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For long-form interviews, news, and commentary about the WordPress ecosystem. This is the companion show to The WP Minute, your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every week.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack. So today's guest is someone I've wanted to interview for a very long time, Jeffrey Zeldman. You may know him as the co-founder of A List Apart and the Web Standards Project. He's been blogging since 1995. His accomplishments may be too numerous to list here, but it's safe to say that he's made a huge impact on the web. These days, he's an executive creative director at Automattic.
Jeffrey, welcome to the WP Minute. And thank you for being on with me today.
Jeffrey Zeldman (00:34)
Thanks for having me. This is great. Hey Eric, how you doing?
Eric Karkovack (00:38)
I am well, I'm so excited to talk to you because I feel like, now obviously you're so well known in the web space, but I feel like we have parallels in our careers a little bit because we both started around the same time. I started playing with HTML in 1995.
⁓ I know that you were a journalist and copywriter before going to the web. My first gig was actually in web design was as a ⁓ webmaster for my local newspaper making five bucks an hour. Hey, eventually they bumped me up to six. I didn't stay there that long though. But I want to ask what.
Jeffrey Zeldman (01:11)
Wow.
Wow.
Eric Karkovack (01:22)
drew you to web design back in those days.
Jeffrey Zeldman (01:25)
Well, at first I hated it, to be honest. ⁓ My friend, ⁓ a friend showed me the web and I was like, this will never catch on. Like AOL is so pretty. And you know, Apple had a thing and it was all pictures and you went into, I forget what it was called. AOL, know, beautifully, it was like beautifully designed space optimized for computers. ⁓ And
Eric Karkovack (01:34)
Ha
Jeffrey Zeldman (01:56)
I had a client, was working in advertising. had a client, Warner Brothers, Don Buckley, their VP of marketing, ⁓ said he wanted to do a website for Batman Forever.
We lied and said, yeah, we know what that is. And my colleagues and I made a website.
We barricaded ourselves in Steve McCarran's office, worked on it for three months, ⁓ launched it and how we got the account. We had the account as advertisers. Warner Brothers had an in-house team that was already doing online stuff, mainly for AOL, but they were getting ready to do it for ⁓
for the web and they presented first. They presented their idea first and they said, this is the Bat-Trove, T-R-O-V-E. Batman swings out on a rope and says, hi, I'm Batman. And I just went, Batman doesn't talk. I don't know why I said it. It was very rude. I was interrupting another company's pitch. I wasn't trying to be rude. It was just like, ⁓
an emotional moment or you know, but here's the thing. The client looked at me, looked me in the eyes like, ⁓ this guy gets it. And I knew at that moment that we were gonna win, and we did. ⁓ We didn't know what we were doing. There was almost nothing you could do on the web, so we invented a bunch of stuff, all of which I would later recant when the web standards movement started because it was like...
It wasn't, you know, it wasn't accessible. was browser specific. You had to use Netscape 1.1 to see it properly. ⁓ But I mean, websites, we had just gotten the ability to embed a ⁓ GIF image. I think JPEG was years away. I don't know, it was just, once I started doing it, I loved it so much.
I got into it by accident because of a client request, but I didn't love advertising the way I came to love web design. And I was okay at advertising. I'd done some halfway decent stuff, but I'd really struggled.
I loved the idea because I was sort of mentally childish. I loved the idea of making little films that would make people go, great, and then buy Doritos or whatever.
Eric Karkovack (04:30)
Yeah.
Jeffrey Zeldman (04:35)
I didn't love the idea of being an assistant to sales, even though that's what half the websites ended up being anyway, but it just felt so creative. We had to start from scratch creating an interface in a medium that wasn't really ready for interfaces yet. ⁓ We used a whole bunch of weird lo-fi tricks to create an animated bat flying toward the camera when you first got there.
Eric Karkovack (04:52)
Yeah.
Jeffrey Zeldman (05:03)
We had videos that were 300 by 200 pixels and took all night to download in a 14-4 modem and people were downloading them. So it was really fun. I really got into writing the copy for it, ⁓ setting the tone and I just loved it. And I quit advertising soon afterwards and just went, well, first I went to... ⁓
By the time, actually we'd already started the web standards project and ⁓ I was working, I worked for five months at a dot com firm and quit just before the bust because I said, I can do this myself. We don't, we don't need all these people and I can probably live on it. And that's what I did.
Eric Karkovack (05:47)
Good deal.
