Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog

They say AI will replace the web as we know it, and this time they mean it. Here follows a short list of previous times they also meant it, starting way back in 1997.

Wired: March 1, 1997: “You can kiss your web browser goodbye” – Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf, The Big Story .

Inspired by the success of PointCast, a clever application that displayed news headlines as a screensaver, our “Push!” story argued that Web browsers were about to become obsolete. 

(I repeat, this was 1997. The Wayback machine was roughly one year old. Primitive CSS was newly available in IE3, but most folks at the time continued to use the Netscape browser, which they bought on disc at their neighborhood computing store.)

Wired: May 1, 2004: “The Return of Push!” – Gary Wolf . 

Though I dubbed it “the worst story Wired ever published,” I quickly began to get feedback from readers who argued that the predictions in the piece were coming true after all. The inspiring technology this time is RSS, a specification that allows easy syndication of news, blogs, and other frequently updated sources.

There is a clear parallel between the excitement of the PointCast days and the enthusiasm for RSS today, one that goes further than easy harvesting of news headlines. Search engine results, product information, new music, notification of recent blog comments, and many other types of digital information are becoming available through RSS. This dialect of XML brings us the Web as an evolving environment: customizable, variable in intensity, and always on. This is the old promise of push. We can see the potential for radically new types of media – again.

To be fair, whereas the 1997 story made mountains out of an early “push” app, this 2004 second attempt to declare the web dead caught a moment of genuine game change as RSS, Atom, and XML provided dependable web standards (not a lone application, as in the 1997 piece) for syndication.

But syndication, of course, did not kill the web; it brought forward much of its inherent value. All praise to Dave Winer and his confederates for RSS and Atom, and to WaSP member Tim Bray and his colleagues for XML: here’s a contemporary history of how that standard came to be.

You’d think Wired would be tired (see what I did there?) of hyping the end of the platform that gave the magazine its relevance, but no:

Wired: August 17, 2018: “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.” – Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff, The Big Story .

Two decades after its inception, the World Wide Web has been eclipsed by Skype, Netflix, peer-to-peer, and a quarter-million other apps.

(Observation: A Wolf wrote or co-wrote the first two articles, and a Woolf co-wrote the third. A meaningless coincidence, but if this were politics instead of tech, there would doubtless be a whole QAnon-style conspiracy theory about it. Especially since Woolf is often a Jewish surname. But I digress.)

The web profoundly changed the world, for better and worse, with the jury still out on some charges, but one thing hasn’t changed: every few years someone in an intellectual leadership position declares the web kaput. It survived previous bubbles (starting with the dot-com crash) and has proved hardy enough to continue providing profound benefits and hazards to the entire world, absorbing and deepening new technologies rather than succumbing to them.

Look, I understand why AI is bigger than Pointcast and how it is disrupting anything it can be stuck in, but the web is not going away. ’Cause think about it for five minutes, which is four and a half minutes longer than the authors of the previous hype cycles appear to have done. If AI kills the web that provides the information AI sucks down, then there is no contemporary body of news and text for AI to suck down and regurgitate. It would be like a parasite that kills the host body. There are occasionally such things in nature, but mostly, life finds a way, mostly. And so will the web. Now a word about those self-driving cars….

The post Receipts: a brief list of prominent articles proclaiming the death of the web. appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

Fam and I are visiting my 96-year-old Uncle George tonight. We love him. His complicated and somewhat meandering stories have been music to my daughter’s ears since she fell asleep in a cab at age six listening to him lament his wife’s death.

George is my late mother’s only sibling, and the only survivor of that generation, just as I am now the only survivor of my generation of my birth family. I hear my mother’s depression in Uncle George’s stories, and he sees my mother when he looks at me.

A former president of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute (NYPSI) and past medical director of the institute’s Treatment Center, he was still lecturing as recently as October of 2011, when he was a spry and supple 82. He’s a lifelong New Yorker who walks miles every day. I expected him to go on forever. But nobody does.

My cousin told me yesterday that Uncle George may have lost a step or two this year. The thought of that brought my daughter and me to tears. 

My mom died fairly young of Alzheimer’s; my dad had untreated dementia for years before my late brother (supported by the Biblical destruction by flood of Dad’s house, and the desertion of Dad’s second wife, who couldn’t take his weekly hospitalizations anymore) managed to get him into a home. He deteriorated there quickly, although he continued to dress each morning as if he were going into the office. He died believing he had beaten up Hitler in a fistfight.

My beautiful younger brother Pete passed soon afterwards, consumed by the worst kind of cancer, and not helped by having exhausted himself worrying about our father.

