Interview - Jeffrey Zeldman of A List Apart

Standards

SitePoint: The WaSP project seems to have recently gone into hiding. What's the inside scoop on that, and, for our readers who don't know, what is WaSP?

The Web Standards Project (WaSP) is a coalition of designers, developers, and Web users fighting to improve support for common technological standards such as CSS, XHTML, XML, ECMAScript (the standard version of JavaScript) and the W3C Document Object Model.

These technologies, which we labeled "Web standards," are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of Web users, while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the Web.

Designing and building with these standards simplifies and lowers the cost of production (very important these days!), while delivering sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices. Sites developed along these lines will continue to function correctly as traditional desktop browsers evolve, and as new Internet devices come to market.

WaSP Phase I could ask no more, so I temporarily retired the site (though it's still available at http://archive.webstandards.org/), reinvigorated our original Steering Committee, and recruited additional members whom I tasked with writing and designing the upcoming Phase II site, which should go live real soon.

SitePoint: What progress have you made in the fight for browser standards? Do you feel that browser manufacturers take you and your organization seriously enough to care about what you say? And will there ever be a browser which is completely standards compliant while still being friendly enough to use on a daily basis?

Between 1998 and 2001, the WaSP petitioned browser makers to do a better job of supporting these technologies, and eventually they did so -- in part because engineers at many browser companies agreed with us and saw WaSP as an ally in their internal battles with management.

Beginning in 2000, one leading browser after another delivered on the promise of many of the standards we'd promoted. Current market-leading browsers, along with several of their smaller competitors, provide excellent support for HTML 4, XHTML 1, CSS, ECMAScript, and the DOM -- or are well on the road to such compliance.

Because of these improvements, the browsers do a much better job of interpreting Web content. They're also much easier to use. For instance, most current browsers let you resize text, and they correctly handle standard scripting behaviors instead of choking on them.

Thanks to these browsers, designers and developers are finally free to build with XHTML and CSS, and in many cases can separate structure from presentation to maximize portability and accessibility. With care, designers can also use the W3C standard DOM to add sophisticated behavior to their sites.

Though today's browsers largely support standards, tens of thousands of designers and developers continue to use outdated methods that yoke structure to presentation, in some cases entirely avoiding semantic structures and misusing (X)HTML as a design tool. In Phase II, WaSP will provide educational resources to help our peers learn standards-compliant methods that are in their interest because they're in the best interests of their audience and clients.

The other ongoing problem we set out to address in Phase II was that the tools used by many Web design professionals did only a fair job of supporting current standards. For instance, you had to jump through hoops to get Macromedia Dreamweaver or Adobe GoLive to generate valid XHTML.

This has changed with Dreamweaver MX and GoLive 6.

Behind the scenes, WaSP's Dreamweaver Task Force (Phase 1.5?) worked with Macromedia to improve Dreamweaver's standards and accessibility compliance, though Macromedia's engineers and management deserve most of the credit.

We were unable to form an appropriate task force to work with Adobe, but they seem to have done just fine without us. We hope to work with both companies going forward, as they continue to fine-tune their products and support emerging standards.

Browsers

SitePoint: With the news that AOL is likely to switch to using Mozilla as the engine for their browser, many people are predicting a re-opening of the "browser wars". Do you worry that this will lead to another round of browser-specific tags and extensions, or is the standards message strong enough now to prevent this from happening?

It totally won't happen, because Mozilla/Netscape 6 is all about Web standards, and IE6/Win and IE5/Mac support the same standards (and IE5/Win supports many of them). If anything, 30 million-plus new Mozilla users will reinforce the message that it's unwise to design for any one browser. Instead, use Web standards and design for them all.

You're a fool if your site won't work in IE. You're a fool if it works only in IE. The real challenge is to design for portability and accessibility (which does not mean dull, lowest-common-denominator design).

The things we need to learn are not Netscape-specific, not IE- or Opera-specific. We need to better understand existing and emerging Web standards and design for the medium instead of for specific browsers, leveraging the Web's true power to reach everyone.

SitePoint: Do you think the Netscape fight-back is a good thing? What are your thoughts on the whole Mozilla project as it heads to 1.0 final after almost 4 years?

I'm glad Mozilla is nearly complete. It's a great browser with extensive standards support.

We all wish it had been ready sooner, and I'm sure nobody wishes that more than the Mozilla engineers and the marketers at AOL/Netscape. But I'm not going to play armchair project manager. I have no idea how much code was involved in creating a new, standards-compliant browser from scratch.

In following this course -- starting over from a clean slate -- Netscape lost tremendous market share. Some users and even some developers seem to have written them off as a player. It will be good to see that change, good to see them win new users and restore some much-needed balance to the marketplace.

Opera is also gaining market share, as are smaller, alternative browsers. All of this reinforces the wisdom of designing and building with Web standards.