Well, I'm glad you brought up just how much you kind of had to invent on that site because for those of you watching and listening who maybe weren't around in the early web, were no standards at that point, right? I mean, we were just making it up as we went along. ⁓ There was HTML.
Jeffrey Zeldman (06:16)
There was HTML,
that was it. And it wasn't about visuals, no.
Eric Karkovack (06:21)
Yeah, we didn't have JavaScript yet. And we didn't
have CSS yet. ⁓
Jeffrey Zeldman (06:27)
not for another two years. And then
usefully not for probably another 10 years.
Eric Karkovack (06:32)
Exactly, yeah, the initial CSS was kind of low.
Jeffrey Zeldman (06:36)
It was awesome, but not predictable because the browser supported only parts of it and not necessarily correctly.
Eric Karkovack (06:45)
Exactly. And so how did you start getting involved in web standards? Like what drove you to that decision? this isn't working. We're building stuff that is too proprietary, maybe too buggy.
Jeffrey Zeldman (07:01)
⁓ Netscape 4 and IE 4 had come out. IE 3 had come out with the first support for CSS. And even though it was limited and not entirely correct per the specification, which to be fair to Microsoft, when the people made the specification, they didn't have any way of testing it. And they weren't thinking like designers. They were thinking like scientists.
So some of the defaults actually didn't make sense and whether padding got added or not and all that stuff.
So we have these four browsers and people were making four versions of their website. You couldn't even say just optimized for IE because which one or just optimized for Netscape because which one. The market was about, well, Netscape had dominated, but now it was about 50-50. And people who were doing this work were like, I make so much money by knowing the four different ways to make something. And I was on a bunch of
We had a bunch of mailing lists and news groups back then. I'm sure you participated in that too. And, I was in one, I don't remember the name of the news group, but, ⁓ George Olson and Glenn Davis were also in that group. Steven Champion, was in that group. And what we started talking about how frustrating it was to have four different, you know, models.
Eric Karkovack (08:16)
yes.
Jeffrey Zeldman (08:40)
None of which were permanent. ⁓
We just in that newsletter or in that series of mails, which I don't have anymore because I don't have Eudora anymore. I used to download my mail, not leave it in the cloud because there wasn't a cloud. Eudora was awesome. It was a great tool, but it was for system seven. I was still using system seven back then, but ⁓ anyway.
I wish I still had it. I wish it wasn't in a landfill or on a jazz drive somewhere in a storage unit in Sheboygan or wherever this stuff ended up. wish, because for historical reasons, it would be interesting to see who contributed the different ideas. But ⁓ I think WASP, think Glenn, Web Standards Project was one of the names we kicked around for like, let's make a group and just try something.
Eric Karkovack (09:16)
Haha.
Yeah.
Jeffrey Zeldman (09:39)
I think Glenn Davis talked about the WASP because was like, well, WSP could be WASP and WASPs are small little annoying bugs, but if enough of them are stinging you, you're going to feel it. And that's where we are as developers. We're going up against two huge companies, Microsoft and Netscape. They're huge and we're nothing. What we represent, if we...
position to message right, we represent hundreds of thousands of developers who are frustrated right now and designers who are frustrated right now. So that gives us power. We re it's like democracy, you know, it's one Senator, but theoretically they represent, you know, many constituents. We're not going to go into whether that is working at the moment or not. We're just going to go with, ⁓ that's how things seem to be them. So we, we.
called it Wasp and I sort of took over a lot of the writing and I designed the website and I made it orange because I thought Wasps were orange. I'm a city boy. I was surprised when I actually made the Wasp logo that Wasps really don't look like bugs in cartoons. They really look more like butterflies, right? But anyway, we got, we did another thing that was effective, which is
Eric Karkovack (10:53)
Yeah.
Jeffrey Zeldman (11:03)
In advertising, there's a thing called, there used to be a thing called a roadblock, Eric. And a roadblock was where, well, in America, there were three networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC. You'd buy a commercial on all three networks and you tell them, I want this to run in the first commercial break of the six o'clock news, let's say. There were three news networks. Everybody watched one of them. And in advertising, if your commercial was going, was, know,
playing on CBS and you're like, I don't want to see a commercial. You switch to NBC, same commercial, you'd switch to ABC, same commercial. So you'd see the message. It's kind of a gross thing. It can't be done anymore because we no longer have a, not a duopoly, but a triopoly, I guess. We no longer have three big networks that everybody watches. but we use that idea. I had started a list apart with a, ⁓
Eric Karkovack (11:53)
Yeah, yeah.
