kartooner

When I fin­ished read­ing Jef­frey Zeld­mans’ Design­ing with Web Stan­dards the first time, I was puz­zled. It all made sense mind you, it’s just the core of its mes­sage didn’t sink in as I had orig­i­nally planned. Whether this was attrib­uted to late night read­ing, or my prover­bial inept­ness I’m not sure, my point is that typ­i­cally when some­thing doesn’t seep in the first time I’ll go for a sec­ond try.

I’m almost done with Design­ing with Web Stan­dards for the sec­ond time and every­thing has clicked together. Evi­dence of this is this per­sonal site which evolved from using Mov­able Types’ default tem­plates to slight tem­plate mod­i­fi­ca­tion and finally result­ing in what you see now, orig­i­nal lay­out and code.

I have to thank Zeld­man (and a list of oth­ers) for inspir­ing me to take this leap of faith if you may. Prior to using CSS and XHTML I was rely­ing on spaghetti code, sliced and diced image slash table hybrids and a bleak under­stand­ing of seman­tics. Proof of my sloppy code habits exist in EMWare Pro­duc­tions which was hosted on Geoc­i­ties (before Yahoo bought them out).

After build­ing this site, in Netscape no less, I listed it under the Soft­ware cat­e­gory on Yahoo, which resulted in sev­eral lucra­tive and poten­tial part­ner­ships with Japan­ese soft­ware com­pa­nies. Truth be told, I was only 18 at the time and wasn’t con­cerned with cor­po­rate part­ner­ships let alone try­ing to run a com­pany with mem­bers scat­tered around the world.

This was before the dot com boom and the revi­tal­iza­tion of web devel­op­ment which meant — dur­ing that point in time — I could get away with an unpro­fes­sional look­ing web site. Flash for­ward to Novem­ber of 2000 wherein my brother and I receive a cease and desist let­ter from emWare, a com­pany based in Utah. Despite the fact that EMWare Pro­duc­tions had been shelved for sev­eral (6 actu­ally) years now, we still get a chuckle from our adven­tures in soft­ware development.

Today I can­not stress enough the impor­tance of seman­tics and standards-based web devel­op­ment. As Zeld­man explains; grasp­ing these con­cepts and uti­liz­ing them accord­ingly will pave the way towards a leaner and cleaner world wide web. Sites like the CSS Vault, Zen Gar­den and count­less oth­ers are push­ing these ideals into the pub­lic fore­front with­out a dime attached.

As H.G. Wells once said;
> The future is now.