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Leo Laporte interviews JZ

IN EPISODE 63 of Triangulation, Leo Laporte, a gracious and knowledgeable podcaster/broadcaster straight outta Petaluma, CA, interviews Your Humble Narrator about web standards history, responsive web design, content first, the state of standards in a multi-device world, and why communists sometimes make lousy band managers.

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2010: The Year in Web Standards

WHAT A YEAR 2010 has been. It was the year HTML5 and CSS3 broke wide; the year the iPad, iPhone, and Android led designers down the contradictory paths of proprietary application design and standards-based mobile web application design—in both cases focused on user needs, simplicity, and new ways of interacting thanks to small screens and touch-sensitive surfaces.

It was the third year in a row that everyone was talking about content strategy and designers refused to “just comp something up” without first conducting research and developing a user experience strategy.

CSS3 media queries plus fluid grids and flexible images gave birth to responsive web design (thanks, Beep!). Internet Explorer 9 (that’s right, the browser by Microsoft we’ve spent years grousing about) kicked ass on web standards, inspiring a 10K Apart contest that celebrated what designers and developers could achieve with just 10K of standards-compliant HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. IE9 also kicked ass on type rendering, stimulating debates as to which platform offers the best reading experience for the first time since Macintosh System 7.

Even outside the newest, best browsers, things were better than ever. Modernizr and eCSStender brought advanced selectors and @font-face to archaic browsers (not to mention HTML5 and SVG, in the case of Modernizr). Tim Murtaugh and Mike Pick’s HTML5 Reset and Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate gave us clean starting points for HTML5- and CSS3-powered sites.

Web fonts were everywhere—from the W3C to small personal and large commercial websites—thanks to pioneering syntax constructions by Paul Irish and Richard Fink, fine open-source products like the Font Squirrel @Font-Face Generator, open-source liberal font licensing like FontSpring’s, and terrific service platforms led by Typekit and including Fontdeck, Webtype, Typotheque, and Kernest.

Print continued its move to networked screens. iPhone found a worthy adversary in Android. Webkit was ubiquitous.

Insights into the new spirit of web design, from a wide variety of extremely smart people, can be seen and heard on The Big Web Show, which Dan Benjamin and I started this year (and which won Video Podcast of the Year in the 2010 .net Awards), on Dan’s other shows on the 5by5 network, on the Workers of the Web podcast by Alan Houser and Eric Anderson, and of course in A List Apart for people who make websites.

Zeldman.com: The Year in Review

A few things I wrote here at zeldman.com this year (some related to web standards and design, some not) may be worth reviewing:

iPad as the New Flash 17 October 2010
Masturbatory novelty is not a business strategy.
Flash, iPad, and Standards 1 February 2010
Lack of Flash in the iPad (and before that, in the iPhone) is a win for accessible, standards-based design. Not because Flash is bad, but because the increasing popularity of devices that don’t support Flash is going to force recalcitrant web developers to build the semantic HTML layer first.
An InDesign for HTML and CSS? 5 July 2010
while our current tools can certainly stand improvement, no company will ever create “the modern day equivalent of Illustrator and PageMaker for CSS, HTML5 and JavaScript.” The assumption that a such thing is possible suggests a lack of understanding.
Stop Chasing Followers 21 April 2010
The web is not a game of “eyeballs.” Never has been, never will be. Influence matters, numbers don’t.
Crowdsourcing Dickens 23 March 2010
Like it says.
My Love/Hate Affair with Typekit 22 March 2010
Like it says.
You Cannot Copyright A Tweet 25 February 2010
Like it says.
Free Advice: Show Up Early 5 February 2010
Love means never having to say you’re sorry, but client services means apologizing every five minutes. Give yourself one less thing to be sorry for. Take some free advice. Show up often, and show up early.

Outside Reading

A few things I wrote elsewhere might repay your interest as well:

The Future of Web Standards 26 September, for .net Magazine
Cheap, complex devices such as the iPhone and the Droid have come along at precisely the moment when HTML5, CSS3 and web fonts are ready for action; when standards-based web development is no longer relegated to the fringe; and when web designers, no longer content to merely decorate screens, are crafting provocative, multi-platform experiences. Is this the dawn of a new web?
Style vs. Design written in 1999 and slightly revised in 2005, for Adobe
When Style is a fetish, sites confuse visitors, hurting users and the companies that paid for the sites. When designers don’t start by asking who will use the site, and what they will use it for, we get meaningless eye candy that gives beauty a bad name.

Happy New Year, all!

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Gary Vaynerchuk on The Big Web Show Episode 26


The Big Web Show

GARY VAYNERCHUK is our guest on Episode #26 of The Big Web Show, taped live before an internet audience at 1:00 PM ET Thursday 4 November at live.5by5.tv. Gary is the creator of Wine Library TV, the author of the New York Times bestselling book Crush It!, and the co-founder with his brother AJ of VaynerMedia, a boutique agency that works with personal brands, consumer brands, and startups.