Jeffrey Zeldman (12:01)
a colleague from that newsletter. ⁓ Jeff Bean was working at Hotwired. ⁓ Glenn Davis was running CoolSight of the Day, or maybe it was Project Cool back then. might've already left CoolSight of the Day. Anyway, he was running either that first site that said, there's cool stuff to look at on the web. Here's a site we like today. Or his second one, which he might've started to get out of maybe, maybe... ⁓
I think he started the first one as an employee and they were like trying to take editorial control away from him or it weren't, he was, you know, he realized that there was more that he could do if he did it independently. So he anyway. And Steve champions web design L mailing list had like 2000 developers on it, but they were like the smartest developers on the web. Anyway, we had a bunch of us who were in this informal group.
We all published our announcement on the same day, demand that, you know, we said standards exist for a reason. ⁓ It is folly to keep bouslerizing the web. I can't think of the word. Alec, Alec Pollock was my partner. Alec, I'm very sorry. I'm an old man and I forgot your name for a second. I'm really sorry. Alec Pollock and Steve McCarran were the... ⁓
Eric Karkovack (13:23)
Haha
Jeffrey Zeldman (13:29)
huge, huge collaborators on ⁓ the Batman site, the Batman Forever site, and they were the two art directors. I mostly concerned myself with content and HTML. But ⁓ yeah, so we announced it and nobody could miss it. Jeff Bean wrote his thing, Steve wrote his, and we all, each of us wrote a passionate plea why this mattered to us.
And we got a lot of designers to join. The amazing thing was that after about a year, Microsoft and Netscape came around. Their engineers started saying, yeah, we want to work with you. Yes, we want to support these standards. It's in our interest too. They were initially competing. Like if you remember, Photoshop had competitors before Adobe owned everything in that space. And software designers would, ⁓ would
Eric Karkovack (14:22)
Yes.
Jeffrey Zeldman (14:28)
differentiate their products, right? In order to make them marketable, kind of like only the Cadillac gives you power steering or, you know, only the Lexus has double, I'm not a car guy. I haven't owned a car in like 30 years. So if you could imagine, I live in New York where you can't keep a car. Yeah, no, if you want, if you want a car still, yeah.
Eric Karkovack (14:51)
Well, that might be a little hard. But browsers were like that though, right?
I mean, IE was very, ⁓ very proprietary with a lot of the things that they had at that time. I still remember inheriting a client site that was built specifically for IE. And when you looked at it in Netscape, it was terrible. None of the effects worked and they were like beside themselves as to why that was happening. And I had to explain Microsoft, you know, has this certain stand thing that they do that's
Jeffrey Zeldman (15:10)
Right. Right.
Yeah,
And Netscape
did too. They introduced JavaScript, ⁓ which wasn't standardized for, know, Microsoft had JScript. They were similar, but worked differently. Finally, ECMA, ECMA, Engineering Consortium of Mid-America. I have no idea. I'm blanking on that there, but ECMA, a standards body like the W3C, but older. ⁓ Standardized.
Eric Karkovack (15:20)
Yeah, yeah.
Jeffrey Zeldman (15:49)
⁓ JavaScript, which for a while, because we were pushing on standards so hard, we would call it ECMA script. ⁓ Glenn Davis called it throat clearing script because ECMA script, I guess, is what he was thinking. But anyway, yeah, and we would have arguments with friends. Like I would have a friend says, do you know how much money I make by knowing the four ways to make this website? And I said, yeah, but if the client's willing to pay that, they're probably
equally willing to pay the same amount, but you make one version of the site and now you have money for photography, for copy editing, you know, proofreading. have illustration maybe. Like there's so many things you can do with that money besides make four versions of the same boring website. ⁓ Flash was already coming out, had just come out too. So that was another sort of stream in this chaos of
how things were netting out because people say, I just use Flash. And Flash was amazing in its capabilities, but it wasn't accessible by default. And I came in, I think I started out of laziness. I'm not gonna memorize these four different ways to make a paragraph space correctly. I wanna have one way.
Eric Karkovack (17:11)
Yeah.
Jeffrey Zeldman (17:14)
I was thrilled by CSS when I saw it in 1996. Microsoft made this gallery and even though it wasn't great CSS and it wasn't accurate necessarily, it was still amazing. knew because we start, when people take all night to download a 300 by 200 pixel video, they don't have a lot of speed. So I knew that it was really important to make what, you know, to respect bandwidth and CSS did that.
