Jeffrey Zeldman is not a name that typically appears during discussions surrounding the web of old. While he was fairly well-known across the internet during the late nineties, it seems as though the passage of time has relegated him to obscurity. While understandable – he’s far from the only person who can fit into that category – it is truly a shame that this is the case. Not only is his now-restored website, www.zeldman.com, significant for several reasons, the impact that this man had on the internet as we know it is monumental.
The most noticeable impact that he had in the late nineties, however, was perhaps the most inconsequential. Several sections of his website garnered large amounts of attention, at least for the time; this is especially the case for his icon gallery, which were taken and used in a variety of homepages across the web. If you look around old user homepages on websites like Geocities, it’s inevitable that you’ll stumble across them. There’s many others such as the Ad Graveyard and the “web’s first alcoholic haiku contest” (truly a massive innovation) that also proved to be popular, but Zeldman’s greatest accomplishments lie elsewhere: web standards.
First, some context. While this was originally going to be a long-winded ramble about the intricacies of both the browser ecosystem and the whirlwind of web design philosophies present at the time, I’ll attempt to keep it as brief as one can when it comes to a topic as complicated as this. Every browser had its own screwed up way of rendering elements on a page, different versions of said browsers supported different things, pages would appear completely wrong on certain hardware, and everyone had a mixture of all of these. It was, to put it lightly, chaos. There were methods to accommodate for these differences, but they all sucked for both the user and the designer. This is why you often see information regarding the intended browser and resolution on old websites – it was the only way to ensure a proper viewing experience. Loads more could be said on this topic, and while I’d love to do so, I instead implore you to check out the Ask Doctor Web section on Zeldman’s website. It’s a fascinating look at the state of web development circa mid-1998.
If you do decide to check it out, you’ll likely notice something along the way: the website is pushing the limits of what could be done in its era. It goes out of its way to accommodate every use case, and attempts to use the latest and greatest features that browsers had to offer without isolating those on legacy versions. Zeldman was not one to accept the disorderly mess that was the 90s web, and he intended to fix it. This is where web standards come in. Not only did he push for the unification of both browser rendering and web design, he was successful at it.
While history is never made by individuals, Jeffrey Zeldman was an essential part of what unified the internet into an experience that could be displayed the same no matter the browser, hardware, or even user disabilities. He helped found and lead the Web Standards Project, a group that pushed for browsers to be cross-compatible with webpages and implement HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in a way to ensure the most accurate browsing experience possible; by 2001, this had been achieved. Alongside this already immense feat, he also helped popularize the usage of CSS and dynamic layouts as browsers became more and more capable of properly supporting them. He continued teaching his philosophies on web design and to this day is still dishing out content on a website with the same exact domain as the one now on Protoweb. This is why it’s such a shame that nobody outside of those in academia remembers him. While he was far from the only one, he was one of the people who helped define the web as we know it.
While I learned about Mr. Zeldman through his icons repeatedly appearing on old homepages, he’s become somewhat of a fascination of mine for entirely different reasons. I’m enamored with his ideals, his style of writing, his sense of aesthetic, and wish he was more widely known amongst those discussing this era of the internet. He more than deserves to be a household name when it comes to the subject, and yet…he isn’t. I’m sure he’s fine with it, as he’s seemingly well-known in college courses due to going on to author textbooks on web design. But I just can’t let it go. He deserves to be known in these kinds of circles.
I suppose that’s just how history goes when you work behind the scenes.
