Higgins & Zeldman
I was looking through some folders of photos on the computer the other day and stumbled upon this photo of me with the esteemed Web-meister Jeffery Zeldman. Unfortunately the dolt I gave the camera to was incapable of taking a simple picture and thus ruined my brush with fame. Ok maybe Zeldman isn’t Hollywood famous, but he’s Internet famous. Alright, maybe not Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, famous. Rather in certain circles, Mr. Zeldman is regarded very very highly.
I went to a talk he gave on web standards back on May 2, 2003 in downtown Albany. (Whew, seems so long ago already!) Web standards are a set of standards designed to provide a way to build and present web sites such that they are the most accessible and useful. It is an admirable goal, one that many people take to heart.
Let me describe it like this… Say SONY made a TV that was really tall and narrow. Say SONY had about 75% of the market, that is, three out of every four TVs is tall and narrow. All the rest of the TVs out there looked the way we normally see them (4:3 ratio… slightly wider than tall). Now if networks designed their programs to fit the majority of TVs, then there is a whole segment of the population with TVs where the program WON’T look good.
This, thankfully, doesn’t happen in the world of TV. However, it runs rampant on the internet. Browsers are the TVs and Internet Explorer is the tall and narrow SONY.
Mr. Zeldman, along with like-minded folk, advocate designing sites that adhere to an established set of standards. These standards are independent of any particular browser. It’s the browser developer’s responsibility to make sure their browser adheres to the greatest number of standards.
Here is a slideshow from that foggy, springtime trip.
Map of the photos.