CSS, you could fill the page with green and then have giant red letters and you could create a double impression of the letters so that they had a faint, you know, blue background behind the red letters or whatever. Terrible. You're probably picturing something really ugly.
Eric Karkovack (18:01)
Something like I
would have made in the 90s, exactly.
Jeffrey Zeldman (18:04)
And I made two and I made in the nineties too, but also a really good designer could do amazing things with CSS. And I said about becoming a good designer, which was, know, so like the education and I, if you started as a webmaster, you probably, you know, the same thing, like you knew some basic things about the code. Now let's find out about lettering. Let's find out, you know,
how to lay out a page. Again, very limited at the time because CSS wasn't a page layout. It was, know, I want my headline, my headline level one to be this big and my headline level two to be that big. I don't know.
Eric Karkovack (18:52)
and my link colors.
That was a big thing back in the day, I remember.
Jeffrey Zeldman (18:55)
David Siegel hated the blue link, blue underlined link choice, and said red would be better because your eye responds to red and you know the click there. I mean, these are the kind of weird conversations we had back then, like as if links could only be one color, but CSS meant the links could be any color. And... ⁓
You could actually start to use what designers have known about for centuries. could, you know, use color relationships, just, and size relationships to communicate the meaning of the document, you know, so that people could tell, ⁓ this paragraph goes with this subhead because it's closer to it. And there's more space under this, under the last paragraph there before the next subhead, could start to do
what typographers and art directors have done, again, for centuries and create a layout that showed you how it worked so you didn't have to read instructions. I don't know about you, but didn't your first websites have like, you utilize the navigation bar, click on the navigation bar to...
find a topic or, know, we stop, we, you know, so we were stopping having to do that. It evolved quickly, nowhere near as quickly as AI now, but the slowness of the web standards movement was good because we broke fewer things and we had time to experiment with each thing and go, okay, now we have this capability. What does it mean?
Eric Karkovack (20:17)
yeah.
Jeffrey Zeldman (20:43)
And we would discover all the bugs that the browser makers didn't know about. Like if I italicize this word in IE for Windows, it pushes through the border of the containing block. And now the layout's broken. It's broken because I italicize something. I can bold it, but I didn't want it bold. I wanted it italic. What can I do? It was just like, well, you could talk to the browser maker. So it started. I think one of the things our movement was successful in besides
getting standards into browsers was it started what now goes on, which should have always been going on, which is that designers and developers work with standards bodies to experiment to say that here's what I can't do. Why is it impossible to do a masonry layout? Like, like, or why do I need JavaScript to control how things lay down on a page? That's silly. So
I'm proud of what we achieved and it was all of us. wasn't me. It was all of us, everyone in that group. You can go to webstandards.org. still up and you view the history of who contributed what. And after a few years, Glen and George left early and I was like, well, somebody's got to keep this going. And it felt like me. I felt like it was like driving by and you see a car crash and there's no hot, there's no ambulance. So you park your car.
get out and try to help the person until an ambulance arrives. It was like that. I was like, I'm not the most qualified person to talk about web standards. I barely know what I'm doing, which was a benefit because that meant I had to figure it out so I really understood it and explain it in the simplest language possible. And because of my advertising background, I know you don't sell features, you sell benefits. Nobody cares about features, but
make one version of your site and it works everywhere was a huge promise. ⁓ Even blind people can use it if you do this was a huge promise when people said, sell televisions, I don't have blind users. We'd be like, yeah, you do. Yeah, you do. Blind people buy things for their family. Blind people use the web all the time, just like everybody else. Yeah, you do. And there's blindness and then there's all kinds of low vision. Again, we started out with really basic
Eric Karkovack (22:56)
Absolutely.
Jeffrey Zeldman (23:05)
ideas of what we were achieving and gradually we learned more and more and we empowered the W3C. In fact,
I haven't met Tim Berners-Lee, but I met ⁓ Hocum Lee several times, the co-author, co-creator of CSS. And ⁓ he told me, we love what you're doing. We depend on contributions from our members to exist. So if we say, Microsoft, do this or screw off, ⁓ that's not going to be helpful. But if you do it and you say you represent
Eric Karkovack (23:41)
Yeah.
Jeffrey Zeldman (23:44)
200,000 developers who have signed a petition, that's their customer base. That's one of their customer bases. They have to work with agencies and developers that make stuff for the end users and for the companies that depend on their software. So yeah, we were able to, and once I took over, was able to make the tone gentler and talk like we're colleagues and I respect what you do and I could never do what you do. I'm talking to
people like...
