Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 50

A Parental Dilemma

MY DAUGHTER has been talking about her eighth birthday party since she was seven and a half. It will be a small party, on a Saturday at noon, with just her closest friends. Last night I found out her BFF won’t be there, because the girl attends a class Saturdays at noon, and her mom is unwilling to have her miss class—even just this once.

My daughter will be hurt. I’m powerless over another parent’s decision, and I must be cordial about it to preserve the smooth functioning of the BFF relationship (and also because it’s not my place to judge). My problems now are to find the right time to let my daughter know her friend can’t attend, and to manufacture positive life lessons in how we handle the disappointment.

Photo: Olivier GR

My 9/11

AS I OFTEN do on this day, I here post a link to my story of Sept. 11, 2001 in New York, one of nine million stories from that day:

zeldman.com/glamorous/54.shtml

My story is not heroic. I saved no one on that day. It is not tragic. I lost no one.

The story I published then is incomplete in many ways. When September 11th happened, I was newly in love with a married woman who was leaving her husband. To be with her, I was leaving my girlfriend of six years. See? Not heroic at all.

The relationship with my girlfriend had been unhappy for years, but I still felt guilty leaving her. As partial penance, I let her stay in my apartment (“our” apartment) while I bunked in a tiny dump above a dive bar. The floor was crooked and the air always smelled like pierogies.

On September 11th, my new girlfriend, the soon-to-be-unmarried lady, was standing on Fifth Avenue when she saw smoke from the impact of the second plane. She was a mile north of the World Trade Center but could still see the smoke. Everyone could see it. Everyone but me, freelancing via modem in the pierogi-smelling fuckpad. The door opened, and there was my new girlfriend, looking stunned. “You don’t know,” she said.

I called my old girlfriend to warn her not to go downtown. She asked why I was crying.

I was crying for her, because I’d left her alone in a suddenly frightening world. Crying for the people in the World Trade Center. We didn’t have any details yet, but it was clear that many people had died. Crying, had I known it, for the thousands more who would die in the wars that were born on that day.

There was no TV and no internet. It was days before I could publish the incomplete story I linked to at the beginning of this memoir. Even when there was internet access again, I could not tell the parts of the story I am telling now. I could not tell them for years.

There it is. Like something out of Hollywood. Horrifying historic events as backdrop to a romantic drama. I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Everything changes, but, for the living, life goes on. My then-new-girlfriend, my fellow 9/11 PTS victim, is now the mother of my child, and my ex-wife. This morning I walked my daughter to school, then headed to the gym, where I warmed up on a treadmill. Above the treadmill were TVs, with the sound off. On the TV I watched, the names of the 9/11 dead were being read aloud in alphabetical order. They were still on B when I finished my workout. The other TV was showing ESPN, and the gym member on the treadmill next to me was watching that instead of the ceremony.

Duty Now For Future: A List Apart No. 361

IN ISSUE No. 361 of A List Apart for people who make websites: Envision better business models for digital newspapers and magazines in What Ate the Periodical? A Primer for Web Geeks by David Sleight. Then test your site in game console browsers and prepare for devices that haven’t been invented yet in Anna Debenham’s aptly titled Testing Websites in Game Console Browsers. Happy testing, designing, and strategizing!

Developer versus designer

To a developer, the problem is a clumsy stacking of concurrently loading web views, interfering with the smooth functioning of JavaScript. To a designer, the problem is the idea sucks.

Unsung Heroes of Web and Interaction Design: Derek Powazek

WE TAKE the two-way web for granted today, but it wasn’t always this way, and the democratizing power of HTML wasn’t manifested overnight. Derek Powazek is one of the pioneering designers who helped bring the two-way web into being.

Informed web designers admire Derek’s now-defunct 1996 personal storytelling site {fray} as one of the first (the first?) examples of art direction on the web, and it certainly was that. Each {fray} story or set of stories was different; each had its own design and layout. Often the site made then-cutting-edge technologies part of the story—as in one tale about the theater, which was told via draggable framesets. (At the conclusion of each page, the user dragged on “theater curtains” made of Netscape frames to reveal the next page, or stage, of the story.) {fray} and Derek are justly famous for promoting true storytelling art direction on the web, in an era when most websites followed strict rules about inverted-L layouts and other now-happily-forgotten nonsense.

But while many fondly remember the site for its art directional achievements, what goes unnoticed is that {fray}, in 1996, was a massive leap forward into the two-way web we take for granted today. The democratizing web that makes everyone an author and publisher, whether on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or WordPress, thereby fulfilling Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for HTML; this web we alternately joke about and fiercely defend; this web in which we spend half our lives (whether on desktop or mobile); this global town hall in which we share the most mundane details of our lives, as well as those things about which we are most passionate—this two-way web would not exist today if not for pioneering interaction designs that showed the way. And Derek Powazek’s {fray} was among the first and most important of those pioneering designs.

