Posts in the Interviews Category

There is a documentary about the history of the web.  It’s an hour long, and now it’s free to watch.

Also, I’m in it — a fair amount, it turns out.  Please do not let this dissuade you from watching it.

I’m blogging about this because there’s a little bit of a backstory.  Jeffrey and I were backers of the film during its crowdfunding campaign.  At that point, Jeffrey had been already interviewed for the film, but even beside that, we really wanted the film to exist in the world.  So much of the history of our craft has been lost, or simply untold.  So we put some of AEA’s resources into supporting the project, and were glad to see it meet its funding goal.  So, you know, full disclosure and all: I’m a backer of the film, and I’m in it.  Jeffrey, too.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out most of the people who appear in the film were also backers of the film.  This probably makes it sound like people paid to be featured, but nothing could be further from the truth.  It’s the exact opposite: the people featured in the film are featured because they’re the kind of people who would badly want to see such a thing exist in the first place, and lend material support to the effort.  They’re all people who truly love the craft and want to see it documented, explained, and shared with as many people as possible.  The kind of people who learned from others, and in turn taught others, freely sharing what they knew.  In some cases, paying out of pocket to share what they knew, in hopes that the sharing would help someone.  I think that ethos comes through bright and clear in the film.

If you want to understand the heart of the web, understand that.  It was designed and built and fundamentally shaped from its earliest days by people who wanted it to be open and free and accessible to anyone, whether as a consumer or a creator.  Those were the founding principles.  They shape every aspect of the web we know, for good or ill or otherwise.

Some time after the film was crowdfunded — about a year and a half, I think — Matt, the film’s director, editor, and all-around prime mover, drove up from his office in Pittsburgh to my office in Cleveland to shoot some of the last segments to be recorded.  So he asked me the questions he still wanted someone to answer, or that had arisen as he’d started editing all the other interviews.  Thus I show up a lot in the first half of the film, talking about the early days of the web, and am mostly absent in the second half, as the younger crowd talks about the great stuff that happened as the web matured.  Which is proper, I think.

But! I hasten to add, there are way, way smarter and better-spoken people in the film than me, all the way through, sketching out the path this field took and what makes the web so incredibly compelling and powerful even today.  It’s company I’m honored and humbled to be part of.  If you can spare an hour, say a lunch break, I highly recommend you devote it to What Comes Next is the Future.

• What Comes Next… was published on Thursday, December 29th, 2016.
• It was assigned to the Interviews and Web categories.
• There has been one reply.

All of a sudden, I’m on three different podcasts that released within the last week.  Check ‘em out:

• The Web Ahead #115  —  recorded LIVE! at An Event Apart Nashville, I joined Rachel Andrew, Jeffrey Zeldman, and host Jen Simmons for an hour-plus look at the present and future of web design and web design technologies, featuring a number of really sharp questions submitted by the audience as we talked.  We got Nostradamic with this one, so warm up the claim chowder pots!
• User Defenders #20  —  Sara and I talked with host Jason Ogle for just over an hour about Design for Real Life, digging deep into the themes and our intentions.  Jason really brought great questions from having just read the book, and I feel like Sara and I kept our answers focused and compact.
• The Big Web Show #144  —  Jeffrey and I talked for just under an hour about Design for Real Life and the themes of my AEA talk this year.  This one’s more of a ramble between two friends and colleagues, so if you prefer conversation a little looser, this one’s for you.

Share and enjoy!

• Invisible Airwaves was published on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2016.
• It was assigned to the Commentary, Interviews, and Web categories.
• There have been no replies.

If you prefer hearing voice to reading text, I was on a couple of podcasts recently and would like to share; also, I have some live appearances coming up soon.

The first podcast is a 16-minute segment on the eHealth Radio Network, talking about designing for crisis.  This was recorded shortly before AEA Seattle and HxRefactored, which is why I talk about HxRefactored in the future tense.  Much as was the case with my talk at HxRefactored, this concentrates on the topic of designing for crisis in a medical/health care context, and as it turns out, it’s only slightly shorter than was my HxR talk.

The second is both longer and a bit more recent: I talked for an hour with Chris and Dave at Shop Talk Show about flexbox, inline layout, the difficulties of the past two years, and how I’ve changed professionally.  It doesn’t shy away from the emotional side, and some listeners have described it as “heart-rending” and “sobering”.  So, you know, fair warning.  On the other hand, I call Chris Coyier a “newb” about a minute in, so there’s that.

