After a decade-long run, Camino is no longer being developed, and we encourage all users to upgrade to a more modern browser. Camino is increasingly lagging behind the fast pace of changes on the web, and more importantly it is not receiving security updates, making it increasingly unsafe to use.

I used Camino for a long time, and only left when it had lagged much too far behind the rest of the browser market.  (Camino used Gecko embedding, which was disabled a couple of years ago.  That change effectively froze Camino’s rendering engine at the level of Firefox 3.6.)

When I migrated away from Camino, I tried a few alternatives and eventually settled on Firefox because its UI was the least unlike Camino’s.  (We like best what we know best.)  There were still some things I sorely missed, though, like simple Flash blocking and whitelisting, the multi-row Bookmarks bar, the keyboard bookmark-activation shortcuts, and the truly great downloads manager.  If you miss those (or would like to experience them) too, here’s how I got them back in Firefox:

• Flashblock — though its UI isn’t quite as easy as Camino’s Flash preferences, Flashblock works well and allows whitelisting.
• Multirow Bookmarks Toolbar Plus — the layout of this has gotten a bit wonky under recent Firefox Nightly builds, but still works just fine, and you can even set it to auto-hide itself.
• Bookmark Shortcut Keys — built for me in Jetpack by Jeff Balogh, this lets you define which keyboard shortcuts trigger the first nine bookmarks in the Bookmarks bar.  I use this all the time, just as I did in Camino.  I’ve defined my shortcuts to be ⌘1 through ⌘9, but you can pick whichever modifier keys you like.  Thanks, Jeff!
• Download Manage Tweak — adds controls to show a file in the OS, delete the file, remove the file from the list without deleting it, and so on.  As with Flashblock, it isn’t quite as smooth as Camino’s UI, but it does the same job and a bit more besides.

And one more: New Tab Homepage, which makes certain that Firefox loads your Home page, and not the dashboard, whenever you open a new tab.

Oh, all right, one more one more: RSS Icon in Awesombar.  If you still roll that way.

So if you still pine a bit for Camino’s UI features, there’s how you can recreate most of the experience in Firefox.  If you don’t, then peace be with you, as with the entire Camino team.  Thank you all for everything you did to bring OS X a great browser that just felt right.

That’s not at all minor point.  I don’t believe it overstates the case to say that if CERN hadn’t made the web free and open to all, it wouldn’t have taken over the net.  Like previous attempts at hypertext and similar information systems, it would have languished in a niche and eventually withered away.  There were other things that had to happen for the web to really take off, but none of them would have mattered without this one simple, foundational decision.

I would go even further and argue that this act infused the web, defining the culture that was built on top of it.  Because the medium was free and open, as was often the case in academic and hacker circles before it, the aesthetic of sharing freely became central to the web community.  The dynamic of using ideas and resources freely shared by others, and then freely sharing your own resources and ideas in return, was strongly encouraged by the open nature of the web.  It was an implicit encouragement, but no less strong for that.  As always, the environment shapes those who live within it.

It was in that very spirit that Dave Shea launched the CSS Zen Garden ten years ago this week.  After letting it lie fallow for the last few years, Dave has re-opened the site to submissions that make use of all the modern capabilities we have now.

It might be hard to understand this now, but the Zen Garden is one of the defining moments in the history of web design, and is truly critical to understanding the state of CSS before and after it debuted.  When histories of web design are written—and there will be—there will be a chapters titled things like “Wired, ESPN, and the Zen Garden: Why CSS Ended Up In Everything”.

Before the Zen Garden, CSS was a thing you used to color text and set fonts, and maybe for a simple design, not for “serious” layout.  CSS design is boxy and boring, and impossible to use for anything interesting, went the conventional wisdom.  (The Wired and ESPN designs were held to be special cases.)  Then Dave opened the gates on the Zen Garden, with its five utterly different designs based on the very same document…and the world turned.

I’m known to be a history buff, and these days a web history buff, so of course I’m super-excited to see both these sites online and actively looked after, but you should be too.  You can see where it all started, and where a major shift in design occurred, right from the comfort of your cutting-edge nightly build of the latest and greatest browsers known to man.  That’s a rare privilege, and a testimony to what CERN set free, two decades back.