Now, web design had been “interactive” since Sir Tim invented HTML. Clicking blue underlined links to explore content is by definition interactive. And the first commercial websites, contrary to what the previous decade’s “Web 2.0″ evangelists would have had you believe, were not one-way communications. The Batman Forever site my first web partners and I worked on in 1995 pushed design and content out to the masses, to be sure—but the site also had discussion forums, where individuals could contribute their viewpoints. Sites before ours had sported such discussion forums; sites after ours would, too.

What Derek did with {fray}, though, took the two-way web to a whole new level. Instead of siloing content by producer (“official” web content here, “user” discussion forums there), Derek integrated the reader’s response directly into the content experience.

I don’t know if {fray} was the first site to do this, but it was the first site I saw doing it—the first site I know of that not only made the entire reading community an equal content authoring partner with the site’s own writers, designers, and developers, but also underscored the point by putting the site’s content and the readers’ content in the same place visually (and therefore conceptually). Fray.com wasn’t just about showing off Derek and his talented partners’ brilliance. It was about encouraging you to be brilliant.

Today we take embedded article/blog post comments for granted, but they wouldn’t exist without a memorable precursor like fray.com. Your blog’s comments may not owe their existence to a flash of insight you personally experienced while reading {fray}, but you can bet that the convention was grandfathered by a designer who was influenced by a designer who was influenced by it.

In the nearly two decades since {fray} debuted, Derek has worked on many things, most of them community driven. Cute-Fight is his latest. Here’s to our democratic, personal web, and to one of the champions who helped make it that way.

Lawson on picture element

Those eager to bash Hixie and the WHATWG are using the new spec as if it were a cudgel; “this is how you deal with Hixie and WHATWG” says Marc Drummond. I don’t think that’s productive. What is productive is the debate that this publication will (hopefully) foster.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site: On the publication of Editor’s draft of the
element.

The Great Discontent & Me

In celebration of TGD turning one tomorrow, we’re going back to our roots. Jeffrey Zeldman—the “godfather of web standards”—has already left an indelible mark on the web industry and those of us who work in it, but what of his life before that? We met Jeffrey at A Space Apart, where he recounted a journey that started long before the [web] was born.

I’m honored to share this lovely, free-form interview: The Great Discontent: Jeffrey Zeldman.

From an imaginary novel

I AM Jewish but my parents named me Jesus, which they pronounced Hay-Seuss, with an emphasis on the Hay. You can imagine the joy of being me in public school. First day of kindergarten, Miss Terwilliger called out, “Jesus. Jesus? Jesus!” And I sat there like a stuffed dummy, because I didn’t recognize the name. About the fifth Jesus, I realized she meant me, and cried out, “It’s Hay-Seuss,” with an emphasis on the Hay. Laughter rang in the classroom, followed by beatings at recess. Like my namesake, I was destined to suffer for the sins of others, although in my case it was only for the sins of Mr and Mrs Kaplan.

Little Jesus, Happy At Last—coming in 2015 from Jeffrey Zeldman

From Chicago, With Love

HEY, FRIENDS. I write from the magical city of Chicago, where I’m enjoying the first Happy Cog Summit. Next week, following our meet-up cum strategy session cum karaoke party, comes An Event Apart Chicago, three days of peace, love, and web standards (plus more Chicago magic).

I won’t be writing here much while these events continue, but I’ve started a Chicago 2012 photo slide show for your pleasure, and will add to it as time and aesthetics permit. You can also stalk me via my new Foursquare Chicago list.

Once An Event Apart kicks in, starting Monday August 27, and until it ends Wednesday night, August 29, I’ll post links and notes here—and you can follow the hot tweet-by-tweet action on A Feed Apart, the official feed aggregator for An Event Apart. Yowee!

Stalk me! JZ’s Foursquare Chicago list
Chicago 2012 photo slide show
Happy Cog
An Event Apart Chicago
A Feed Apart

HTML5 Video Player II

JOHN DYER’S MediaElement.js bills itself as “HTML5 and made easy”—and that’s truly what it is:

HTML5 audio and video players in pure HTML and CSS.
Custom Flash and Silverlight players that mimic the HTML5 MediaElement API for older browsers.
Accessibility standards including WebVTT.
Plugins for WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, jQuery, BlogEngine.NET, ruby gem, and plone.

For complete information, visit mediaelementjs.com.

Hat tip: Roland Dubois.