cLINT FISHER ART | //Design_Photo

Theres a new interview with Jeffrey Zeldman over at iStockphoto.com. I found one thing particularly interesting about the interview with this question and response:

Do you sometimes feel shock with the roster of accomplishments you’ve accumulated under your belt? Do you have any specific goals for the near future?

It’s nice to have my own business and I’m mostly happy to have had a hand in changing the way many sites are designed and developed, but neither of those things is a particularly big deal.

If I had a goal for the future it might be that next time I come up with an idea for the web, it might be nice if it brought my family some dough. My more successful efforts seem to have benefited the community at large without lining my pocket. That was okay with me then, but now I have a kid.

I’ve thought quite a bit about this response, and can only reason from my own perspective on it. I don’t have any children yet, so I can’t begin to understand the responsibilities it brings financially, but I can understand how this becomes a great concern once you are responsible for bringing that child into this world and want it to have the very best possible.

What I do want to mention is that I think what Zeldman has done for web development is far greater than his response of it not being “a particularly big deal.” It has had a tremendous impact, and I am a result of that, and can attest to the impact it has made and is making. Very few (if not all) of us who are “designing with web standards” would be where we are today if it had not been for Jeffrey becoming the spokesperson and chief soldier for the cause. Sure it could have been someone else, but it wasn’t. And yes we have some fantastic tremendously influential people among us now and also some of which have been around just as long and longer. But certain people go down in history as fathers of causes, and in the web standards cause I can’t see anyone else who replaces him, or would want to. I tend to think that Eric Meyer is the father figure of CSS, but who am I, its just me expressing an opinion of someone who in a particular area I look up to and look to for help and direction.

Lastly, I can empathize regarding Jeffrey’s desire that in the future, his ideas would put money in his pocket. Who would’nt want this to be so? The fact is, that many of the most influencial people on this planet are not compensated financially for the ground breaking achievements they have done.
I doubt Tim Berners-Lee has been paid for inventing the internet yet, and the list of examples can go on and on. I’d like to see all of the forementioned sporting bank accounts the size of Bill Gates.

What I will say is that zeldman, ala, meyerweb, stopdesign, simplebits, and that homeless man that I gave a dollar bill to who said “God bless you son” provide much more inspiration to me than can be measured numerically. Some of us feed from the crumbs that fall from the table.