On Friday, the Web Standards Project announced its own dissolution.  I felt a lot of things upon reading the announcement, once I got over my initial surprise: nostalgia, wistfulness, closure.  And over it all, a deep sense of respect for the Project as a whole, from its inception to its peak to its final act.

In some ways, the announcement was a simple formalization of a longstanding state of affairs, as the Project has gradually grown quieter and quieter over the years, and its initiatives had been passed on to other, more active homes.  It was still impressive to see the group explicitly shut down.  I can’t think of the last time I saw a group that had been so influential and effective recognize that it was time to turn off the lights, and exit with dignity.  As they wrote:

Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality. While there is still work to be done, the sting of the WaSP is no longer necessary. And so it is time for us to close down The Web Standards Project.

I have a long history with the WaSP.  Way, way back, deep in the thick of the browser wars, I was invited to be a member of the CSS Action Committee, better known as the CSS Samurai.  We spent the next couple of years documenting how things worked (or, more often, didn’t) in CSS implementations, and—and this was the clever bit, if you ask me—writing up specific plans of action for browsers.  The standards compliance reviews we published told browsers what they needed to fix first, not just what they were getting wrong.  I can’t claim that our every word was agreed with, let alone acted upon, but I’m pretty confident those reviews helped push browser teams in the right direction.  Or, more likely, helped browser teams push their bosses in the direction the teams already wanted to go.

Succumbing to a wave of nostalgia, I spent a few minutes trawling my archives.  I still have what I think is all the mail from the Samurai’s mailing list, run through Project Cool’s servers, from when it was set up in August 1998 up through June of 2000.  My archive totals 1,716 messages from the group, as well as some of the Steering Committee members (mostly Glenn Davis, though George Olsen was our primary contact during the Microsoft style sheets patent brouhaha of February 1999).  If I’m not reading too much into plain text messages over a decade old, we had a pretty great time.  And then, after a while, we were done.  Unlike the WaSP itself, we never really declared an end.  We didn’t even march off into the sunset having declared that the farmers always win.  We just faded away.

Not that that’s entirely a bad thing.  At a certain point, our work was done, and we moved on.  Still, I look back now and wish we’d made it a little more formal.  Had we done so, we might have said something like the WaSP did:

The job’s not over, but instead of being the work of a small activist group, it’s a job for tens of thousands of developers who care about ensuring that the web remains a free, open, interoperable, and accessible competitor to native apps and closed eco-systems. It’s your job now…

And so it is.  These last years have shown that the job is in very good hands.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” said Margaret Mead.  I see now that the way those small groups truly change the world is by convincing the rest of the world that they are right, thus co-opting the world to their cause.  Done properly, the change makes the group obsolete.  It’s a lesson worth remembering, as we look at the world today.

I’m honored to have been a part of the WaSP, and I offer my deepest samurai bow of respect to its founders, its members, and its leaders.  Thank you all for making the web today what it is.

Anyway, the second episode, starring Steve Champeon, was recorded and released last week.  Hear about SGML and HTML, progressive enhamcement, the inside and little-known story of the WaSP’s success, and more.  I learned at least one thing I had never heard before, and Steve’s just a fun guy to talk to regardless of topic, so hopefully you’ll find it as interesting as I did.

Next week, we’ll be recording our third guest, Dave Shea, on the afternoon of Wednesday, October 17th (a week from today!).  In addition to being a pretty darned fantastic designer, Dave is of course the mastermind behind the groundbreaking CSS Zen Garden.  We’ll spend our time talking about that and other products of Dave’s brilliance, like CSS Sprites and Chalkwork Icons, as well as find out what he’s been doing of late.  Jen and I hope you’ll join us!

The episode is up on 5by5, where there are a whole bunch of links to things that came up in the conversation; as well as on iTunes—so pick your favorite channel and listen away!  If you are an iTunes listener, Jen and I would be deeply grateful if you could give the show a quick review and rating, but please don’t feel that you’re somehow obligated to do so in order to listen!  We’ll be more than happy if people simply find all this as interesting as we do, and happier still if you find the shows interesting enough to subscribe via RSS or iTunes.

