It is the true teacher who leaves the class knowing they have learned the most.
Tucson, AZ
Joined September 2006
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For me it was one of the most exciting moments in web history to see those things come together this lasted a few years where evangelism and growth and better compatibility really started coming together along with other cool things like xmlhttprequest Ajax, restful development
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The one thing left out however was JavaScript and behavior and in the next few years as browsers began to evolve and Microsoft lose the long and Google became powerful and JavaScript via ecma and @BrendanEich as well as the Mozilla team Advanced JavaScript as well.
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And that wonderful book was born. The advantage of the book is that an extended the experience of what Dave had done other designers and developers who got involved and created one of the most beautiful web destinations proving content markup CSS and accessibility we're beautiful
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And so one of the best selling web design books in history Zen of CSS design was born as an idea. Dave lived in Vancouver I was traveling as well as living in Tucson Arizona we somehow figured out a workflow got with the designers picked out what we were going to work
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At this point the CSS zen garden had grown so large with so many brilliant beautiful design work and I went off to the Waterside conference who where the agency for book authors such as myself and I ran into New Riders publisher Nancy who said hey got any ideas Molly?
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We start talking and he's picking my brain about book writing and ideas and it comes upon us that hey maybe together with his design abilities and his genius idea and my book writing experience and organizational experience we could have a potential game-changer on our hands
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I finally pick myself up and was just humbled and in awe of an experience of knowing that we can change the world together even if we are apart. It was the moment is teacher became a humble student indeed. Fast forward a few months we meet up at South by Southwest in Austin Texas
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He adds by the way I'm the Dave if you've not seen it who's been working on the proof-of-concept project this CSS zen garden of course I've seen it I fell out of my damn chair and there was your Miss Molly not knowing whether to laugh cry or both so I did both
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And inspiring me to become a web designer. I've written a bunch of books and I've had a lot of encounters with Guys across the world who have the name Dave so it didn't hit me right away I wrote back a kind thank you and kept working when 5 minutes later he wrote me back.
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I was working on some book here in Tucson one day in my office and I get an email. The email was so polite and kind and said hey my name is Dave I want to thank you for inspiring me through one of your books to take my what I believe was an art degree or graphic design degree
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Juicy stuff! IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, any browser of the day was rendering now a to stack layer with markup and content in xhtml that was accessible, diverse beautiful. Fonts Dynamic CSS menus using no JavaScript and on and on a list of awesome transcending the constraints
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Sorry xhtml page with content nobody could touch that they could only add CSS leaving a proof-of-concept that would appeared on the visual screen was beautiful while the underlying content and markup was accessible clean and the same. Shout out if you remember or did a design!
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So this guy Dave in Vancouver started project where he did a proof-of-concept using more meaningful xhtml non presentational but what we would term semantic as in meaningful as much as possible use of elements to the content. So this guy Dave build a clean XHTML Hage with content
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So things begin to align we had rigorous markup oh, far better ways of doing CSS including the emergence of what we call Progressive design and adaptive design from Ethan marcotte and Aaron Gustafson respectively. Things started getting exciting and we had some browser equality.
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Generally Charming a little invasion was finally he says well what is this obscure thing you need implemented which was not obscure at all it was the CSS specification which he promised then and there to ensure would move forward and made a public commitment to make it happen.
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It took me a little time to get those first words out but he masterfully took a few beads after my question and made a rather dark joke about well I don't know it would be like to own the web it sounds attractive and the entire room just lost it laughing we sparred for a while
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Bill Gates and I were sitting two and a half feet across a conference table eye-to-eye. Well I was never nervous about that I realized the weight of the significance of what was happening and that was the first time and maybe only time in my life where I got nervous.
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It was really down to so many different people it would take years to name them all but they did an amazing job at bringing together just the right folks although of course you can only imagine that when it got to me I really didn't have much to say did I hahaha
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Had a chance at the end of the session to sit down with Bill Gates himself and speak individually with him a bit about our unique concerns or feedback regarding issues with Microsoft and developers in the wild I cannot say how unusual this was for a company like that open up
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