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The WP Minute brings you news about WordPress in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack. Today's episode features a segment from part one of my interview with A List Apart co-founder Jeffrey Zeldman. Here, Jeffrey tells us about the fight to convince browser makers to support web standards. Now, you can check out the entire interview over on our WP Minute Plus channel. Visit thewpminute.com for all the details.
Eric Karkovack (00:28)
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 (00:43)
⁓ 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 (01:53)
yes.
Jeffrey Zeldman (02:17)
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 (02:50)
Haha.
Yeah.
Jeffrey Zeldman (03:12)
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 (04:25)
Yeah.
Jeffrey Zeldman (04:33)
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 (05:22)
Yeah, yeah.
Jeffrey Zeldman (05:30)
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.