Guests are lining up for the next few shows, which will come about once every other week.  Jen is preparing a standalone web site where we’ll be able to talk about new and upcoming episodes, have a show archive, provide show information and wiki pages, and much more.  Great stories and perspectives are being uncovered.  Exciting times!

Hailing from Sydney, Australia, John by himself has seen and done more on the web than most web teams put together.  First encountering the web in the early 1990s, he built one of the very first CSS tools, Style Master, and a number of other web development tools; published a wealth of information like support charts and free courses; wrote the deeply insightful and far-seeing article “A Dao of Web Design”; influenced the course of the Web Standards Project; and founded a successful international conference series that continues to this day.

We’re incredibly excited to have John as our inaugural guest, and hope you’ll join us for the live recording this Thursday, September 20th at 6pm Eastern/3pm Pacific.  That’s also Friday, September 21st at 8am Sydney time, and 2200 UTC if you want to calculate your own local offsets.  The time zone dance is the reason we’re recording the first show at that particular time.  Moving forward, the plan is to record on Wednesdays, usually mid-afternoon (US Eastern) but sometimes in the morning—again, depending on the time zones of our guests.

Be able to say you were there when it all started:  please join us for the live recording, and subscribe to get the finished podcasts as they’re released.  We already have some great guests lined up for subsequent shows—more on that as we firm up dates and times—and some interesting plans for the future.  We really hope you’ll be there with us!

To me, history is vital.  As a species, we’ve made a plethora of mistakes and done myriad things right, and the record (and outcomes) of those successes and failures can tell us a great deal about how we got to where we are as well as where we might go.  (Also, from a narrative standpoint, history is the greatest and most authentic story we’ve ever told—even the parts that are untrue.)  The combination of that interest and my ongoing passion for the web is what led me to join the W3C’s recently formed Web History Community Group, where efforts to preserve (digital) historical artifacts are slowly coalescing.

But even more importantly, it’s what has led me to establish a new web history podcast in association with Jen Simmons of The Web Ahead.  The goal of this podcast, which is a subset of The Web Ahead, is to interview people who made the web today possible.  The guests will be authors, programmers, designers, vendors, toolmakers, hobbyists, academics: some whose names you’ll instantly recognize, and others who you’ve never heard of even though they helped shape everything we do.  We want to bring you their stories, get their insights and perspectives, and find out what they’ve been doing of late.  The Mac community has folklore.org; I hope that this podcast will help start to build an similar archive for the web.  You can hear us talk about it a bit on The Web Ahead #34, where we announce our first guest as well as the date and time for our first show!  (Semi-spoiler: it’s next week.)

Jen and I have took to calling this project The Web Behind in our emails, and the name stuck.  It really is a subset of The Web Ahead, so if you’re already subscribed to The Web Ahead, then episodes of The Web Behind will come to you automatically!  If not, and you’re interested, then please subscribe!  We already have some great guests lined up, and will announce the first few very soon.

I haven’t been this excited about a new project in quite some time, so I very much hope you’ll join Jen and me (and be patient as I relearn my radio chops) for a look back that will help to illuminate both our present and our future.

Writing to the Norm

No, not the fat guy on “Cheers.”  Actually, it’s a fundamental issue every Web author needs to know about and appreciate.

Web browsers are written by different people.  Each person has their own idea about how Web documents should look.  Therefore, any given Web document will be displayed differently by different browsers.  In fact, it will be displayed differently by different copies of the same browser, if the two copies have different preferences set.

Therefore, you need to keep this principle foremost in your mind at all times: you cannot guarantee that your document will appear to other people exactly as it does to you.  In other words, don’t fall into the trap of obsessively re-writing a document just to get it to “fit on one screen,” or so a line of text is exactly “one screen wide.”  This is as pointless as trying to take a picture that will always be one foot wide, no matter how big the projection screen. Changes in font, font size, window size, and so on will all invalidate your attempts.

On the other hand, you want to write documents which look acceptable to most people.  How?  Well, it’s almost an art form in itself, but my recommendation is that you assume that most people will set their browser to display text in a common font such as Times at a point size of somewhere between 10 and 15 points.  While you shouldn’t spend your time trying to precisely engineer page arrangement, you also shouldn’t waste time worrying about how pages will look for someone whose display is set to 27-point Garamond.

