Man Crushes, Web Standards, HTML5 in 10K

by Thomas Lewis on July 29th, 2010

Ok, I am going to make a confession and admit that I have a man-crush on this gentleman:

Now hear me out before you begin thinking I have gone off the deep end or making a serious life change. See, I lived for a long time in the “developer” world focused on back-end coding. I believed “design” was all about the aesthetics of a website. I then decided one day to attend An Event Apart, which was a conference for people who make websites. This conference was run by a great group of folks which one was the man above, Jeffrey Zeldman. Little did I know that he was known as the King of Web Standards nor that he had written an amazing book that would change how I thought about web development:

If you take a look at MIX Online which is a site I manage for Microsoft which is a community of designers, developers and web builders you will find that we have always been a proponent of web standards-based development. Also, we were early to jump on board with HTML5. So you can imagine how stoked I was when we were offered the chance to work with Jeffrey Zeldman and his partner in crime Eric Meyer on a great project called 10K Apart.

This is a contest based on a previous concept by Zeldman where we want you to create the most brutal HTML5-based application with only 10 kilobytes of code!

Now you only have 30 days to get your app submitted and you will actually have some of the most awesomesauce judges: Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, Nicole Sullivan, Whitney Hess, and Jeremy Keith. The grand prize is free registration to any AEA event, the incredible HTML5 for Web Designers Book and $3000 Visa Cash Card. That’s a lot of cake!

So go check out the contest page (which looks amazing!), explore submitted apps and get your submission up there!

Now these things don’t just happen, it takes some pretty good talent to pull it off. We had Ian Muir who handled the backend work. Nishant on my team PM’d the project flawlessly. Of course the amazing, amazing, amazing team at Things That Are Brown. In fact, go check out their post about their work on the project: