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.

On a scale of 1 to 10 (1=Amish, 10=Star trek convention attendee), how geeky are you?

Six and a half. I don't own a Palm Pilot, I prefer the Mac GUI to a command line interface, I'm not a programmer or a backend developer, I don't own a Tivo and yet my life seems rich and full, I prefer paper tickets to e-tickets, and I can still use a pen if I have to.

On the flip side, I hand-roll my XHTML, CSS, RSS, and JavaScript in a text editor, I helped Craig Hockenberry of Iconfactory.com develop the first plug-ins to handle web color back before Photoshop even thought about web publishing, my email filters are more complex than the code in some applications, I've been designing websites since 1995, and I can listen to Tim Bray without subtitles.

So maybe I'm a seven.

Do people ask for your autograph?

Yes. But some of them may have mistaken me for George Clooney.

		"I'm often mistaken for George Clooney."
Jeffrey Zeldman	George Clooney

You and me both, Jeffrey. Finally, what's the most beautiful thing you've seen today?

Carrie, when she first woke up.

[Editor's note: Carrie Bickner (soon to be Zeldman's wife) is the Assistant Director for Digital Information Design for The New York Public Library's Digital Library, and the author of "Web Design on a Shoestring", to be published by New Riders Press a little later this year.]

The glass: half-full or half-empty?

It runneth over.

Thanks, Jeffrey.

DMXzone.com fully supports the Web Standards Project's work in wishing to help publicise the advantages of XHTML, CSS and Accessibility.

In our Premium Content section, we have articles on XHTML and Standards from Molly E. Holzschlag and CSS from Rachel Andrew, both from the WaSP. Our series of articles for designers, "Ideas to Implementation" by Matt Machell shows how to build a site visually using CSS, XHTML and Accessibility techniques.

If you are interested in learning more about Web Standards on DMXzone.com, please mail Bruce Lawson at mailto:Bruce@DMXzone.com?subject=standards