Talk:Jeffrey Zeldman

Picture

I think there should be a picture of this individual on this article. What do you think? --CortlandKlein (talk) 23:33, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Absolutely. Do you have one? Agendum (talk) 07:25, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Recommend for deletion

This is so obviously a self-publicity Wikipedia article.

E.g.

"Zeldman is held to be one of a vanguard of proficient visual designers who have adopted and promoted the use of standards-based, cross-browser solutions to web design problems."

(i) "Held to be" by whom? (ii) There are millions of proficient web designers. If anyone is in the 'vanguard' it is those with the foresight to design the next level of standards... certainly not the millions who simply follow them, as happens in most industries. (iii) Just about all good web designers, of whom there must be tens or hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, "adopt and promote the use of standards-based, cross-browser solutions to web design problems." It's like saying that car mechanics adopt the use of standard sized bolts and standard battery voltages. The promoting part... again, most of the promotion is of books, events, etc., produced or run by Zeldman.

At a talk by an "educationalist", he said that the first thing to do for publicity is to get a Wikipedia Id and write an article about yourself (or get a friend to). Zeldman has done this on Wikipedia, Flickr, his own blog and, I would guess, other places. The fact would seem to be that none of these contain anything that sets him out as worthy of special attention relative to the countless other good web designers in the world.

I do not have anything against Zeldman or his business. He appear to be a competent web designer. His web design company has won "awards". Most web awards would seem to have been invented for focussed publicity, rather than representing real industry-wide recognition (web awards seem to proliferate at the same rate as web sites). However there would seem to be nothing obvious that makes him worthy of an encyclopaedia entry unless it is the intent of Wikipedia to have an entry for every individual with a business, or who has written a book. Wikipedia is not, I understand, to be primarily a promotional vehicle, although it must be very difficult to draw the line regarding quality control vs. publicity. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.183.24.162 (talk) 14:28, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Research on reviewers' comments on his book entry on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Web-Standards-Jeffrey-Zeldman/product-reviews/0321616952/ref=cm_cr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&filterBy=addOneStar suggest that, whilst overflowing with prolixity, the actual useful information contained in quite a long book is very patchy and sparse. This would tends to move any reason for his being identified as more significant than other good web designers down a few notches towards the average. Presumably, either Wikipedia should have articles for the millions of average-and-above web designers or else this article should be removed until something particularly significant about Zeldman is presented.

(I have found this experience frustrating because the existence of a Wikipedia entry seemed to be a positive indicator that I'd found the author of the sort of book about web design that I was looking for. Unfortunately it has turned out to be a red herring - an article that has no encyclopaedic value).

• Jeffrey Zeldman is important in web design-- this article just needs more references. Here is Business Week calling him "King of Web Standards" in 2007, for a start. Smundy (talk) 17:34, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

References