Jeffrey Zeldman: King of Web Standards

As a pioneer of standards-based design, he helped put an end to the browser wars and made Web sites available to all

by Jessie Scanlon

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It's hard to remember what the Web was like in 1995, when Jeffrey Zeldman designed his first site. But suffice it to say that in those days "WWW" might as well have stood for the Wild West Web—there were no rules and no best practices. In a way, it was a time of great experimentation. But Zeldman soon came to see the flip side: The chaos was leading to user frustration and spiraling development and maintenance costs that threatened healthy development of the Web.

At the time, Zeldman was working as an art director at an advertising agency, and a client wanted a Web site. That project launched a new career that now includes the 11-person New York design consultancy Happy Cog; the Webzine A List Apart; the traveling conference An Event Apart; and a new book imprint—all dedicated to Web design. Perhaps most important, Zeldman helped to pioneer the movement known as standards-based design—a yawn-inducing term that basically ensures that a Web site can be used by someone using any browser and any Web-enabled device.

This concept may seem obvious today, but during the Browser Wars of the 1990s, Microsoft (MSFT) and Netscape each claimed close to 50% of the market, and their browsers were almost entirely incompatible. It wasn't uncommon to type in a URL and find that the site didn't work. Companies eager to open their virtual doors had to invest in multiple versions of their sites. In short, it was a bad situation for businesses and consumers alike. Yet the browser makers were behaving as many software companies do—by trying to out-feature the competition with the introduction of new proprietary technologies.

Chaos and Lawlessness

"There could be no filmmaking without industrywide agreement on frame rates, lenses, and audio recording equipment," argued Zeldman, and the flourishing Web was no different. In fact, the Web already had standards or nonproprietary technologies recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The industry organization was founded by WWW inventor Tim Berners-Lee along with the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and the Swiss particle physics lab CERN to create guidelines and ensure that Web technologies work well together.

Some standards defined the basic structural languages of the Web—the piece of code that defines something as a headline, for instance—while others established the language used for the presentation of content. The problem was that although the standards existed, they were widely flouted.

"The Web standards movement was a bottom-up thing in response to the top-down communities that weren't being responsive," says Jeffrey Veen, manager of user experience for Google's (GOOG) Web applications, who served as executive director of interface design for Wired Digital back in the Wild West days. "Both Microsoft and Netscape came to HotWired [as it was then called] to show us early builds of their version 4.0. We told them you're not using this, you're not using that, you're building things in the wrong direction, and we're not going to support your browser." "This and that" included inconsistent support for standards such as CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), for instance, and incompatible versions of DHTML or "Dynamic HTML."

Getting Organized

In 1998, Zeldman co-founded the Web Standards Project (WaSP), a coalition of designers and developers with a message for the industry. As the organization's official history page puts it: "If Netscape and Microsoft persisted in building ever more incompatible browsers, the cost of development would continue to skyrocket, tens of millions of people would find themselves locked out, and the Web would fragment into a digital tower of Babel."