meyerweb.com

For them what might be interested, this Monday (July 2nd) I’ll be the guest on Off By One, a half-hour technology radio show originating from the studios of WCSB in sunny downtown Cleveland and is available on iTunes as well as via the station’s streaming audio. Locals can, of course, catch it at 89.3 MHz on their FM dials. The show starts at 12:30pm EDT and runs a half-hour, so it will be, y’know, off by 1:00pm. (Hee hee!)

This will be my first time on the air since Your Father’s Oldsmobile ended back in 2005 (unless you count my talk radio call-in earlier this month), and the first time I’ve done a live on-air chat about my professional work and life in about seven years. Bart, the show’s host, and I haven’t discussed any specific topics to be covered, so if you’ve ever wanted to find out what I’m like in an almost totally unrehearsed environment, well, now’s your chance. I’m looking forward to it.

Update [4 Jul 07]: a recording of the show is available via the “Off By One” weblog. Apparently I say “fractional update” a lot.

Among all the other stuff this past week, I let something slip off the radar: an interview with me over at the Lunartics blog. The interview was conducted via e-mail by Amy Armitage, who I briefly met last year at the Webmaster Jam Session in Dallas. It’s not your usual “why is CSS important” kind of interview; Amy likes to keep things fun while still covering serious questions. It’s definitely worth a read.

It also scoops news of a development I’ve never gotten around to mentioning: in October 2006, I was inducted as a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. It’s a pretty incredible honor, given that it’s an invitation-only body of 500 members including “David Bowie, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, Internet inventor and Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vinton Cerf, ‘Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening, Real Networks CEO Rob Glaser, and fashion designer Max Azria”. The fact that my name appears on the same list as those people is jaw-dropping enough. To me, it wasn’t the most stunning part by a long mile.

I’ll admit, though I’d heard of The Webbys, I assumed the IADAS was one of those name-collector groups, like those “Who’s Who in America” books where you pay to be listed. Instead, I found that the IADAS levies no membership fees, and I was deeply surprised and pleased to discover that they invite people based on their actual qualifications. How do I know? Because my welcoming letter didn’t praise my web design work. Instead, it cited my “dedication to promoting Web standards”, my “international recognition on the topics of HTML and CSS”, and proclaims that I’ve “helped inform excellence and efficiency on the Web”.

Yes, the text string “HTML and CSS” was actually in the letter.

It’s a little difficult to express how important this recognition is to me. See, most of the time, I’m introduced and perceived as an influential web designer, which is frankly insulting to actual web designers everywhere. If you aren’t reading this post via RSS, look around. Does this look like influential web design? Hell no. At best, we can call meyerweb’s design minimalist and maybe—maybe—possessed of a certain elegance. And it only took me five years and ripping off ideas from Khoi Vinh to get here!

But I’ve never claimed to be a designer. I think the perception that I am one arises because I get linked to from people who really are designers. I’ve always claimed to be a communicator. I’m someone who’s done his best to explain, promote, and advance the technologies that let designers do their work. I’ve invested tons of time and effort into making good web design easier without sacrificing clean and semantic markup. I wouldn’t say that work is done by any stretch, but there’s been a lot of progress. Sometimes I forget just how much.

And so, to be invited to join the IADAS not for what I’m usually thought to be, but actually for who I am—it’s an indescribable feeling. A fantastically good one, certainly! But not one I could describe no matter how many words I threw at the problem.

It’s a delicious irony, and I do so love my irony: my powers of communication fail me when I wish to express my feelings over being honored for my communicating, over all those years, my love of the web and my passion for getting it right and the inner workings of how to make that happen.

But I can at least say this:

Thank you. Thank you for coming to read my posts, for reading my books and articles, for listening to me speak. Thank you for being the other end of the conversation. Thank you for being open to what I have to say, and for responding with your insights and perspectives, all of which have changed me in untold ways. Thank you for making everything I’ve done and said and written about the web worth far more than what I put into it.

Thank you for making this honor possible.

