Jeffrey Zeldman

I’ve started a Bluesky list featuring some of the brilliant writers, designers, coders, editors, and others who’ve contributed to A List Apart “for people who make websites” from the magazine’s first dawning back in the 19(mumbles). Bluesky fans, grab the list here:

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:pgjpl4opnmqxxpb74n4vuabv/lists/3lbozpqe2kq2t

Why only *some* of the contributors? Simple. Several are, sadly, deceased. Many others are likely alive and well but not yet on Bluesky. We can’t unmake death, but we can offer the living networked comradeship and a wee increase in visibility.

So if you’re an A List Apart contributor who’s been thinking of joining Bluesky, consider this an incentive. Note: I’m not a partner in Bluesky, and have nothing to gain from inviting you, beyond the pleasure of your company—be it salty or sweet.

Once you join and have started a profile, ping me and I’ll add you to the list. (I’m zeldman.bsky.social on Bluesky.)

And, hey, if you haven’t yet contributed to A List Apart, your ideas are always welcome.

Online since 1998, A List Apart (ISSN: 1534-0295) explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices. About the magazine. | Complete list of Authors. | Style Guide. Cheers!

“Our online experience doesn’t have to depend on billionaires unilaterally making decisions over what we see.”

From pixels to prose, coding to content.

A personal assessment from February, 2024 of the fractured social network landscape.

The post A List Apart contributors list on Bluesky appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.

At its core, MARTI is a bridge. It harmonizes with existing metadata standards like the Content Authenticity Initiative, Anthropic’s Responsible Scaling Policy, and the W3C’s PROV. It anticipates the needs of future standards, laws and practices, such as those proposed by the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), The EU Artificial Intelligence Act, and Making Data FAIR.—Carrie Bickner

As I study Carrie Bickner’s initial posts on the MARTI Framework she’s developing to manage AI metadata across various disciplines, a familiar feeling steals over me.

It’s similar to how I felt during the early days of The Web Standards Project (WaSP), when a handful of us took on the quarreling browser makers in what seemed a Quixotic attempt to bring consistency, predictability, usability, and accessibility to an already Balkanized web.

Fortunately, at that time, we had two aces up our sleeves: 1., the standards already existed, thanks to the W3C, and 2., the EU and Clinton Administration were suing Microsoft, which meant that the tech press was interested in hearing what we had to say—even if evangelizing web standards had little to do with accusations that Microsoft was abusing its monopoly power.

Years after The WaSP declared victory, and browser stagnation had begun to set in, I felt that same thrill vicariously when Eric Meyer, Tantek Çelik, and Matt Mullenweg invented XFN (XHTML Friends Network), inverting the standards creation pyramid so that great ideas were empowered to bubble up from small groups to the wider community, Open Source style, rather than always coming from the top (W3C) down.

I’ve no doubt that microformats were the spark that lit the HTML5 fuse, and we all remember how Steve Jobs used the new markup language to power the first iPhone, initiating the mobile era we now live in.

More about microformats history is available, and you can read Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers online for free—or buy the 2nd Edition, coauthored with Rachel Andrew, directly from Jeremy.

And now I feel those same stirrings, that same excitement about possibilities, as I study Carrie’s first posts about MARTI, an emerging object-oriented metadata framework that can be used to articulate rights-permissions, preservation metadata, provenance, relationships between objects, levels of AI involvement, and contextual information such as usage history and ethical considerations. 

Here’s why I’m excited (and you may be, too).

For better or worse, our ideas create our reality. For better or worse, we have atomic power, the web, and social media. There’s no putting these genies back into their bottles. And there’s certainly no shutting down AI, however you may feel about it. Nor need we, as long as we have smart guardrails in place. 

I believe that MARTI—particularly as it promotes responsibility, transparency, and integrity in documenting AI’s role in content creation and curation—has the potential to be one of those guardrails.

Drafted by a career digital librarian, this provisional  metadata framework for human/generative AI output won’t stop bad actors from scraping content without permission. But if it is extended by our community and embraced by the companies and organizations building AI businesses, MARTI has the potential to bring rigor, logic, and connectedness to the field. In Carrie’s words:

The emergence of generative AI marks a transformative moment in human creativity, problem-solving, and knowledge-sharing. MARTI (Metadata for AI Responsibility, Transparency, and Integrity) is a provisional metadata framework designed to navigate this new landscape, offering a standardized yet adaptable approach to understanding, describing, and guiding the outputs of human-AI collaboration—and even those generated autonomously by AI.

At the heart of MARTI lies a robust object model—a modular structure that organizes metadata into reusable, interoperable components. This model ensures transparency, traceability, and ethical integrity, making it the cornerstone of the MARTI framework.

MARTI is not just an architecture for describing AI output, but it offers a way of structuring policy and a possible foundation for a new literacy. This is not about teaching every individual to code or engineer prompts. It’s about empowering humanity to collectively understand, describe, and guide everything we make with AI, ensuring accountability, transparency, and ethical integrity at every step.

MARTI is a framework for creating structured, standardized documentation that is attached to or embedded in AI-generated content. This documentation, or metadata, can be created by people collaborating with AI tools to produce content. Additionally, AI processes themselves can generate and embed metadata into their outputs, ensuring transparency, traceability, and accountability at every stage of content creation.

