{QTtext}{timescale:100}{font:Arial}{size: 26}{backColor:0,0,0}
{textColor:65535,65535,65535}{width:400}{height:100}{justify:left}

[00:00:00.00]

[00:00:00.50]
( reading slowly and deliberately )
External...style...sheets...

[00:00:06.00]
Oh hi!

[00:00:07.50]

[00:00:17.00]
Hi I'm Jeffrey. 

[00:00:18.00]
You may know me through such sites as Zeldman.com,

[00:00:21.50]
the Web Standards Project,

[00:00:23.25]
A List Apart

[00:00:24.75]
and Google...

[00:00:26.10]
ok, not Google.

[00:00:27.30]

[00:00:36.00]
I'm not going to make a big, long, technical speech today.

[00:00:39.50]
But I am going to share with you something quite remarkable:

[00:00:43.00]
it's a brand new CSS technique,

[00:00:45.00]
never been shown to anyone,

[00:00:47.00]
haven't written about it at A List Apart or Zeldman.com;

[00:00:50.00]
nobody, not even my business partners, knows the slightest thing about that...

[00:00:53.50]
it's just for you guys and it's really going to blow your minds

[00:00:56.50]
and it's going to change the way you design websites forever.

[00:00:59.30]

[00:01:08.00]
Before I do it I just want to make sure we're all on the same page

[00:01:11.00]
so I'm going to do a little, quick...ah...remedial part

[00:01:14.70]
and then once we're all on the same page

[00:01:16.00]
I'm going to tell you this amazing new technique.

[00:01:19.00]
So...remedial part.

[00:01:22.00]
Every web page has three components:

[00:01:25.00]
presentation, controlled by CSS;

[00:01:29.00]
markup, controlled by a language like XML or XHTML or HTML;

[00:01:33.00]
and dynamic behaviour controlled by the Document Object Model.

[00:01:37.00]
So: 

[00:01:38.00]
CSS,

[00:01:39.75]
XHTML,

[00:01:41.00]
DOM.

[00:01:43.00]
Hold on...wait.

[00:01:44.00]
I'm sorry.

[00:01:45.50]
This is XHTML,

[00:01:48.00]
this is CSS

[00:01:50.75]
and this is the DOM.

[00:01:53.00]
( sounding uncertain ) I think that's right.

[00:01:55.00]

[00:01:57.00]
In 1998 when we started the Web Standards Project

[00:02:00.00]
a lot of very intelligent, well meaning people said to us 

[00:02:04.00]
"you have no chance in hell,

[00:02:05.50]
web standards are a pure theory,

[00:02:07.00]
the W3C is irrelevant,

[00:02:09.50]
CSS layout will never catch on,

[00:02:13.00]
good markup doesn't matter

[00:02:15.50]
nobody's going to bother with accessibility, etc"

[00:02:19.50]
but we won.

[00:02:21.00]
That's the thing and that's why you're sitting here.

[00:02:22.50]
A conference like this is proof that we won.

[00:02:26.00]


[00:02:29.00]
I believe web standards are just going to be what you do.

[00:02:33.00]
If you know what you're doing,

[00:02:34.00]
it's just going to be a component of...

[00:02:37.00]
...just a tool. It's just going to be a tool that you use...

[00:02:41.50]
...and I think the focus of web design will go back

[00:02:45.50]
to things like content, design, usability,

[00:02:51.50]
and those will always be the most important things

[00:02:53.75]
and we have to take a side trip away from them

[00:02:56.50]
in order to persuade very powerful companies

[00:03:00.00]
to stop behaving like idiots and start supporting standards

[00:03:04.00]
and we have to take another detour

[00:03:06.00]
to persuade at least enough of you, smart people like you at the conference...

[00:03:11.00]
...to start working with standards instead of 

[00:03:13.00]
doing things the way you've always done them and...

[00:03:16.00]
now it's time to forget about that, just make it part of your practice.

[00:03:19.00]
Sorry...ok...