The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) is recorded live in front of an internet audience every Thursday at 1:00 PM ET on live.5by5.tv. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of recording, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web. Subscribe and enjoy!

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Paul Ford on The Big Web Show

Paul Ford

Paul Ford is our guest on The Big Web Show, taped live before an internet audience at 1:00 PM ET tomorrow, 14 October 2010, on the 5by5 network at live.5by5.tv.

Paul is a freelance writer and computer programmer. He was an editor at Harper’s Magazine from 2005–2010, and brought Harper’s 159-year, 250,000-page archive to the web in 2007; the system now supports tens of thousands of registered subscribers. More recently he helped the media strategy firm Activate with the launch of Gourmet Live, a re-imagining of Gourmet Magazine for iPad, and co-founded Popsicle Weasel, a small company totally focused on microsites.

He has written for NPR, TheMorningNews.org, XML.com, and the National Information Standards Organization’s Information Standards Quarterly, and is the author of the novel Gary Benchley, Rock Star (Penguin/Plume). Paul programs in PHP, Java, and XSLT2.0, but lately is all about Python and Django. His writing has been anthologized in Best Software Writing I (2005) and Best Music Writing 2009. He enjoys both software and music.

He will teach Content Strategy at the School of Visual Arts in New York City starting in 2011. His personal website, started in 1997, is Ftrain.com. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife Mo and the obligatory cats.

The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) is recorded live in front of an internet audience every Thursday at 1:00 PM ET on live.5by5.tv. Join us!

Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of recording, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web. Subscribe and enjoy!

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Design Apps for Fun and Profit

Josh, Williams, CEO of Gowalla. Photo: Keegan Jones.

Update! Episode 14 is now available for your listening and viewing pleasure at 5by5.tv.

Josh Williams, founder of Gowalla, is our guest at 1:00 PM ET today, July 29, in Episode 14 of The Big Web Show. Whether you’re a social media user/creator, an entrepreneur, an application developer, an iconist or illustrator, a freelancer with big dreams, an API wizard, a devotee of marketing 2.0, a web designer, a Gowalla fan, or what, you won’t want to miss this episode.

The Big Web Show is taped in front of a live internet audience, and you can be part of it. Join co-host Dan Benjamin and me at 1:00 PM ET today to participate in the live taping of Episode 14.

If you miss the live taping, you can watch the show on our website or via iTunes later tonight.

The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) is taped live in front of an internet audience every Thursday at 1:00 PM ET on live.5by5.tv. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards (often within hours of taping) via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web.


Photo: Keegan Jones.

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Episode 2: HTML5 For Designers

Zeldman, Dan Benjamin, and Jeremy Keith discuss HTML5 on The Big Web Show.

Now online for your listening and viewing pleasure: in Episode 2 of The Big Web Show, Dan and I chat with Jeremy Keith—designer, developer, content creator, agency co-founder, speaker extraordinaire, and author of HTML5 for Web Designers (A Book Apart, 2010). In this hour-long video podcast, we explore the goals, process, and inspiration behind the book, and discuss what HTML5 means for web creators and consumers—from semantics to strategy, accessibility to implementation.


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Big Web Show Today

The Big Web Show

Live today at 1:00 PM Eastern, watch Jeremy Keith, author of HTML5 For Web Designers, discuss markup and other matters with Dan Benjamin and me on The Big Web Show. Your live calls are welcome.

  1. The Big Web Show
  2. Episode 1: Web Fonts
  3. HTML5 For Web Designers
  4. Jeremy Keith

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Big Web Show No. 1 up!

Jeffrey Zeldman

FOR YOUR viewing and listening pleasure, The Big Web Show’s Episode 1: Web Fonts is now online.

Jeffrey Zeldman and Dan Benjamin grill Ethan Dunham of Fontspring and Font Squirrel and Jeffrey Veen of Typekit (and other sites, too numerous to name) about one of your favorite subjects, “real fonts on your website” in this, our inaugural episode.

Enjoy!

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Live Today: Web Fonts Dialog

The Big Web Show, a live video call-in show and podcast. Today's show is all about web fonts.

Update! Final audio and video are now available for your listening and viewing pleasure.

Live today, Dan Benjamin and I grill Ethan Dunham of Fontspring and Font Squirrel and Jeffrey Veen of Typekit and numerous other good things on the web about one of your favorite subjects, “real fonts on your website.”

The Big Web Show

Be part of this dialog that takes place via streaming video feed with live call-in.

Don’t miss the inaugural live broadcast of The Big Web Show today at 1:00 PM Eastern.

(And get the podcast next week by following 5by5 on iTunes.)


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