The Web Ahead

The finished product was published last Friday morning. I know it’s a bit of a lengthy beast, but if you’re at all interested about how we got to where we are with CSS, you might want to give this a listen: The Web Ahead, Episode #18. Available for all your finer digital audio players via embedded Flash player, iTunes, RSS, and MP3 download.

My deepest thanks to Jen for inviting me to be part of the show!

I don’t think that metaphor made any sense at all.

Anyway, here’s what I’ve had to say so far:

• The Geek Talk: Eric Meyer — a brief e-mail interview I did a week or so back. Want to know my favorite color? Applications? What I think of CSS3? What I intend to do this year? A recent inspiration? Read and enjoy.

• The Pipeline, Episode #19 — a half-hour interview with Dan Benjamin. We talked very little about CSS and a lot about how I got started with the web, why I’m still with it nearly two decades later, and why I believe quality is everything. This was a very interesting interview because I went into it entirely cold: we didn’t discuss topics, length, or really anything at all beforehand. We just jumped in. Refreshing, maybe a little unnerving, but a lot of fun, not least because Dan is a master interviewer. Probably one of the most personal interviews I’ve ever done.

…and speaking of Dan, he’ll be the co-host (along with Jeffrey Zeldman) in my next public appearance: Episode 12 (Thursday, 15 July 2010) of The Big Web Show. The incomparable Andy McMillan and I are the scheduled guests and the topic of conversation will be web conferences—what goes into them, how to found one, how to help it grow, and so on. I’m really looking forward to it, being especially interested in what Andy has to say about his experiences with the Build Conference, and I hope you are too!

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.

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.

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.

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?”!

(One week to go. Woo hoo!)

Update: Jason’s interview is now available.

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.

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.

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?

Enough about my former employer; let’s have me talk for a bit. I did just that with Russ Weakley of Maxdesign and the Web Standards Group, and the result is now available for your enjoyment, or for your frustration if you’re of certain persuasions. Font-size zealots of all kinds, I’m looking in your direction.

There was more stuff I was going to talk about, but a severe cold/stomach bug/allergy condition has my brain operating at about one-fifth its usual speed. Maybe it’ll come back to me tomorrow. The only reason I’m even typing this entry is that I accidentally took a daytime medication instead of the nighttime equivalent, so now instead of sleeping off the illness I’m propped up in bed snuffling my way through it. Bleah.

Speaking of books, the second edition of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide is now available pretty much everywhere. Over at Amazon, its sales rank has been hovering around 200 for a couple of weeks now, so that’s pretty cool. I’ve heard from a few readers who already have their copies, and some errata reports have started to come in. Joy! It’s always frustrating to finish a book, because I know that the errors that got missed will immediately be spotted by all the readers. No matter how hard we tried, some errors are going to slip through. The perfectionist in me quails at that knowledge.

But then, releasing a new book does afford me the chance to be amused by reader reviews. Here’s one that had me chuckling:

i understand the basics of css already, i just needed something to outline the syntax and concepts in css2 and then just function as a reference. this book did neither, and i’ve found it to be a complete waste.

Yeah, I guess you probably would. Say it with me, sparky: “Definitive Guide.” Not “Reference.” It’s not an outline, and wasn’t when the first edition came out. If you need a reference with a quick outline, you could always try the CSS2.0 Programmer’s Reference, which has, of all things, an outline of the syntax and concepts of CSS2 and provides a full property reference. Amazing.

I know you aren’t supposed to judge a book by its cover, but sometimes you can get a little guidance from its title.

Anyone who reads Italian might be interested in an interview with me conducted by Marco Trevisan. For those who don’t do as the Romans do, the English version should be available in the near future.

Update: Gini‘s sister is doing better, although she was evicted from the hospital even though still suffering a lot of pain. Ferrett tells me that it looks like some of meyerweb’s readers did contribute to the support fund, and again, Kat and I both thank you for reaching out.

Also bear in mind that I didn’t buy an Airport base station because I didn’t want to spend that much on a wireless extension to my existing wired network. I’ve been looking at the LinkSys WAP11, as I have a LinkSys router already and the price is right, but I’ve been reading online that its range is limited and I want to cover three floors of the house, plus the front and back yards. As long as I can good signal at a fifty-foot range from the station, and moderate signal up to one hundred feet, I’ll be more than fine. I found a how-to on hacking the WAP11 to boost its transmission power, but I don’t know if the current firmware still allows the hack. What does sort of bother me is that the WAP11 won’t pass through AppleTalk packets. It’s not that I do tons of AppleTalk, but that it bothers me buying an access point that absolutely slams that door shut. I will want to communicate between my Classic OS desktop and the TiBook, obviously.

Anyway—have need for wireless access point, need to cover multistory house, will want Mac-to-Mac communication, looking for recommendations. The more plug-and-play, the better. Meantime, I have to figure out how to best go about repartioning the hard drive into my usual triad of boot volume, data volume, and scratch-space volume. And then I have to come up with a catchy name for this beast. Oh, the crosses I bear.

Somehow I missed the fact that Opera Journal published a short interview with me on Tuesday and Wednesday. You should probably start with part one, and then follow it to part two. I think it got broken up because I spent some time answering the first question, but it really is short—five questions, if I counted correctly. But not a Friday Five.

I indicated yesterday that DevEdge would likely not be updated. That’s because the standards evangelism team has been disbanded. Two team members were among those let go, and the rest of us went to different places within AOL. I’m really not sure what made the difference between those who were axed and those who were not.

As much as I’m unhappy that we’ve come to this pass, I don’t regret for one second having taken the position of Standards Evangelist. While it lasted, Netscape funded close to ten full-time and part-time positions whose job was to promote standards, not proprietary technology, and to spread that message as far and wide as possible. They may well have been doing it for selfish reasons, but that hardly matters. We were able to inform, educate, and proactively help a lot of sites get better cross-browser behavior by using standards. In our own way, we helped make things better, and we made a difference.

So here’s to Bob Clary, Marcio Galli, Katsuhiko Momoi, Chris Nalls, Tristan Nitot, Arun Ranganathan, Doron Rosenberg, and Susie Wyshak. We fought the good fight and created a lot of great material, including information about the redesign of DevEdge itself.

Moving forward, I have to decide what I will do: accept the position into which I was reassigned, turn down the reassignment and look for another position within AOL, or decide to take the severance package and leave AOL altogether. This isn’t exactly an easy call, partly due to the economy, but also because the importance of standards to AOL is not, at present, clear to me. Perhaps the message has sunk in and there will be a place for someone like me, and perhaps not. I hope to find out which over the next week or so. No matter what, I face some tough choices, but at least I have choices. I can’t say the same about 50 former co-workers.

Meanwhile, DMX Zone just this morning (my time) published an interview with me, so those interested in such things can click away. Love that Dark Jedi groove thang! [insert lightsaber sound effects here]