That’s from “Chapter 1: Terms and Concepts” of Introduction to HTML, my first publication of note and the first of three tutorials dedicated to teaching HTML in a friendly, interactive manner.  The tutorials were taken down a couple of years ago by their host organization, which made me a bit sad even though I understood why they didn’t want to maintain the pages (and deal with the support e-mail) any longer.

However, thanks to a colleague’s help and generosity I recently came into possession of copies of all three.  I’m still pondering what to do about it.  To put them back on the web would require a bit more work than just tossing them onto a server, and to make the quizzes fully functional would take yet more work, and after all this time some of the material is obsolete or even potentially misleading.  Not to mention the page is laid out using a table (woo 1995!).  On the other hand, they’d make an interesting historical document of sorts, a way to let you young whippersnappers know what it was like in the old days.

Reading through them, now sixteen years later, has been an interesting little trip down memory lane.  What strikes me most, besides the fact that my younger self was a better writer than my current self, is how remarkably stable the Web’s fluidity has been over its lifetime.  Yes, the absence of assuredly-repeatable layout is a core design principle, but it’s also the kind of thing that tends to get engineered away, particularly when designers and the public both get involved.  Its persistence hints that it’s something valuable and even necessary.  If I had to nominate one thing about the Web for the title of “Most Under-appreciated”, I think this would be it.

As the engineering staff at Netscape prepared a new release of Mozilla, the browser off which we branched Navigator, those of us in the Technology Evangelism/Developer Support (TEDS) team were testing it against high-ranked and partner sites.  On a few of those sites, we discovered that layouts were breaking apart.  In one case, it did so quite severely.

It didn’t take much to see that the problem was with sliced images in layout tables.  For some reason, on some sites they were getting pushed apart.  After a bit of digging, we realized the reason: the Gecko engine had updated its line-layout model to be more compliant with the CSS specification.  Now images always sat on the baseline (unless otherwise directed) and the descender space was always preserved.

This was pretty new in browserdom, because every other browser did what browsers had always done: shrink-wrapped table cells to an image if there was no other cell content.  The only problem was that behavior was wrong.  Fixing the flaws in the CSS implementation in Gecko had broken these sites’ layouts.  That is, it broke them in standards mode.  In quirks mode, Gecko rolled its behavior back to the old days and did the shrink-wrap thing.

We got in touch with the web team at one of the affected sites, a very prominent social networking site (of a sort) of the day, and explained the situation.  We already knew they couldn’t change their DOCTYPE to trigger quirks mode, because that would break other things they were doing.  We couldn’t offer them a simple CSS fix like td img {vertical-align: bottom;}, because their whole layout was in tables and that would throw off the placement of all their images, not just the sliced ones.  All we could offer was an explanation of the problem and to recommend they class all of their sliced images and use CSS to bottom them out, with assurances that this would cause no change in other browsers.

Their response was, in effect:  “No.  This is your problem.  Every other browser gets this right, and we’re not mucking around in our templates and adding classes all over just because you broke something.”

The truth, of course, was that we were actually fixing something, and every other browser got this wrong.  The truth was not relevant to our problem.  It seemed we had a choice: we could back out the improvement to our handling of the CSS specification; or we could break the site and all the other sites like it, which at the time were many.  Neither was really palatable.  And word was we could not ship without fixing this problem, whether by getting the site updated or the browser changed.  Those were the options.

Let me reiterate the situation we faced.  We:

1. Had improved standards support in the browser, and then
2. Found sites whose layouts broke as a result
3. Whose developers point-blank refused to alter their sites
4. And we had to fix the problem

We couldn’t back out the improvement; it affected all text displayed in the browser and touched too many other things.  We couldn’t make the site’s web team change anything, no matter how many times we told them this was part of the advance of web standards and better browser behavior.  Two roads diverged in a yellow web, and we could choose neither.

So we found a third way: “almost standards” mode, a companion to the usual modes of quirks and standards.  Yes, this is the reason why “almost standards” mode exists.  If I remember the internal argument properly, its existence is largely my fault; so to everyone who’s had to implement an “almost standards” mode in a non-Gecko browser in order to mirror what we did, I’m sorry.

