While honeymooning in Rome, we spotted an Italian translation of my second book in the display window of a quaint old shop two blocks from the Colosseum.
The ancient amphitheatre was our destination; we had been walking toward it excitedly, with greater and greater speed. But the bizarre sight of Designing With Web Standards in this strange location halted our progress.
For my book, my name, my face to be here, of all places! What were the chances? For a text about something as new and ephemeral as web design to show up in this timeless and eternal plaza! How crazy was that?
The shop owner, adjusting his window display, shot us a quizzical smile. My companion pointed to my face, and then to the book cover, which bore my photo. The owner shrugged; he did not understand. If life were a movie, I would have whipped a blue beanie out of my coat pocket. But it isn’t, and I had none.
So there I stood. The author, at a loss for words.
And then we smiled, and he smiled, and we continued our passage toward the ancient home of bread and circuses.
4 replies on “My Glamorous Life: Roman Holiday”
Hi Jeffrey, I had a copy of the Italian edition of the book, the first one, with the orange cover, and I have been able to start a web designer career thanks to it. Then I have been a programmer, an analyst, a project manager and so on, but your book was the door to what was behind the web that I was passionate about. You were an inspiration and still are.
I still have my copy of the French edition of that first, orange book. In fact, it was the very first Web-related book I bought, while I was 18 and just starting as a student.
Before acquiring it, I already had the opportunity to read an online translation (published on pompage.net with permission from New Riders) of the “99.9% of websites are obsolete” chapter. I remember being heavily inspired by it, and I was fortunate to meet a teacher (and future very good friend) who thought as highly of it as I did.
Since then, I’ve always stayed faithful to progressive enhancement and the like, often getting into fierce (but polite) arguments with peers and colleagues. Never embracing the trends and approaches in which JavaScript was a non-negotiable requirement made it harder to find meaningful jobs, but I managed to continue evolving on my own path — well, until burnout, but I have hope it will come to an end at some point.
Telling younger students the (abridged) story of their craft has always been a kind of duty of mine, and the name of Zeldman always came very soon in the list (usually not long after Tim Berners-Lee and close to Eric Meyer and Dave Shea) 🙂
Thank you for sharing that!
I have read the book in 2007 and it has been a huge inspiration for me ever since. Today I’ve stumbled on it by accident and reread some of the pages – the core principles are still as sound as ever. Probably my favorite book on Web design of all time, it’s really different compared to everything else I’ve ever read on that topic – I guess the combination of deep experience and a sharp writing style does it – thank you so much for this masterpiece!