In 2003, I inadvertently discovered web standards. The site was Dan Rubin’s Superfluous Banter and there was a beautiful light green menu bar with block hovers on the links. I loved it so much I told myself that no matter what I was going to decipher the crazy Javascript that made it work. I viewed the source and all I saw was a plain HTML unordered list. What was this black magic?
You see, years prior I had given up on web design because it seemed that to do anything “interactive” one had to learn mountains of Javascript. Viewing and trying to decipher the source of websites in 2000 was like reading Ulysses backwards. This clean presentation of markup in front of me was counter-intuitive to say the least, yet it felt so “right.” I was baffled.
Finally, I figured out that everything was being controlled by CSS and that this new approach was called standards-based design. I was hooked. I knew immediately this is what I wanted to do for a career. I was going to be a web designer. But not just a web deigner, I was going to run my own business as a full-time, freelance web designer. Nearly all the bloggers I followed freelanced on their own and I aspired to do the same.
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