We made “almost standards” mode apply to the DOCTYPE found on the offending site—an XHTML DOCTYPE, I should point out.  While we were at it, we rolled in IBM’s custom DTD.  They were using it make their site validate while doing all kinds of HTML-invalid stuff, and they were experiencing the same layout problem.  And lo: a third layout mode was born.  All because some sites were badly done and would not update to accommodate our improvements.  We did it so as not to break a small (but popular) portion of the web while we advanced our standards support.

(By the way, it was this very same incident that gave birth to the article “Images, Tables, and Mysterious Gaps“.)

Now take that situation and multiply it by a few orders of magnitude, and you get an idea of what the IE team faces.  It’s right where we were at Netscape: caught between our past mistakes and a site’s refusal to accommodate our desire to improve support for open standards.

Some have said that Microsoft is in a unique position to take leadership and spread the news of improved standards and updating old sites to its customers.  That’s true.  But what happens when a multi-billion dollar partner corporation refuses to update and demands, under the terms of its very large service contract and its very steep penalty clauses, that a new version of IE not break (for whatever value of “break” you like) its corporate intranet, or its public e-commerce site?  It only takes one to create a pretty large roadblock.

For all we did in publishing great content to DevEdge, proactively helping sites to update their markup and CSS and JS to work with Gecko (while not breaking in other browsers), and helping guide the improvement of standards support in Gecko, we could not overcome this obstacle.  We had to work around it.

Looking back on it now, it’s likely this experience subconsciously predisposed me to eventually accept the version targeting proposal, because in a fairly substantial way, it’s what we did to Mozilla under similar conditions.  We just did it in a much more obscure and ultimately fragile manner, tying it to certain DOCTYPEs instead of some more reliable anchor.  If we could have given that site (all those sites) an easy way to say “render like Mozilla 0.9″ (or whatever) at the top of every page, or in the server headers, they might have taken it.

But had we offered and they refused, putting us back to the choice of backing out the improvements or changing the browser, would we have set things up to default to the specific, known version of Mozilla instead of the latest and greatest?  The idealist in me likes to think not.  The pragmatist in me nods yes.  What else could we have done in that circumstance?  Shipped a browser that broke a top-ten site on the theory that once it was in the wild, they’d acquiesce?  Even knowing that this would noticeably and, in a few cases, seriously degrade the browsing experience for our users?  No.  We’d have shipped without the CSS improvement, or we’d have put in the targeting with the wrong default.  We didn’t have version targeting, but we still made the same choice, only we hinged it on the DOCTYPE.

A short-term fix for a short-term problem: yes.  Yet had we not done it, how long would Netscape/Mozilla’s standards support have suffered, waiting for the day that we could add that improvement back in without breaking too many sites that too many people would notice?  Years, possibly.  So we put in a badly implemented type of version targeting, which allowed us to improve our standards support more quickly than we otherwise would have, and it has been with us for the more than half a decade since.

So maybe I’m more sympathetic to the IE predicament and their proposed solution because I’ve been there and done it already.  Not to nearly the same degree, but the dilemma seemed no less daunting for all the difference in scale.  It’s something worth keeping in mind while evaluating what I’ve said on this topic, and whatever I will say in the future.

In the end, the web form of this is pretty simple, even though it wasn’t simple to produce.  It’s just a series of images, one per year.  I have in mind a way to do it without the images, which would be nice, as that way the information would be accessible to the blind.  Right now, all the images just have empty alt values, I’m sorry to say.  Besides which, creating the same timeline out of structured content would be a fun challenge, albeit one I really don’t have the time to tackle right now.

A few notes:

• Internet Explorer has two lines, one for Windows and the other for Macintosh.  I did this because their release schedules often had little or nothing to do with each other.  The other browsers represented typically release cross-platform on or about the same day, and so each got a single line.

• The temporal resolution is one month.  In other words: no, I didn’t attempt to place the vertical connector bars so they correspond to the specific day of the month a browser was released.  In many cases, I don’t have that information—just the month and year of release.

