kartooner.com

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.