You never know if the next visit may be the last. 

The thought that now Uncle George too is beginning to lose his brilliant mental faculties—and maybe past beginning—is tough to take.

Our culture conspires against preparing for or even acknowledging disability, aging, and death—as if happiness is just one more Amazon delivery away. 

I got extra sleep last night and this morning to boost my emotional strength for our visit tonight. Believe it or not, this is me pumping myself up to experience love and joy in tonight’s reunion, and not let sorrow dominate. So much of living now is about finding love and connection while the systems and people we took for granted collapse around us.

The post My Glamorous Life: Entertaining Uncle George appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

My father was an engineer who designed robots. When I first learned what he did, I imagined the Robot from “Lost in Space,” and asked him to make me one. When I turned 13, I realized that the pick-and-place robots he designed replaced assembly-line workers, and asked how he, who’d been a socialist in his impoverished youth, could create something that took anyone’s job away.

“Those are depressing, repetitive jobs,” he said. “Those folks can be trained to do more interesting work: work that stimulates their mind. Pays lots better, too.”

Actually, that’s what he meant to say, but how he expressed it was:

“A steam shovel takes away the job of 1000 Coolies digging with teaspoons. Should we not have steam shovels?”

Oof. My father and his words.

Uh-oh. Let me explain…

My father didn’t mean to be racist with that “Coolie” crack. He was as anti-racist as any white man of his generation, which in his case was actually a lot.

Like he wouldn’t watch “Gone With the Wind” because, in his words, “it’s anti-Negro.”

He would say this angrily, with wet eyes.

As a young man, my father had been a civil rights worker who worked to enroll voters in Harlem. His heart was in the right place.

(But also: He had major emotional problems, constant bubbling rage from untreated childhood trauma, and undiagnosed spectrum stuff, which made him brilliantly inventive and creative, but also left him almost incapable of speaking for ten minutes without offending someone, often profoundly. Where was I? Oh, yes.)

Maurice Zeldman as a young man.

As for the “Negro” in “anti-Negro,” my father was taking his lead from the Black community itself. This was the era of the United Negro College Fund and the NAACP, when a white person calling a Black person a “Negro” was showing respect, strange as it sounds to modern ears.

And he was profoundly right about that damned film, which whitewashed slavery and depicted Black people as either sweet, overgrown children or violent rapists crazed by white flesh. (Still later in my life, when cable TV became a thing, it appalled me that Ted Turner played “Gone With the Wind” seemingly every other week on his big channels, TNT and TBS.) I’m not saying it’s a badly made or unambitious film. Just that it’s racist af. So fuck Ted Turner. Fuck him for platforming “Gone With the Wind” every ten minutes. Fuck him two times for creating the 24-hour cable news cycle. Look where that’s gotten us.

But I digress.

(NOTE: I can’t watch any film with Clark Gable since I learned that he wore dentures that stank—something his glamorous leading ladies had to endure during dialog and kissing scenes. It’s not that I judge the poor man for his health problems and the state of dentistry in the 1930s. It’s just that, ick, it shatters the romantic illusion movies work so hard to create. But I digress again. I can’t watch “Gone With the Wind” because it is racist, and I’m glad my father gave me that understanding when I was young.)

Beep Boop

Wait a minute, how did I get into all this? I was talking about my dad creating robots for Perkin-Elmer, American Machine & Foundry, and Rockwell International. Robots that didn’t look anything like the talking, beeping 1950s sci-fi robots in the old movies I grew up adoring. 

I was talking about how my once-socialist, pro-worker dad helped create products (like pick-and-place robots) that replaced human workers on the assembly line.

Not that that reminds me of anything happening today. Although I should probably ask my chatbot to check and make sure.

(That’s humor, kid—is what my dad would have said.)

Betrayed!

By the way, if you’re so inclined, you can buy a Kindle copy of my dad’s book, “What Every Engineer Should Know about Robots,” from you-know-who. Technically, my father and I wrote the book together: he supplied the knowledge, I brought the writing chops.

When he brought me in on his book-writing assignment, my father promised to share a coauthoring credit with me. But in the end, he couldn’t do it, and I was listed in an acknowledgement as a “creative editor,” whatever that means.

I found out when I saw the printed book that I’d been denied my credit.

My dad could have told me in advance. He could have lied and said the publisher insisted on only crediting one author. How would I have known any different? I was only 23.

But he said nothing.