• I was interested to discover that the “quietest” years in the timeline were 1999, 2002, and 2004 1999 and 2002.  (My earlier belief that 2004 was quiet was due to my having the wrong year for the release of Netscape 7.2.  Um, whoops.)

• Because the timeline was created for a session about CSS, the timeline starts in 1996 and doesn’t include pre-CSS browser versions.  I may extend it backward at some point, although that introduces interesting questions like whether or not to include Mosaic, Viola, Cello, and so forth; and whether to extend it all the way back to 1989.

• Yes, I’m missing browsers such as Konqueror and iCab, not to mention the whole forest of Gecko spin-offs like Camino and Flock.  Again, there’s the question of which browsers to include and which to omit.  This was dictated partly by perceived market share, but mostly by good old-fashioned laziness.

I’ll do my best to address any suggestions for improvement, though this is kind of a side project and so commands a comparatively small share of my attention.  Still, even if it never changes again, I’m happy that it’s finally out into the world.

I’ve heard some people are comparing this storm to the Blizzard of ’77, and a few with a slightly better sense of proportion have recalled the storm that hit the area in November of 1996.  Both strike me as rather specious comparisons.  The ’77 storm was near to epic in scope and intensity, dropping four or five feet and stranding a whole lot of travelers.  My paternal grandparents had dropped by to visit the day before it started and ended up staying several days longer than they’d planned; the snow on our roofed patio was three or four feet deep, and many drifts throughout our area were a dozen feet or more tall.  For 1996, we had four or five days of constantly falling dense, wet snow, and tornadoes and thunderstorms to boot.  This week’s storm mostly dumped the light fluffy snow you can clear away with a broom, assuming it’s not too deep.

The truth is that this week’s storm wouldn’t have been very remarkable twenty years ago.  It might have been one of the heaviest individual falls of a given season, and certainly would have caused some problems, but it wouldn’t have triggered historical comparisons.  I remember days with ambient air temperatures of -20°F (-29°C) and stiff winds, which drove the effective temperature down to -50°F (-45°C) or lower.  I remember snow feet thick on the ground which stayed on for weeks.  I remember tunneling through roadside snowbanks and building elaborate snowforts with the neighbor kids, snowy bus stops, sledding parties and ice skating.

Yeah, yeah, okay: “when I was your age…”.  That’s not actually my point.  What I’m trying to say is that for last couple of decades, we’ve had some very mild winters, and it made us complacent.  I don’t own boots, because it’s literally been years since I needed them.  I had cause to regret that as I cleared snow from our walks in my regular shoes.  Thankfully, we do have access to a snow blower, so I didn’t have to shovel, but that didn’t stop the snow from getting into my shoes.  Oh, that’s a cold feeling.

I stayed far away from any conventional media yesterday, mostly to spare myself the histrionics of local news forecasters and avoid the depressingly repetitive comment, “I guess so much for global warming, haw haw haw!”.  There’s only so much moronity I can stomach in a day.  Instead, we all stayed home (Carolyn’s preschool and Kat’s office both being closed, along with nearly everything else in the city) and played games, read books, and went outside for short periods to make snow angels, get cold-rosy cheeks, and eat a few mittenfuls of snow.  Then we came back in to sip hot drinks in front of the fireplace.

People sometimes ask me why I stay in Cleveland when I could find work no matter where I moved.  In response, I can only point out my window to the drifts of snow sparkling in today’s clear-sky sun and the bare brown trees that will, in a month or two, begin to bud green shoots and tiny flowers; the same trees that will be silhouetted against a lightning-torn sky and will roar as autumn winds rip through their branches and brilliant leaves.

While that is not the only reason I stay, I need no other.

Some other popular articles from my Netscape days gone by:

• Consistent List Indentation
• Defining Cross-Browser Tooltips
• Issues Arising From Arbitrary-Element Hover
• Understanding Underlines
• Liberty! Equality! Validity!

So far as I’ve been able to determine, some of the less technical pieces, like the interviews with Doug Bowman and Mike Davidson, are not available.  Not now, anyway.  Perhaps one day that too will change.

