventually become Dreamweaver MX. So we weren't hard-selling them on something they didn't want; we were offering to help them achieve something they themselves knew was important to their users.

Are Standards preventing people from publishing on the Web by placing barriers to entry (CSS, XHTML etc etc)?

Does English prevent people from communicating? It has grammar and syntax and those are hard. Yet even with a rudimentary knowledge of English, if I yell, "Help! Fire!", you'll understand.

Standards are a continuum of interlocking, empowering technologies. The more you know, the more you can do. But you can do a lot even if you don't know all that much, yet.

If you'd never used JavaScript and were suddenly asked to build a full-fledged DOM-based web application, you'd have a tough time. What happens with, for instance, CSS, is that people who've never used it, or who've barely used it, or who've only used a little of it without understanding it, sometimes try to do a full-blown CSS layout, and those CSS newbies naturally become frustrated.

Well, the trick to learning anything is to approach the problem in stages. If you've always done table layouts and you've never used CSS, stick with table layouts for now, but replace your font tags with style sheets. As you learn more, you'll do more. It's a continuum, not a set of inflexible rules. The second half of Designing With Web Standards goes through the tools and shows how they work together, and in the book we create a hybrid site using tables plus CSS before tackling a CSS-only layout. We do that to remove fear from the equation and to ease the learning curve by letting you work with what you already know.

"Dreamweaver lets an inexperienced person build a site but it does more in the hands of an experienced professional. And that's the nature of web development: it's a great profession for people who like to learn."

Anyone can learn these technologies - you already know HTML; XHTML is essentially the same thing with a few additional rules. Also, the tools keep improving. If you're a content person, not a coder, or if you're a designer who's unfamiliar with the underlying mark-up, there are applications like Dreamweaver and publishing tools like Six Apart's upcoming TypePad that can help you generate compliant sites. Naturally, the more you know, the better these tools work and the more power they give you. Dreamweaver lets an inexperienced person build a site but it does more in the hands of an experienced professional. And that's the nature of web development: it's a great profession for people who like to learn.