Not that I’m bitter. My dad was profoundly abused in his childhood. While he came across as having a huge ego, inside he was more fragile than silence. To have given me the boost my writing career desperately needed at the time was simply too difficult for him. It needed to be his book, so everyone would know Murray Zeldman was a genius.

At least, that’s what my mother told me when she saw me sitting quietly in a corner, looking like I’d been gut punched.

I have long understood and forgiven my dad, although at the time I could only feel hurt. (Also at the time I was working blue- and grey-collar jobs that barely covered my rent and bus fare; even if it didn’t immediately boost my financial circumstances, it would have been swell for my self-esteem to have the publishing credit I’d earned. But I digress.)

Besides, it was a great learning experience: mindful of the pain I felt when screwed out of my credit, I’ve made it a point during my decades of work to always credit my colleagues for their contributions. I hope I have not failed to do that.

But we were talking about chatbots or something. Right?

Say, look here, I’ll tell you what Claude.ai and ChatGPT can’t do: write a memoir as disorganized, digressive, and curdled in the stench of resentment as this here—but what is this thing I’ve written here, anyway? A lament? A word salad dressed in thousand island tears? Who can say? I was dreaming when I wrote this. For you. Always for you, my dear daughter.

The post My Glamorous Life: Bots, Books, and Betrayal appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

Working in tech means being comfortable with change and uncertainty. Successfully working in tech means not letting change and uncertainty paralyze you.

Forge ahead on the best information you have, and be prepared to change direction as needed.

The post How do you spell success? appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

We must stop thinking of failure as an end of something, and learn to see it as a natural part of progress. The first incarnation of a new idea may die, but the best ideas will find new lives. Behind every successful launch, there are 100 interesting failures. 

The post Behind every successful launch, there are 100 interesting failures.  appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

My beloved veterinarian’s office apparently moved to a new office location without informing customers. They also changed phone systems. The new phone system doesn’t work, and they didn’t leave a forwarding message on the old phone system. You call, leave a message, never hear back, and never learn what’s become of the business.

Our oldest cat, Snow White, who’s had failing kidneys for two years, is alive at 18 chiefly because we love her and we give her drip medication three times a week. We ran out of the medication last week and requested a refill, but never heard back, and nobody was at the office when we checked.

So for a week I’ve been calling them every morning and every afternoon, while also using their website (which, like the voicemail system, offered not a peep about their office relocation) to request the medicine our queen requires to keep living, and nobody called me back or responded to web messages or text messages, because they weren’t hearing or seeing them.

Today I received a boilerplate email saying that they had moved; the hurried communication included the *area* they moved to but not a street address.

The email also said that their new phone system doesn’t work. So they’ve been sitting in a new office with no customers, not getting their messages—not having thought to provide advance notice to their customers that any changes were afoot—and probably wondering what went wrong.

The email included a phone number we could use to send them a text message. So I did that, letting them know I’d been trying to reach them all week, repeating my request for the badly needed medication, and asking for the street address they’ve moved to.

Three times they texted back with the same information they’d already provided. Information that told the general area they’d moved to. With no street address.

I continued to respond, saying that’s nice but what’s the street address? And each time they replied by resending the same boilerplate that contains absolutely no street address information. You’d think, oh, he’s talking to a bot. But in fact I’m talking to people. People who are responding to messages they’re too frantic to actually read and reply to properly. Instead of answering once, correctly, they end up answering many times without actually, you know, answering.

I empathize with their freakout, I know their job is hard. I had service jobs myself all through my twenties—the benefit of an MFA in fiction writing is that it prepares you to take shit jobs that will later give you material to write about. And even much later in life, as a business owner, I’ve been guilty myself of responding too fast to queries I scanned instead of reading. But I learned better. I learned that it was actually more helpful to read and respond correctly to ten messages, than to scan and respond uselessly to 100. 

I know this because one of my former employees would yell at me to slow down. As you may realize, nobody who worked for me ever feared me. Nor did I want them to. I’m happy about that. No boss should intimidate the people who work for them. I made lots of business mistakes—the cliche about creatives not being super-duper at business exists for a reason, and was true for me. But I never made the mistake of encouraging my employees to live in fear. And neither, apparently, does my veterinarian. Which is cool. He is, after all, a good person. The panic driving the thoughtless responses doesn’t come from him, but from the situation.

I’m not angry at anyone—not the brilliant veterinarian who founded the business, not his medical colleagues, and certainly not the folks who run the front desk. But damn. Don’t move without informing your customers. Don’t tell people approximately where you’ve moved to when you finally realize your customers have no idea what happened to your office and you should let them know where you’ve been hiding all week. And if a customer with fair-to-excellent diplomatic skills gently points out that they still need a street address, the thing to do is update your boilerplate to include the street address—not keep resending the useless boilerplate that asks people to treat their pets’ health as a scavenger hunt with exciting clues about where the veterinarian MIGHT be located.