So—I’m still grappling somewhat with the idea that I’ve been a Web design influence to anyone, let alone for people like Nick and Keith.  A quick glance around will tell you I’m no designer.  If I wanted to pretend that I had an aesthetic, I could claim to be a Minimalist, but let’s be frank: my design skills are just not very sharp.  But that’s okay.  I’m content to help spread information about CSS and how to use it, thus allowing designers to get into using it more effectively and intelligently.

It’s an odd feeling to think of myself as An Influence (and that’s how the words sound in my head, at least in this context).  It’s much easier to think about the people who have influenced me.  So here’s my list of the people who have most influenced my activities, outlook, and career path over the past decade.  I expect this will read a bit like Message To The Messengers, but hey, I’ve been around for a while.  There are two things I’d like to make clear up front.  First, these are professional influences, not personal ones (although there is some overlap, of course).  So there are folks out there who have meant a great deal to me, just in other ways.  Second, these are more or less in the order they occurred to me.  No overt attempt at ranking should be inferred.

Jim Nauer

We were college roommates for a year, and not too much later on I worked for him at the University Microcomputer Labs (wall to wall Macintosh SE’s, baby!).  Shortly after that, I graduated from college and was hired by Library Information Technologies, so that made us co-workers.  All along, he’s been a friend.  In fact, he was over at our house yesterday afternoon to spend some time playing with Carolyn.  The Web-centric point of all this is that it was Jim who first dragged me in front of a Mosaic beta, getting me instantly hooked.  He pointed me to the HTML specification, and it was he who convinced me that well-formed markup was important when I tackled my first Web pages in late 1993.  Without that critical early guidance, I might easily have become a table-and-spacer hack, and never seen CSS for what it was.

Tantek Çelik

I’ve said before that Tantek is one of the sharpest thinkers I know, and that’s no less true today.  Furthermore, he’s someone who genuinely cares about doing the right thing and supporting the common good.  I always take his opinions and thoughts on the Web and its technologies seriously.  I may not always agree with him, but even in disagreement I find his insights to be invaluable.  In a way, it’s a pity that his name has come to be associated with the CSS hack he published, because that’s a tiny dot compared to the totality of his efforts on behalf of Web standards and Web design.  I wrote about some of that back when IE/Mac was discontinued.  If you’re a Web designer today, you owe Tantek more than you realize.

Todd Fahrner

Remember Agitprop?  If not, go read it; Todd’s observations on font sizing and styling are still relevant, and help explain a lot about how we got to where we are with font styling on the Web.  Remember the Box Acid Test, which eventually found its way into the CSS1 Test Suite?  That was him too.  You know DOCTYPE switching?  Todd’s idea.  When Todd retired from the Web, it was a sad day for us all, although I’m happy that he’s found activities that are more enjoyable for him.  If you’re a Web designer today, odds are you owe Todd far more than you realize.

David Baron and Ian Hickson

Or, as I sometimes think of them, The Wonder Twins of Mozilla.  Not that they look or act anything alike, and of course Ian works for Opera now, but anyway.  They pounded on me (via e-mail) until I finally understood the inline layout model, and were immensely helpful in making the first edition of CSS:TDG as good as it was.  They’ve both taught me a lot over the years.  They both put a lot of work into making Mozilla a great CSS rendering engine and making CSS itself a better specification.  They both care about standards.  It probably isn’t fair to lump them together, but that’s how I think of them.  (Probably because of their joint work on CSS:TDG.)

Jeffrey Zeldman

Jefferey’s a mensch.  I’m tempted to leave it at that, because what else matters?  And yet he’s also been an enormous force for good, helping found the Web Standards Project.  His writing is easy on the eye and ear, and it goes down smoother than silk.  He’s always trying to better himself and his understanding of how to do the right Web thing, sharing both what he knows and what he doesn’t know, and letting the rest of us learn along with him.

Steve Champeon

Anyone who’s subscribed to Webdesign-L for a while knows The Joy Of Steve.  Unless of course you annoy him, in which case he’ll tell you in detail.  That characterizes Steve himself, actually: he’s a man who cares a great deal about the details, and about getting them right.  If you’ve ever enjoyed the Color Blender, you can thank Steve for its existence, as it was his detailed explanation of how to calculate color midpoints that made me realize that, hey, it would be pretty easy create a tool to do that.  Furthermore, css-discuss is modeled in a great many ways on Webdesign-L, so his influence is felt there too.