[00:03:21.00]
CSS,

[00:03:23.75]
XHTML,

[00:03:26.00]
Document Object Model...

[00:03:28.50]

[00:03:30.00]
I don't know all the speakers,

[00:03:32.50]
but I do know four of them, so I'm going to talk a little bit about each one.

[00:03:35.50]

[00:03:38.25]
John Allsopp wrote one of the most influential articles

[00:03:41.50]
we ever published at A List Apart.

[00:03:43.00]
It's called "Dao of Web Design" and in it John made the point

[00:03:47.00]
that the web was different from other media

[00:03:49.00]
and should be designed for differently.
 
[00:03:51.00]
He thought: let the web be the web and he used examples from the Tao Te Ching
 
[00:03:57.00]
I don't know if I just pronounced that correctly,
 
[00:04:00.00]
but he used examples from this text to make the point 
 
[00:04:04.00]
that water flows and does not fight and water sits..
 
[00:04:11.00]
you know, I forget what it was, but it was really pretty...eastern.
 
[00:04:16.50]
A wonderful and very influential article.
 
[00:04:19.50]
It's still being argued about and there are still people who...
 
[00:04:26.50]
are discovering it years after it was published and find it revelatory.
 
[00:04:30.75]
Three components of any web page:
 
[00:04:33.25]
markup language,
 
[00:04:35.75]
cascading stylesheets
 
[00:04:38.00]
and document object model...wait.
 
[00:04:42.00]
I love Joe Clark as no man should love another.

[00:04:44.75]
What I get from Joe Clark is that accessibility is not the memorisation of a series of rules,

[00:04:52.00]
but like other aspects of design and usability

[00:04:55.50]
it's something to think about;

[00:04:57.50]
it's something filled with challenges;

[00:05:00.00]
it's something that intelligent and reasonable people can disagree about.

[00:05:04.00]
There's more than one right way to do something.

[00:05:06.75]
He also showed me that you can talk about a subject 
[00:05:09.50]
about which you're very knowledgeable and very passionate

[00:05:13.00]
and you can do so in a unique voice.

[00:05:16.00]
I have read Joe Clark's "Building accessible websites" five times.

[00:05:21.50]
Cascading style...

[00:05:23.00]


[00:05:25.00]
Around 2001, when I was still group leader of the Web Standards Project,

[00:05:30.00]
I was pretty frustrated in our ability to reach designers.

[00:05:34.50]
An idea Dorie Smith and I came up with

[00:05:36.50]
was that the Web Standards Project's redesigned site was fairly plain,

[00:05:41.75]
but we could let people come up with very...with alternative designs for the site

[00:05:49.00]
same content, different design

[00:05:51.00]
we'd publish the best ones and people who visited the site

[00:05:55.50]
could push the button and switch between radically different layouts...

[00:05:58.75]
but we weren't able to execute it.

[00:06:01.50]
But shortly after I left the Web Standards Project

[00:06:04.50]
Dave Shea, independently, completely on his own, had the very same idea.

[00:06:11.00]
He created the "CSS Zen Garden",

[00:06:13.50]
there are hundreds of entries now,

[00:06:16.00]
many of them are very beautiful

[00:06:17.50]
and that one site, that one project, has interested designers all over the world in CSS

[00:06:23.75]
in a way nothing else had before.

[00:06:27.50]


[00:06:33.50]
Doug did something very important for our industry:

[00:06:38.00]
he rose to the challenge of taking a big commercial site

[00:06:44.00]
into the realm of standards-based design.

[00:06:47.00]
The effect of Wired.com and its redesign on the community was just astounding.

[00:06:54.50]
No sooner had Wired.com came out

[00:06:57.00]
that we started getting Inc and Sprint and ESPN

[00:07:01.50]
and a lot of other big commercial sites using CSS layout

[00:07:05.50]
and, as far as they could, semantic markup and XHTML. 

[00:07:10.00]

[00:07:17.00]
transcript + captions:
patrick h. lauke / splintered.co.uk

[00:07:18.99]

[00:07:19.00]