Jeffrey Zeldman was born in New York City in 1955, studied music, film and English at Indiana University before earning a master's degree from the University of Virginia. He worked in music composition, journalism and advertising until 1995, when the Web began taking over his professional life.

Would you like to tell our readers who you are?

I am just a poor boy though my story’s often told.

How did you get started with web design?

Same as most people: I stumbled into it by accident.

In January 1995 I was in advertising. Our Warner Bros client was looking for unusual ways to promote their upcoming Batman Forever, and Don Buckley, a VP at Warner Bros, sensed that the fledgling web was going to be important. He also thought Batman and the web were a good fit, and he asked our agency’s president if we knew how to create websites. We pretended we did.

If we had known what we were doing, we would have created a tragically constricted and unappealing site. In our ignorance, we were able to make something entertaining and unique. It not only sold the movie, it helped sell the web as a viable commercial and marketing space. Half the people using the web at the time visited our site each week. They spent an average of half an hour exploring it. They emailed their friends about it, and downloaded movie clips (even though streaming had not yet been invented and the highest available dial-up speed was 14.4).

The lesson was obvious: keep going and get better. I launched my personal site in June of that year and changed careers.

How did you learn HTML?

Same way you probably did: I viewed source on other people’s sites. From this I learned extended presentational HTML, which was all we had to work with at the time, and I added my own presentational HTML hacks and methods to the body of knowledge out there as people viewed my source. I also even wrote about some of these methods in my old “Ask Dr Web” tutorial. There’s some bad markup out there with my DNA.