I am an employee myself these days, and happy to be one. I like that everyone at my workplace is available for honest conversation—even the CEO. It’s an unusual and excellent part of our culture.

Dealing with bills and medications and doctors is something I squeeze into short breaks I take during my working day. Today I’m not only dealing with this during those breaks, I’m also trying to coax the staff of a brilliant and expensive gum surgeon I see (I’m old, I have health problems like everybody, and more than some) to send me the records of my many expensive visits there, which I have paid up front (as they required), so I can share those records with my insurance company and possibly get reimbursed. I spent ten days waiting for those records after they promised to send them to me right away. It used to be, doctors sent their bills to the insurer, and if there was any part the insurance company didn’t cover, they’d invoice you later, discreetly. But that hasn’t been The Way of medical treatment in NYC for years, now. I was polite and didn’t bother them about the missing documentation. I only asked twice. I finally got it and submitted it to the insurer. The insurer’s website entered a black hole after I submitted the invoice, because of course it did. So I submitted again. After which, there were two identical invoices in the queue, because of course there were.

So they’ll probably reject them both. As an added bonus, I discovered that the periodontist had sent me two (out of seven) of the bills that they then re-included in the new mega-bill. Which means the insurance company will think I’m fraudulently trying to double-bill them for my expenses. Because of course they will.

Solving writing problems, design problems, and music production problems brings me joy. Dealing with life on life’s terms, not always so much.

The world is on fire and we will see worse before some sense of justice or even normality returns—if it ever does. But me, I’m still worrying about medical bills and where on earth my cat’s lifesaving medical practice has moved to.

The post Everybody’s lost it, Part I appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

At Automattic, we know our time is finite and precious. Here are the questions we ask ourselves before agreeing to any meeting:

Am I investing time toward the things that are doing the most to help me grow and improve my ability to contribute?How much of my time is contributing to my team’s goals, and choosing the right ones?Is the work effective? Is it moving the needle? Can I describe it to a friend over dinner in a way that gets them excited? Can I blog about it?Are all my meetings so effective that you look forward to them? (Don’t laugh. It is possible.)

“Sync Overload”—And How to Avoid It

The post Too many meetings? appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

Or not.

My fears melted away. And in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation. It had to mean something. And then I meant something, too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too. To God, there is no zero. I still exist. — 
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

AKA:

How I feel after not updating Designing With Web Standards or writing a new book since 2013.

AND:

And also how I feel now that there’s no longer a single, agreed-upon digital town square (and, further, now that the biggest one, where I once enjoyed a hefty following for some pixel pusher, has turned into a N*zi bar, where I no longer choose to spend time).

And since Covid killed the conference I co-founded, and I cut way back on travelling and giving conference talks and focused on paying off the debts we were left with.

And since financial reality forced us to kill our publishing company, too. So many nice things, all gone.

I had the world, or at least a wee piece of it, by the eyeballs, and, not entirely by my own choice, bit by bit, I let it go.

Kinda depressing, sure. But also, and mainly, pretty liberating.

I also learned something about people and friendship, and remembered something about the passing of all things.

The post Staying relevant appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

Starting today, file suits to prevent biased gerrymandering. Fight harder for the right to vote than the GOP has fought to suppress the votes of Americans MAGA dislikes. Craft a Democratic party platform focused on equal rights, equal justice, fair wages, and affordable housing. Win the Midterms, shifting the balance of power in congress. Upon gaining control of the House and Senate, do as many of the following as possible:

Restore and expand women’s rights.

Overturn laws and policies that were motivated by anti-Black or other racial animus. Take them one by one.

Restore queer and trans rights.

Dissolve ICE.

Immediately halt deportations, freeing all prisoners who were denied due process. Provide reparations to them and their families. Use ICE money to restore veterans services, children’s lunch programs, and other essential services that were cut to give billionaires an extra tax break.

Close and tear down Trump’s concentration camps. Educate the public about what happened in those camps, so it never happens again.

Restore the department of education and all other departments that were defunded during Trump’s moronic reign.

Take aggressive action to fight climate change. Lead on it.

Strongly and firmly support Ukraine with no strings attached.

Halt arms shipments to Israel while that country pursues its genocidal project in Gaza. Do whatever is possible to insist on peace and justice.