A couple of interviews that involved me were recently released, and I’ve been very tardy in linking to them. Life has been like that of late: I passed a major career anniversary last week and completely failed to note it. I was lucky not to overlook Mother’s Day, which is not really something you want to do when there are children in the house.

So anyway, the interviews:

• Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, Jason Santa Maria at An Event Apart — a bit o’ chat from AEA Atlanta, conducted by the lovely and talented Amber Rhea of CSS Insider fame. At the beginning of the podcast, I learned something about Amber I hadn’t previously known. It was… odd. At least for me.
• Web 2.0 Show - Episode 18 - Eric Meyer — in which we talked about my career path and professional history, self-publishing, running an event, and getting started in CSS.

I’ll be showing up again on the Web 2.0 show as part of an ensemble cast in their discussion of ma.gnolia, but I don’t know when. I’ll probably linkblog it when it comes out.

Ya know, I remember when interviews were printed, not audible, which was preferable because I tend to sound more intelligent in print than I do in person. Of course, I also remember acoustic-couple modems, so maybe it’s not that I’m less intelligent so much as more senile.

At the risk of being a bit backward-looking, on 21 December 2005 I was quoted in the article “Year in Review: CSS, Standards, Microformats and Flash“. (And I wasn’t even the one who talked about microformats, Jon!) This was the second half of a year-end review by Stephen Bryant; part one, “The Highs and Lows of Web Design in 2005“, is also online and quotes many familiar names. I was going to blog both at the time, and, well… I forgot.

For historical purposes, here’s the whole block of text from which I was quoted, in response to the question “Generally speaking, did you see much progression in the adoption of Web standards this year? In CSS use? Can you give some specific site examples?”:

As in previous years, 2005 saw standards adopted more slowly than I’d have liked, but faster than in previous years. I think this was the year when it became self-evident that standards-oriented design is the way to go. I can’t remember the last time I had to defend the practice, and whenever that was, it wasn’t in 2005. At this point, it’s basically all over but the training. I think the biggest gap now is between the people who want to go standards-oriented, and their ability to do so. That’s not an easy gap to bridge, but I think we’ll get there.

I mean, it’s the point now that desktop applications are using XHTML and CSS to drive their layout. Just recently I discovered that Adium, a multi-service chat client for OS X, uses XHTML+CSS for its chat windows. [E]very chat session in Adium is just a single XHTML document that’s dynamically updated. Which means that you can define your own markup and CSS to create your own chat window theme. It’s amazingly slick and powerful, and some of the themes are just gorgeous. There are other programs doing similar things, and I expect the trend to continue.

The new-in-2005 CSS-driven sites that immediately come to mind: Apple, Slashdot, Turner Broadcasting, AlterNet, McAfee… and I’m sure there were hundreds of others I missed.

Hopefully this won’t lose me the bonus points Jeremy awarded me. C’mon, man—at least I didn’t post my answer to the question “Best books, blogs, design? Best CSS layout?”!

Speaking of AEA, the good people at AIGA released another podcast interview with Jeffrey Zeldman. Rumor has it they’ll have one coming soon starring Our Man Stan, and there might even be another from yours truly. Grab hold of their podcast feed if you’re interested in any of that, or in hearing from other designers in the future.

(One week to go. Woo hoo!)

Update: Jason’s interview is now available.

For those of you who’ve always wanted to hear me talk very quickly over a phone connection: AIGA has put up a podcast of me talking with Liz Danzico about design, code, and An Event Apart. At the end of last week, they published a similar interview clip of The Zeldman. There are more interview clips to come from each of us in the next three weeks, so keep an eye on the AIGA site or their feed.

Originally these weren’t quite podcasts because they weren’t part of a feed, and thus had no enclosure to download through your aggregator. AIGA has fixed that now, and you can grab the AIGA podcast feed via the Podcast directory page. Or, if you want, go to the previously-linked individual resource pages and download the MP3 files directly. Either one works for me.