Tantric Celic, friend of mine, lives in San Francisco, brilliant guy. He made IE5 for Mac. made the, I forget the name of the rendering engine, but it was the first engine to really seriously try to support a great deal of CSS accurately. I was talking to these much more brilliant people than me, just... ⁓
I would listen to their brilliant conversations that were sort of abstract, theoretical, academic, ⁓ to some degree, or just expressed in the language of academics. And I would go, they're trying to make it so this will work for everyone. That's a good thing. I just basically translated the thoughts of smarter people than me into benefit-oriented copy that you could present to your boss.
when he said, we don't have time for that, or we don't have time for accessibility. So a lot of it was persuasion. And then, of course, once the standards were in the browsers, the last thing that we set out to do was make designers want to use them, help designers realize Flash wasn't necessarily going to stay around forever. Flash could be made accessible with a great deal of work, because Adobe cared about that, or Macromedia cared about that. But yeah, so I'm...
And then I quit so younger people could take over and new people could take over, sort of handed it over to. ⁓
I'm just going to be hitting my desk like a sad old man who can't remember people's names. Molly Hohschlag and Aaron Gustafson took over the, ⁓ you know, one after the other, took over the, it became more of an educational project. get, you know, ⁓ we've convinced designers to do this. Now how do they do it? And you know, Molly had like 50 books on that she'd written on HTML.
Eric Karkovack (25:54)
you
Okay.
Jeffrey Zeldman (26:21)
And she was brilliant and I think underappreciated. I hope that if there's ever a history of this thing, will, you know, record the many and everyone I've mentioned so far is like, I don't know. feel like because I was the voice of it for awhile. And because I wrote the book, Designing with Web Standards, people think that I somehow came up with this stuff myself. didn't. I was working with many much smarter people and
basically just almost translating or being an account executive, you know, just, yeah. Cause I'd see, yeah, it's collaborative.
Eric Karkovack (26:56)
Yeah.
Well, that's the beauty of the web, right? It's collaborative. And that's, that's, that's what I love
about this industry even today is that we, we share knowledge and I know I learned a lot from a list apart. ⁓ and I think is, was that kind of the next step for you then to just kind of bring in the educational component, because there were so many great articles in there that showed you exactly how to do something that was standards compliant. Because
Let's face it, the educational system wasn't really there in those days for web designers. We all learned on our own.
Jeffrey Zeldman (27:32)
Not at all.
Right. Absolutely. I think, ⁓
So it came out of the newsletter tradition of sharing knowledge. The first thing I loved about the web besides I could publish and nobody could stop me. And if I did it right, people would actually come and read or come and look or download these little background patterns I made or something. You know, I could make entertainments. It appealed to the part of me that's an artist, the part of me that's a writer, the part of me that...
appreciates code, which and You'd and back then you didn't have to be great at any of those things You just had to be willing to put in the work I loved that and I again I came out of advertising where you could get fired if you told if you went if you went out for a beer with your friend who all worked at another agency and they said hey I'm pitching Pepsi and you went hey, we're pitching Pepsi too. You'd both be fired. You could never share any information
And in the newsletters of the early web design community, people were sharing, here's how I use JavaScript to do X. ⁓ Eric Meyer made a test, who was another super important member of the Web Standards Project, made the ACID test for CSS. Even before there were browsers supporting CSS, he was making, today it would be an app, but he was making websites that would test.
Eric Karkovack (28:53)
absolutely.
Jeffrey Zeldman (29:06)
how compliant a browser was and the immensity of that. was like the open source movement. We didn't call web standards open source, but it was the same in that we were doing a bunch of work for free. We were making tests and we were writing articles and that still continues. And I just published a new article in a list apart today, but publication has slowed way down there for many reasons. But Smashing Magazine is
publishes all the time, discuss. It's funny, there's a CSS site that everybody uses now. There was a period where I felt at a list apart, we've said enough about web standards now for a while. Everybody's on board. Let's talk about usability. Let's write about ⁓ user experience. How do we improve that? Let's talk about.
Copywriting for the web. Let's talk about how do we sell this to our clients? How do we sell this to our internally? How do we do product design on there? So I started branching out. I said, I don't want to be CSS trick of the week. That was it. I said, I don't want to be CSS trick of the week anymore because for a while it was Dan Cedar Holmes, ⁓ make a background that was last to the bottom of the screen, even though that was impossible in CSS at the moment. Douglas Bowman was like,
Eric Karkovack (30:33)
yeah, yeah.
