On the Subject of Me

I admit. I’ve never been a web professional. Never actively participated in any discussions on best design techniques. I have mostly been lurking around. I’ve created for the web, but merely on a personal level.

And yet I’ve been around long enough to have witnessed the switch from sites that worked in broken browsers to those that comply with web standards. I remember Mr Zeldman’s original Designing with Web Standards. I remember the different designs that A List Apart (For People Who Make Websites) went through. And learning all about picking the correct doctype. I remember the huge succes of Dave Shea’s CSS Zen Garden. (Wanted to get noticed as a designer? Better made sure you were on there.)

I also remember Cameron Moll’s That Wicked Worn Look series, as well as the sudden popularity of Gotham and Clarendon, and Dan Cederholm’s passion for ampersands. And the enthusiasm surrounding ‘true’ web fonts. (Heck, I even remember downloading Microsoft’s Core Fonts for the Web bundle, way back when it still existed.)

I’ve seen the move away from needless and obtrusive scripting, the massive ditching of wrongly used Flash, and the rise of JavaScript frameworks like jQuery. The rise of tons of design-related blogs that turned out did little but collect links to articles elsewhere, too. And of design-related sites that got it right from the very beginning, of which Dribbble seems, to date, the most successful example.

And, despite the buzz surrounding HTML5 and CSS3, I’ve seen little things really move, these last few years. (Except maybe seen people move to Twitter and away from blogging.) Until came responsive web design, surrounded with what bears striking resemblance to the momentum that made possible the switch toward web standards, now so long ago. And reading on web design, even for non-professionals, became interesting again.

I’m just saying.

Note: I think I just stole Jason Santa Maria’s line. Also, pretty much every sentence of the first four paragraph starts with ‘I’. Which isn’t too bad for an entry ‘on the subject of me’, I guess.