Quotes from Jeffrey Zeldman

Amazon doesn't want to give Apple a cut of its media sales, so Apple won't let Amazon sell products in its apps.

Business owners should think of designers as architects, not decorators.

Historians and scholars have access to every issue of every newspaper and journal written during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s but can access only a comparative handful of papers covering the election of Barack Obama.

When you die, nobody pays your hosting company, and your work disappears. Like that.

Dropbox, with its emphasis on good old-fashioned hierarchies, is superb at automatically saving one original of each photo I take, whether shot with a phone or a fancy camera. No loops, no duplicates, no confusion.

I could open a thousand Excel documents and still never think to scroll past a wall of empty rows to see if, hidden beneath them, there is a tab I need to click. Just doesn't occur to me. Because, design.

To my way of thinking, passive management of file assets is okay for screwing around with iPads, where we're mainly watching TV on Netflix or obsessive-compulsively checking the popularity of our Instagram uploads.

We at The Web Standards Project turned everything on its head. We said browsers should support the same standards instead of competing to invent new tags and scripting languages. We said designers, developers, and content folks should create one site that was accessible to everyone.

The web's strength lies precisely in its unique position as the world's first universal platform.

Even if it's not always the best markup, what are Facebook and Twitter? They're web standards with some scripts. They may not validate, but they're still CSS layouts and simple markup, and that's great!

Now, not every blog post or 'Top 10 Ways to Make Money on the Internet' piece deserves to live forever. But there's gold among the dross, and there are web publications that we would do well to preserve for historical purposes.

CSS is the design language of the web, and it is not as easy to use as it ought to be, and it can be confusing, especially if you are new to it.

Many thought it was a fool's errand - that the browser companies were never going to listen to us. Others argued that, 'Users don't care if you use Web standards.' Well, of course they don't. They just know that your site works better.

At one point, I was blogging prodigiously, in the late '90s; and I was getting, like, millions of pages because I was, like, one of the only people writing about web design, and I was always writing about web design.

In 1995, I made a website, and half the web came to see it, and I thought, 'Man, that's it, that's what I want to do.'

The printed word will be around long after many of our digital creations are gone, either because books don't require monthly hosting, and blogs and websites do... or because the languages and platforms for which a particular digital creation was published will become obsolete.

Put simply, if an interface is poorly designed, I will not see the data I looked for, even if it is right there on the page.

Real web designers write code. Always have, always will.

The best way to engage honestly with the marketplace via Twitter is to never use the words "engage," "honestly," or "marketplace.

Spec = asking the world to have sex with you and promising dinner date to one lucky winner.

Content precedes design. Design in advance of content is not design, it's decoration.

I know and have worked alongside some of the designers, developers, and editors at Vox Media; you'd be proud to work with any of them.

I spent all day in front of a digital screen, but I'm about to curl up with a book.

I was a frustrated musician, frustrated designer, frustrated art director, frustrated novelist, right. I'd fail at all these different professions.