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.
Now, not every blog post or 'Top 10 Ways to Make Money on the Internet' piece deserves to live forever. But there's gold among the dross, and there are web publications that we would do well to preserve for historical purposes.
The less concerned with aesthetics and usability these friends and family members are, the more easily they navigate sites and applications I can't make head nor hair of. Like the ex-girlfriend who mastered Ebay.
Validation is easy - you run your site through a validator, and it's either valid or it isn't. The rest of the stuff, such as whether my logo or the biggest headline should be the h1 in my HTML, isn't so easy and is subject to interpretation.
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.
When we launched The Deck, I hoped other networks would take inspiration from it and figure out how to increase engagement while minimizing clutter. I even tried to sell my studio's media clients on the notion of fewer, better-priced, better-targeted ads.
Wildly successful sites such as Flickr, Twitter and Facebook offer genuinely portable social experiences, on and off the desktop. You don't even have to go to Facebook or Twitter to experience Facebook and Twitter content or to share third-party web content with your Twitter and Facebook friends.
With consumers buying two smartphones for every desktop computer they purchase, the demands, challenges and opportunities of the mobile space are reshaping our assumptions about design and user behaviour.
To my way of thinking, passive management of file assets is okay for screwing around with iPads, where we're mainly watching TV on Netflix or obsessive-compulsively checking the popularity of our Instagram uploads.
Marketing is not bragging, and touting one's wares is not evil. The baker in the medieval town square must holler, 'Fresh rolls!' if he hopes to feed the townfolk.
My first typewriter cost me $75. I can't tell you how many hours it took me to earn that money, or how proud I was of that object. I wrote my first books on it. They will never be published, but that's all right.
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.
I worry about every newspaper. I worry about the financial undertaking, and I worry that somehow the loss of the sale of the paper version will affect their ability to have journalists and editors and producers. We really need those.
I was a journalist, but I was starving. And I've written fiction, but I couldn't get a publisher. So, I was basically a very frustrated creative person working in advertising, and even there, I have a great idea that client won't buy it.
I wanted to be a writer and an artist. Learning to type as quickly as I could think was a needed skill and part of my long self-directed apprenticeship.
I could open a thousand Excel documents and still never think to scroll past a wall of empty rows to see if, hidden beneath them, there is a tab I need to click. Just doesn't occur to me. Because, design.
Historians and scholars have access to every issue of every newspaper and journal written during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s but can access only a comparative handful of papers covering the election of Barack Obama.
Every industry has standards. For example, the motion picture camera, there are 2 or 3 film formats with a number of brackets and number of speed, a shooting speed that is standard. If we didn't have that, then some motion pictures will play back too slowly, and people would talk very slowly, and it will be bizarre.
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!
Dropbox, with its emphasis on good old-fashioned hierarchies, is superb at automatically saving one original of each photo I take, whether shot with a phone or a fancy camera. No loops, no duplicates, no confusion.