In the Shop Talk episode, we talk briefly about Facebook’s On This Day feature, which had just launched but I hadn’t seen at that point.  Yesterday, it finally popped up in my Facebook timeline.  I had observations, and will probably write about them soon.  First, though, I need to finish up my slides for Fluent, where I’ll be giving my talk “This Web App Best Viewed By Someone Else”.  I get 13 minutes to tell the audience that they… well, I don’t want to spoil it for anyone.  (Plus there’s another slide deck I need to finish up for next week, but that’s for a private engagement, so never mind that now.)

In May, I’ll once again be presenting the hour-long version of “Designing for Crisis” at An Event Apart Boston.  There are still some seats left if you’d care to join us; it’s a pretty great lineup, and as usual I’m feeling a wee bit intimidated by the brilliance.  Attendees have been telling us that this year’s lineup is one of the best they’ve seen, making AEA worth every penny and then some, so you’d get way more out of the show than just hearing me.

In case you’re wondering (and I also mentioned this on ShopTalk), I won’t be at AEA San Diego in June.  Part of me very much wants to be, but an accident of scheduling made it inadvisable: the show starts June 8th, the day after the first anniversary of Rebecca’s death and what would have been her seventh birthday.  I don’t know that I’ll be in any shape to hold brief conversation, let alone stand on stage in front of a few hundred people and give an hour-long talk, in the days immediately following.  Rather than risk it, we (the AEA team and I) decided to have someone else take my place at the San Diego show, and that show only.  I intend to be at all our other shows this year.

Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to write about attending not-web-design conferences in the near future.  I find such experiences entertainingly, and in some ways refreshingly, different.  I recommend it.

• Talk Talk was published on Wednesday, April 15th, 2015.
• It was assigned to the An Event Apart, Interviews, and Speaking categories.
• There have been no replies.

As the year draws to a close, I have a few bits of podcast news to help fill the lonely hours between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

The first is that Jen and I have done two more “The Web Behind” episodes since the last time I mentioned it, and they were both really fun.  Back on November 28th, I interviewed Tom Bruce of the Cornell Legal Information Institute about the very earliest days of the web, parallels between the arguments then and the arguments now, writing the first Windows web browser more or less from scratch, his invention of marquee, and the time he took a road trip to NCSA with Tim Berners-Lee to help bring cgi-bin to the web.

Then on December 20th, I got Tantek Çelik on the line to discuss how the web is like OpenDoc, why the web didn’t impress him the first time he saw it, the creation and interesting features of Internet Explorer 5 for Mac, how interviewing developers working in the field helped shape IE/Mac and thus the browsers that followed it, and how DOCTYPE switching came to be (and who thought it up).

On the other side of the microphone, I was honored to be the guest for the first episode of Besquare’s “12 Days of Podcasts”, which started on Boxing Day and continues on through the Feast of the Ephiphany.  We talked for just over half an hour about CSS past and future, conferences, how I got started on the web, and ways to land a job in the web industry.  As I publish this, they’re just three episodes into the series, so it’s not too late to jump in.

Happy listening, and a joyous New Year to you and yours!

• Audio Waves was published on Friday, December 28th, 2012.
• It was assigned to the Interviews and The Web Behind categories.
• There have been no replies.

Last Thursday, I had the rare honor and privilege of chatting with Jen Simmons as a guest on The Web Ahead .  (I’ve also chatted with Jen in real life.  That’s even awesomer!)  As is my wont, I completely abused that privilege by chatting for two hours — making it the second-longest episode of The Web Ahead to date — about the history of the web and CSS, what’s coming up that jazzes me the most, and all kinds of stuff.  I even revealed, toward the end of the conversation, the big-picture projects I dearly wish I had time to work on.

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!

• The Web Ahead, Episode #18: Me! was published on Monday, March 5th, 2012.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Interviews categories.
• There have been three replies.

All of a sudden, people have been asking me to yak about myself and stuff that I know (or at least think I know).  These things tend to come in waves, and right now I’m surfing like a search engine’s crawlerbot.

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!

• Text, Speech, Video was published on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010.
• It was assigned to the Interviews and Tech categories.
• There have been no replies.

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.

• ‘Off By One’ On 2 July was published on Saturday, June 30th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Interviews and Tech categories.
• There have been four replies.

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.

• I’d Like To Thank The Academy… was published on Saturday, February 3rd, 2007.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Interviews, Personal, Standards, and Web categories.
• There have been eight replies.