Jeffrey Zeldman Quotes

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.

The Internet didn't become usable until Netscape because that gave the average person a user interface that was intuitive, simple, friendly - this made it accessible.

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.

It's not about HTML 5 vs Flash. They're mutually beneficial. The more important question is the freedom of choice on the web.

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.

Ajax is an important development for Web applications, and its importance is only going to grow.

I did an early version of my site where it was virtually impossible to get through it, just as a statement about the web. But after a few laughs and some angry e-mails, I realized it wasn't doing me much good. I think the web has become more about the final product, not what it takes to get to it.

You are not designing for yourself, and shouldn't be. Most people using the Web don't understand (most of) what makes it work and don't want to. Design for those people. There are many more of them than you.

My site is a little unorthodox without being totally inaccessible.

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

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

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.

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 was really just a hard-core geek, if you will, in 1996, and was building websites as a hobby. I started doing a lot of web design and development and built my first website on the now-defunct GeoCities platform.

Flash and HTML have co-existed, and they're going to continue to co-exist.

It's too easy to do your own site to not have one these days. I guess everyone has one.

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

The productivity and expressiveness of Flash remain advantages for the Web community even as HTML advances.

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.

CSS is the design language of the web, and it is not as easy to use as it ought to be, and it can be confusing, especially if you are new to it.

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.