Zeldman video keynote

Transcript of Jeffrey Zeldman's Web Essentials 04 video keynote. See also the captioned version using Quicktime SMIL 1.0

( reading slowly and deliberately ) External...stylesheets...oh hi!

Title: (ahem)

Hi I'm Jeffrey. You may know me through such sites as zeldman.com, the Web Standards Project, A List Apart and Google...ok, not Google.

Title: a film by Eric Etheridge

Title: speaker: Zeldman

I'm not going to make a big, long, technical speech today. But I am going to share with you something quite remarkable: it's a brand new CSS technique, never been shown to anyone, haven't written about it at A List Apart or zeldman.com; nobody, not even my business partners, knows the slightest thing about that...it's just for you guys and it's really going to blow your minds and it's going to change the way you design websites forever.

Title: music by Zeldman

Title: made for WEB ESSENTIALS 04 Sydney 30 Sept. - 1 Oct. 2004

Before I do it I just want to make sure we're all on the same page so I'm going to do a little, quick...ah...remedial part and then once we're all on the same page I'm going to tell you this amazing new technique.

So, remedial part. Every web page has three components: presentation, controlled by CSS; markup, controlled by a language like XML or XHTML or HTML; and dynamic behaviour controlled by the Document Object Model. So: CSS, XHTML, DOM.

Hold on...wait. I'm sorry. This is XHTML, this is CSS and this is the DOM...( sounding uncertain ) I think that's right.

Title: the good news

In 1998 when we started the Web Standards Project a lot of very intelligent, well meaning people said to us "you have no chance in hell, web standards are a pure theory, the W3C is irrelevant...ah...CSS layout will never catch on...ah...good markup doesn't matter...ah...nobody's going to bother with accessibility, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera"...but we won. That's the thing and that's why you're sitting here. A conference like this is proof that we won.

Title: what's next for web standards?

I believe web standards are just going to be what you do. If you know what you're doing, it's just going to be a component of...ah...just a tool. It's just going to be a tool that you use...ah...and I think the focus of web design will go back to things like content, design, usability, and those will always be the most important things and we have to take a side trip away from them in order to persuade very powerful companies to stop behaving like idiots and start supporting standards and we have to take another detour to persuade at least enough of you, smart people like you at the conference...ah...to start working with standards instead of doing things the way you've always done them and now it's time to forget about that, just make it part of your practice.

Sorry...ok...CSS, XHTML, Document Object Model...

Title: the players

I don't know all the speakers, but I do know four of them, so I'm going to talk a little bit about each one.

Title: John Allsopp

John Allsopp wrote one of the most influential articles we ever published at A List Apart. It's called "Dao of Web Design" and in it John made the point that the web was different from other media and should be designed for differently. He thought: let the web be the web and he used examples from the Tao Te Ching - I don't know if I just pronounce that correctly, but he used examples from this text to make the point that water flows and does not fight and water sits..you know, I forget what it was, but it was really pretty...eastern.

A wonderful and very influential article. It's still being argued about and there are still people who...are discovering it years after it was published and find it revelatory.

Three components of any web page: markup language, cascading stylesheets and document object model...wait.

Title: Joe Clark

I love Joe Clark as no man should love another. What I get from Joe Clark is that accessibility is not the memorisation of a series of rules, but - like other aspects of design and usability - it's something to think about; it's something filled with challenges; it's something that intelligent and reasonable people can disagree about. There's more than one right way to do something. He also showed me that you can talk about a subject about which you're very knowledgeable and very passionate and you can do so in a unique voice.

I have read Joe Clark's "Building accessible websites" five times.

Cascading style...

Title: Dave Shea

Around 2001, when I was still group leader of the Web Standards Project, I was pretty frustrated in our ability to reach designers.

An idea Dorie Smith and I came up with was that the Web Standards Project's redesigned site was fairly plain, but we could let people come up with very...with alternative designs for the site - same content, different design - we'd publish the best ones and people who visited the site could push the button and switch between radically different layouts...but we weren't able to execute it.

But shortly after I left the Web Standards Project Dave Shea, independently, completely on his own, had the very same idea. He created the "CSS Zen Garden", there are hundreds of entries now, many of them are very beautiful and that one site, that one project, has interested designers all over the world in CSS in a way nothing else had before.

Title: Douglas Bowman

Doug did something very important for our industry: he rose to the challenge of taking a big commercial site into the realm of standards-based design. The effect of Wired.com and its redesign on the community was just astounding. No sooner had Wired.com came out that we started getting Inc and Sprint and ESPN and a lot of other big commercial sites using CSS layout and, as far as they could, semantic markup and XHTML.

Title: the end