To the greatest extent possible, lay the groundwork for America to rejoin the family of nations after the Trump presidency.

Restore the “equal time” rules about TV news coverage.

Aggressively prosecute FOX “News” when it deliberately misleads the public.

Create affordable housing programs.

Revive FEMA and other essential services.

Restore Biden’s student loan forgiveness program.

Replace Trump’s hacks with professionals.

Arrest and aggressively prosecute Trump for all the crimes he has committed as president. Use a prosecutorial carrot and stick approach to encourage cooperation from White House staffers who can best roll over on their boss. Hold televised trials so Americans will see Trump and his minions testify to their crimes under oath.

Nullify the Supreme Court’s worst rulings, e.g. Donny’s crimes while president cannot be prosecuted; corporations are human beings; no limits on dark money, etc.

Expand the Supreme Court and impose term limits.

Impose term limits on congress itself.

Forbid senators and congresspeople from profiteering by buying and selling stocks based on inside knowledge. Arrest and prosecute as you would any other insider trader.

Increase the taxes billionaires pay and use those funds to pay down the national debt.

Do everything the legislative branch can do on its own to fix the economy, support small businesses, create jobs, and restore the rights and dignity of all Americans and make America a welcoming place for visitors from other lands.

Having built a strong Democratic party platform that most Americans can get behind, and proven that you mean it by doing as much of the above as you can achieve despite a hostile Executive branch, take back the presidency in 2028.

Immediately limit the power of the presidency so that no future would-be Caesar will seek that office again. 

What have I omitted?

The post Project 2026 appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

My doctor sends me to Brooklyn for an abdominal aortic aneurysm screening. As instructed, I fast for six hours beforehand. I don’t even brush my teeth, for fear of swallowing toothpaste and screwing up the test. I wear a Covid-era face mask to avoid breathing on anyone.

The journey takes me to Boro Hall, a part of the city I’d not explored before. Judging by the style of pedestrian dress and the Hebrew lettering on some of the buildings, it appears to be an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood.

I enter an enormous, shabby waiting room—empty except for me, a receptionist, and a warehouse’s worth of old furniture. The couches are patched with duct tape. There are signs on the tables forbidding you to sit on them. The receptionist informs me that I can in fact drink water without spoiling the test results. She gives me a cup.

After some minutes, a technician comes for me. She’s soft-spoken and quietly friendly. Wears a pink headband and a long dress.

The examination room and the equipment inside it remind me of OB/GYN visits when my ex was pregnant. In those tests, we wanted to see something. In this test, I suppose, we do not. I lie on my back. The jelly is cold.

The exam takes 40 minutes. The only point of visual interest in the somehow-coffee-stained drop ceiling above me is a circular, flat light fixture composed of concentric glass rings. It is like the eye of God, peering down at me. Not a personal, loving God, mind you. Or maybe it’s more like the hard stare of a universe that, if it took note of our trivial human suffering, would be indifferent to it. I breathe in and out, as instructed.

The technician takes several dozen pictures. There’s sound, too. Occasionally I hear the roar my blood vessels make, chugging busily. My blood vessels don’t share my worries. They just do their work. Some of the sounds they make are rather rude. I suppose that’s good. I like to think the boys in the engine room are somewhat boisterous. The rudeness sounds like health.

It’s time to stop staring at the light, sit up, and wipe the goo off my belly. The technician gives me a large piece of special medical paper designed for this very task.

After I leave, a radiologist will review the pictures and send a report to my doctor.

I have a half-dozen other tests to take in the next few weeks. X-Rays, scans, even a lung screening. Ordinarily when a doctor recommends a half-dozen tests, I shove the paperwork in a corner of my desk and forget about it. But this time, I decided to be an adult and follow through. I may even balance my checkbook one day.

I exit the mostly empty medical facility, call a Lyft, and stand on the sidewalk a while, taking in Boro Hall. On the ride home, I let my gaze caress the changing neighborhoods. Somehow the whole city seems more interesting. Or maybe more alive. Like air after rain. Even the familiar landmarks as I near home strike me as beautiful and reassuring.

Home again, I wash my hands, clean last night’s dishes—the kid and her boyfriend cook late at night—pour my first espresso of the day, and knock it back with plenty of fresh, cold water.

I text my friend, to whom I’d complained earlier about the instructions against tooth brushing. He asks, “Did they give you a mint?” I respond with a “ha-ha” emoji.

Much as I enjoy my job, am grateful for my health insurance, and appreciate the wonders of modern medicine, I decide to take the rest of the day off. You know, for mental health. 

The post The eye of God appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.