Jeffrey Zeldman (30:35)
give curved edges to a box, even though CSS couldn't do that at the time. Like here's ⁓ all the hacks ⁓ using sprites for image animation, which was Dave, ⁓ Dave who did the CSS garden. I apologize, Dave. I'm an old man. I forget people's last names. I know who you are. I see your face before me. 20 minutes from now, I'll blurt out your last name. I'm sorry, Dave.
Eric Karkovack (30:41)
All the hacks.
my gosh, yeah.
Well if you remember you go ahead.
Jeffrey Zeldman (31:05)
Everybody know
the CSS, the CSSN garden by. Okay. Do you remember Dave, the guy who wrote it, created it?
Eric Karkovack (31:10)
I remember that, yeah.
I
remember visiting that site and just playing around with it, but I do not remember Dave himself.
Jeffrey Zeldman (31:23)
All these things, that thing was huge. People who weren't persuaded by the web standards project saw that and went, I get it. I don't have to recode all my content if I redesign the layout of this website. If my client changes brand colors, I mean, that stuff's obvious, but if they say we want a nature theme for this issue, I can do that. Like just the power of that.
Eric Karkovack (31:25)
It was.
Jeffrey Zeldman (31:52)
even simple CSS was pretty amazing.
Eric Karkovack (31:54)
We'll
have to link to that in the show notes. And for those that don't haven't ever visited that, was ⁓ a, basically you could click a link and completely change the style sheet for that site. And it would have a completely different layout and look, color scheme, fonts, all that stuff. was like at that time, early 2000s, guess, it was like a light bulb went off for a lot of people at that time.
Jeffrey Zeldman (32:12)
early 2000s.
And I found freelance collaborators too, like Mike Pick made this thing where everything was, he illustrated the ground that you could walk on and beneath it were like skeletons of decaying dead animals and stuff. that was the, that's what he did with the page. He made a picture out of, and like I worked with, he ended up redesigning a list apart several years ago, but just, you know,
The creativity, it doesn't have to be boxes and arrows. It doesn't have to be columns. That's often very useful. It's great for a lot of things, great for newspapers, great for blog posts, but you don't have to, like CSS can pretty much do anything now. And of course, it was very heavy, CSS back then, if you wanted to do, because you to attach so many images, have images off screen that would suddenly,
glide in, you couldn't control the speed at which things loaded. So it might take two minutes for your page to show up for somebody with a slow access before they could see the view. Now we have control over all those things. I'm going to preload. When the user goes to the homepage, I'm going to preload the top three articles on the homepage in the background so that when, if they click through, it'll just happen. Like we figured all that stuff out. had 20 or 30 years to figure all that stuff out.
Eric Karkovack (33:47)
Yeah, I was gonna say the web would not be where it is today. I mean, just the ability to do all these things all in a browser without plugins, you we don't need to download Flash. We don't need to bring anything special. Just bring your browser, no matter which one you're using.
Jeffrey Zeldman (33:47)
And of course now we're, yeah, go ahead.
no matter which one you're using. Or if you're not using, yeah. Or bring Lynx and it'll still work and you'll still be able to navigate. Like that was, those things were really important. We still struggle. Accessibility is still an afterthought for so many businesses, which is tragic and foolish. But so we, I got tired of doing that fighting, right? But we still have to do that fighting.
Eric Karkovack (34:09)
That's a big deal.
Jeffrey Zeldman (34:37)
in a nice way with benefits.
Eric Karkovack (34:40)
Yeah, I see it in my
business every day. It's something that you have to educate on.
Jeffrey Zeldman (34:43)
What are you?
What do you do now besides this podcast?
Eric Karkovack (34:47)
Well, I am a freelance
developer. I've been doing this for 30 years now. This is my 27th year on my own. I've worked at home for 27 years, so I don't want to leave the house. But yeah, I so I still run into it. ⁓ What the whys of accessibility? Well, this is our color. We can't change our color. Well, if you want it as a background, you probably should, because otherwise people can't read it and you might get sued.
Jeffrey Zeldman (34:53)
30 years.
I know the feeling.
Right. That still happens.
Eric Karkovack (35:18)
This concludes part one of my conversation with Jeffrey Zeldman. Be sure to check out our next episode when Jeffrey talks about his role at Automatic and his thoughts on the future of the open web. In the meantime, visit us at thewpminute.com slash subscribe to receive our newsletter and support the work we do at the WP Minute. Thanks and we'll see you again next time.