Håkon Lie and Bert Bos

They were the lead authors of the CSS1 specification.  In the words of Stan Lee, ’nuff sed!

Chris Lilley

Chris passed on my early test suite work to folks at both Microsoft and Netscape, and was the person who extended the Working Group’s invitation to join as an invited expert.  His dry wit and genial outlook in WG meetings served as an example to me, and helped me mesh with the group much more smoothly than I might otherwise have done.  Fun trivia fact: Chris was moderator the session at WWW5 in which Peter Murray and I presented our paper on the Borealis Image Server.  Followup fun fact: Robert Thau, who presented before us about Apache, sat next to a guy in the audience and talked loudly with him throughout our entire presentation.

My final, but in no way smallest, person of influence must receive the honor posthumously: my mother.  For a listing of most of the reasons why, I refer you to the eulogy I delivered, but there’s at least one more reason that’s relevant here.

She taught me to believe in myself.

To John’s recollections, I would add Chris Lilley, who’s since been much more involved in SVG and other things; and Susan Lesch, who’s now at the W3C but back then was at macvirus.com.  (There’s a reason I didn’t link to that address, by the way.  If you go, make sure you can block popups.)

A more recent event of note is that it was a year ago today that the CSS Zen Garden opened its gates to the world.  Congratulations on an incredible first year, Dave.  I’m honored to have been able to contribute to the Garden in that time, and eternally grateful (and a little jealous) that you created such an awesome resource.  It opened a lot of doors, and a lot more eyes and minds.

Then there are the edge cases.  Google’s announcement of Gmail has now been reported by CNN, The New York Times, c|net, Wired, and more.  It sure seems like an April Fools Day joke on Google’s part, just like Pigeonrank, but heck, it could be real.  Here’s the thing: just because it got reported by major media outlets doesn’t make it true.

I found this out back at the very beginning of 2000.  You all probably remember the Y2K noise leading up to that point; there were reports that vendors had to certify pencils as Y2K compliant in order to sell them.  It got pretty silly.  In the middle of it all, as we went through month after month of analysis and certification of the systems at CWRU, one of the DMS gang said something like, “Are we sure that Aurora [the CWRU Web server] won’t suddenly think it’s January 1900?”  The response was, “I sure hope not, because then it would insist on using a telegraph to connect to the Internet.”  We started riffing on that idea, kicking around what the page design would look like, what kind of news would be there, turn-of-the-century pictures that should show up, and so on.

So we did it.  My co-worker Pam and I went down to the University Archives and found a number of photos that were of the right era and that were clearly allowed to be used (many of them had no known author and so would not pass into the public domain until 2020), and scanned them in.  I created a wood-grain design for the home page, including a modified badge that proclaimed us the “Yahoo! Most Wired College 1899″ site.  We had two places  on the page where the year was listed, and I had to deliberately introduce Y2K bugs in order to make them say “January 1, 1900″ on that day.  We set up a cron job to roll the old-timey graphics into place at the stroke of midnight on 1 January 2000, and went off to party.

By eight o’clock on the morning of the first, we had several dozen e-mails in the server contact inbox.  They were about evenly divided into people congratulating us on having a sense of humor, and people insulting us for being so stupid as to have suffered a visible Y2K bug on our public Web server.  (I’d like to think that at least some of those were tongue-in-cheek.)  By the end of the day, Wired had reported it as a real Y2K bug, even quoting our message apologizing that the server “believes that it is January of 1900,” and the next day the story was printed more or less verbatim in The Washington Post.  We ended up issuing a press release about it, and the joke design, which was intended to stay in place for a couple of weeks, lasted 33 hours before the administration said, “Yeah, uh-huh, very funny.  Get rid of it.”

As I write this entry, I have no idea if Gmail is an April Fools joke or not.  (Okay, that’s not true.  I have some idea that it’s a joke, but I’m not certain.)  In a way, it’s kind of irrelevant.  The whole situation has simply reminded me that those in the news media can be as easily duped as the rest of us, and that’s something worth remembering in the current political climate.