Jeffrey Zeldman Quotes

We at The Web Standards Project turned everything on its head. We said browsers should support the same standards instead of competing to invent new tags and scripting languages. We said designers, developers, and content folks should create one site that was accessible to everyone.

Everybody who runs a Web site knows we're not assured of compatibility, and we could end up with a split.

We found a way to make things look great to the human eye through the window of a graphical web browser without worrying about what everything looked like under the hood.

Many thought it was a fool's errand - that the browser companies were never going to listen to us. Others argued that, 'Users don't care if you use Web standards.' Well, of course they don't. They just know that your site works better.

IT professionals have a responsibility to understand the use of standards and the importance of making Web applications that work with any kind of device.

At one point, CERN was toying with patenting the World Wide Web.

Technically, web browsers can control what users see, and sites using Javascript can overwrite anything coming from the original authors. Browsers heavily utilize Javascript to create an interactive Internet; sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Gmail could be crippled without it.

We reduced the size of our front page code by about 50%, and by using absolute positioning, we are able to display important parts of the page before other parts may have fully loaded yet.

We're actually helping advance HTML5 in some very concrete ways, such as Edge, which is in beta.

I think HTML5 is one area where Mozilla has done very poorly at actually communicating what we have done.

Even if it's not always the best markup, what are Facebook and Twitter? They're web standards with some scripts. They may not validate, but they're still CSS layouts and simple markup, and that's great!

I vertically center things in tables a lot, and the fact that there is no way to control vertical positioning in divs affects the way we do things across the board.

Now that digital lifestyle devices, tablets, wireless phones, and other Internet appliances are beginning to come of age, we need to worry about presenting our content to these devices so that it is optimized for their display capabilities.

If someone had protected the HTML language for making Web pages, then we wouldn't have the World Wide Web.

At Adaptive Path, we've been doing our own work with Ajax over the last several months, and we're realizing we've only scratched the surface of the rich interaction and responsiveness that Ajax applications can provide.

Small businesses no longer need to feel like a deer in the headlights when considering constructing or updating their Web sites. With ClickThings what you see is what you get, unlike some other competitive Web-based Website building tools.

I'd like to be able to design as easily as if I was using Photoshop. I'd like to be able to create a multicolumn layout and control source order without having to do advanced mathematics or hire Eric Meyer or Dan Cederholm to figure out the CSS, because I can't.

The Mozilla Foundation is an independent, nonprofit organization.

IE6 was a bad experience for consumers, but it was a terrible for developers. Not only it was technically bad, but it was closed, and you couldn't do much with it.

Because the competitive landscape of the web is such that the site which looks and works best gets the most traffic, developers and designers put a premium on the presentation of that content and let structural markup take a back seat.

Our old site did not have very good support for the disabled, but our new site should soon have much better support. With all of our content in divs now, we can hide all but the relevant chunks of content and navigation with a simple alternate CSS file.

For most of the '90s and the first part of this decade, content providers who wanted to publish online only needed to worry about the graphical web browser.

In '93 to '94, every browser had its own flavor of HTML. So it was very difficult to know what you could put in a Web page and reliably have most of your readership see it.

Let's leverage the power of the Web - don't get rid of it, but make the Web beautiful again. We need to give the content room to breathe and give magazine-style advertisements the opportunity to flourish.

If I was designing a web site for elementary school children, I might have a much higher percentage of older computers with outdated browsers since keeping up with browser and hardware technology has not traditionally been a strong point of most elementary schools.