A little while back, David Poteet of New City Media conducted an interview with me, and the much-edited version is not only a part of today’s UIEtips newsletter, but also published as a full article on the UIE web site. In it, I lay out my case for why standards-oriented design is a good thing from a non-technical purity-neutral point of view, and use eBay as my Exhibit A for a site that could reap big returns from moving toward using standards. Ethan has already called the article a “great read”, further cementing his reputation as the whacked-out loon of the standards world.

I have to be honest: reading the full transcription of the interview was a deeply shocking and humbling experience. In the past, when reading transcripts of news interviews and commentary shows, I’ve winced and clucked over the mangled syntax of the people being transcribed. False starts, weird shifts, strange commas, unfinished sentences, mind-number repetition, long rambling assaults on syntax and coherence—what was wrong with these people? Are these the best minds our society can produce? Can none of them do so much as utter a sentence with a clear point and progression? How many “you know”s does one person really need?

Then I read the transcription of me, and was utterly horrified. I sounded exactly like everyone else! Worse, at times. Here’s but one example, from a portion of the interview that didn’t get used in the edited version. (Note that this was conducted before I moved to my current host; so far as I know I’m no longer in danger of hitting any caps.)

Yeah, you’re talking about actually, you know, reducing the bandwidth bill and saving money, in that sense. I mean, for most people, for my site, MeyerWeb, I’m actually getting close to, I’m having some bandwidth, I’m getting close to hitting a bandwidth ceiling with my current provider –

And then, not five seconds later:

It’s less of an issue because I’m paying more, 30, 40, 50, whatever number of dollars per month and as long as I don’t put up The Matrix Reloaded for people to download and, you know, they use several terabytes worth of data in a month, you know, that’s what I pay. I don’t have to pay extra bandwidth. That gets rolled into the cost.

The horror. The horror!

Thankfully, the published version of the interview makes me sound a good deal less like an epileptic chimp—so you might want to check it out, if you have a few spare minutes.

You know, a lot of people have told me I write like I speak. Apparently, they were all being very, very kind to me.

You probably know that I’m a long-time Macintosh user, going back to the days of the single-floppy Mac SE. At one point, I worked in a computer lab that had a “Changing the world, one person at a time” poster on the wall. Every single one of my books, articles, and other resources has been written or developed on a Mac. So you can imagine how thrilled I am to be featured in an Apple Pro article. Not only can you find out a little bit about how I got into this whole CSS thing, but see a picture of me dropping some fat horns on my listeners.

I’ll put this Pro file on the shelf with being made a comic strip character as “ways to know I’ve really made it”. But you know what really told me I’d arrived? Discovering that someone had created a Wikipedia entry about me. It was a pretty stubby page at the time, but its mere existence was enough to drop my jaw into my lap. Now I find myself wondering if I should edit my own entry to include a full biography and related links, or if that would in some way be incredibly gauche. (And asking someone else to do it for me would just be gauche by proxy, which is worse.)

It’s an odd thing to be famous, even when the fame is limited to a specific field of activity. As a matter of fact, I was recently asked to write an article about the “fame game” and I’m still mulling over how to tackle it. See, when you get right down to it, being well-known is both a reward and a restraint. When people look to you, there’s a certain set of expectations that gets imposed upon you, whether you want them or not. You’re supposed to always be right, always be fair, and always be in agreement with whoever’s looking to you. None of these things are possible.

Nevertheless, I am where I am because I worked to get here (and was lucky), and I’ve no real complaints about the position I occupy. All told, it’s not a bad thing. It isn’t even a good thing. It just kind of is.

So there’s still the question of what I might write about the “fame game”. As it was posed to me, the editor was interested in my thoughts on “how influential designers and developers must balance ‘responsibility’ to the community with their own need to say what’s on their mind and use their clout to get good things done”. In many ways, it’s the classic “how do you feel about being a role model?” question. I’m not entirely sure I’m qualified to answer the question, although I do have some ideas. I often wonder what the community thinks, though.

So I’ll throw it out to you lot: in your personal opinion, how should influencers balance community responsibility with personal expression—or does there need to be a balance at all?