MARTI also offers a variety of potentially transformative business applications.

Disclaimer: the author is a friend of mine. But then again, so is every other thought leader mentioned in this article (with the exception of the late Steve Jobs, although our lives did touch when he fired me from a project—but that’s another story).

For more MARTI magic, check these posts:

• Meet Marti
• Object Model Overview
• Domain-Specific Attributes in MARTI
• MARTI: The Object of Our Affections
• New! Safeguarding Intellectual Property: How Blogging Platforms Can Use MARTI to Protect the Creative Content Ecosystem
• Also new! Help Us Establish a Home for MARTI
• Haikus, Sonnets, and Leaves: The Morphology of Metadata for Intellectual Units
• This Is Your Brain on ChatGPT

And if you’ve a mind to do so, please pitch in!

The post Understanding MARTI: A New Metadata Framework for AI appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.

Writing on this website on November 11, 2002, one year and two months after 9/11, my late father Maurice had this to say:

My wife Catherine held up an Annenberg report on World War II, written by Donald L. Miller that she had just downloaded from the web. “Murray,” she said, “please read this, because I remember that you said the same thing to me one year ago.” She pointed to a place in the article where I read, “As one GI said: ‘I think it would have been a catastrophe if Hitler would’ve won.’” The article continued, “That expletive had to be stopped,” said another; “that’s why I joined up.”

I joined the Navy to “stop Hitler” when I was seventeen and a half, and had not finished high school. Since I was that young, I needed parental consent to join. My father, a WW I veteran, enlisted when he was fifteen because his father signed for him and said that he was seventeen. My father went through hell in Europe—survived a Mustard Gas attack, had his knee cap blown away, had surgery to get a silver knee cap, took a bayonet wound in the neck, and was shell shocked. He was in a veteran’s home for one year after the war ended and was given a total disability and honorable discharge.

My father and I were never close. I always seemed to be the object of his anger. He battered me frequently when I was a child. Yet, at the enlistment office where he signed for me, I saw tears in his eyes. I never knew if those tears were for him, for me, or for both of us.

One week after I joined, the war in the European theatre ended. After boot camp, I found myself in the Amphibious Corps being trained for the invasion of Japan. The Amphibious Corps predated the Navy Seals. We were the sailors that used amphibious craft to land on the beaches and return for more of the same until the invasion was over or we were blown out of the water.

The training prepared me to drive LCVP’s (Landing Craft Vehicles and Personnel) and LCM’s (Landing Craft Machinery). These diesel landing craft were used to carry troops, vehicles, and machinery to the beaches during an invasion. The life of an amphibious sailor was estimated at three minutes in combat.

After training, we were being made ready for the invasion when Truman approved release of the atomic bombs, thus ending the war. At the time, I didn’t realize that this action saved my life, the lives of many Americans, and countless Japanese who otherwise would have suffered through a lengthy invasion.

The war ended and I was assigned to train Marines in amphibious warfare. From the time that I enlisted ’til my discharge, my Navy career lasted 13 months. I had signed up for the duration plus six months.

Today, people seem to be ready to condemn troops for mistakes made by governments. Most young people who enlist do so for an ideal. After the war, I learned that my grandparents had been incinerated in Treblinka when they were in their eighties. I did not know that they lost their lives that way.

We still have to think about the megalomaniacs who would rule the world if they were given a chance. In WW II, we waited too long to try to stop Hitler. This caused a devastating war that lasted too long, killed too many people, and permitted insane villains to attempt to rule the world.

I love people who want peace, who worry about their children, who respect education, who see the potential for good in most people. But I also realize that there are people who would destroy a democracy, and return the world to an age of ignorance and tyranny. We must be vigilant to only fight when the battle is right, to survive in a chaotic world, and when a situation arises that requires a proper defense, not hope that the villains will go away of their own accord, but to let them know that we will fight for justice. This Veteran’s Day, let’s honor all of the people who have served their country in times of need.

The post Veterans Day Remembrance appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.

If you’re finding today a bit stressful for some reason, grab a respite by sinking into any of these web design inspiration websites.

Gathered from conversations on Reddit and elsewhere, each site offers a collection of other sites’ designs, chosen for impact, originality, and innovation. Each collection should offer at least a few designs that will inspire your own ideas and creativity—and most contain more than a few. Lots more.

We make no claims as to usability, accessibility, or appropriateness of design. Which doesn’t mean that the chosen websites are unusable, inaccessible, or inappropriate to the brand, subject matter, or needs of the audience. Indeed, from the care devoted to the graphical interface, we assume that many of these sites are as good under the hood as they are on the surface. But it’s just an assumption; we haven’t tested, and the point of this post is purely to share visual and creative inspiration. Enjoy!

• https://godly.website/ (collection)
• https://www.awwwards.com/ (collection)
• https://www.cssdesignawards.com/ (collection)
• https://land-book.com/  (collection)
• https://httpster.net/  (collection)
• https://goodui.org/  (UI patterns A/B tested, experiments)
• https://saaslandingpage.com/ (SaaS landing page examples)
• https://mobbin.com/browse/ios/apps (collection)

Enjoy https://betteroff.studio/, an individual studio’s rhythmically organized, sensory-appealing design.

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