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John Allsopp

westciv
john@westciv.com

Upcoming speaking engagements

  1. June 24 ReMIX—at Melbourne Australia
  2. July 10th Enterprise Content Management—at Canberra Australia

John Allsopp

Currently

A short bio

I'm a , , , and , with a long standing interest in CSS, web design and development. I'm also one of the founders and organizers of the web design and development conferences "Web Directions".

Read a short bio for some more.

Software

For the last 14 years, along with Maxine Sherrin, I've run Western Civilisation pty. ltd. (westciv), a software development company. We publish the successful, highly regarded Cascading Style Sheet development software Style Master, for both Mac OS X and Windows. We have also previously published Layout Master, a tool for developing CSS based HTML and XHTML page layouts, and Palimpsest, a sophisticated hypertext based knowledge management tool.

Style Master

Style Master is the leading cross platform CSS developments software, with tens of thousands of users around the world. It's the oldest, and yet most frequently updated CSS development tool on either platform.

Layout Master

Now freeware for Windows, Layout Master was our tool for developing HTML+CSS based page layouts for the web. Changes in the underlying software development environments we use, and the way in which best practice page layout is done (moving away from absolute positioning to float based layouts) made Layout Master less useful than it was when first developed, and yet prohibitively expensive to redevelop. Many of its best features have been incorporated into Style Master.

Palimpsest

Developed in the early 1990s, Palimpsest was a Mac only application for developing complex knowledge bases that incorporated very rich hypertext (such as multidirectional linking, tagged links, like meta data, and meta data copy and paste.) Very enthusiastically received at the time, such a powerful application was probably too ambitious for a small development company, and the simplicity and networked nature of the Web (itself very much in its infancy when we began developing Style Master) pretty much annihilated all desktop hypertext applications (like Lotus SmarText) of which there were at the time quite a few.

The lesson from this? Don't try to work against the web. Work out where the stampede is going, and get yourself there.

Publications

In addition to publishing software, Westciv has published significantly online in the field of standards based web design and development, accessibility, CSS, HTML and related fields.

The Complete CSS Guide

Now nearly a decade old, and frequently updated in those 9 or more years, "Everything you ever wanted to know about style" has widely been recognized for its central role in helping people learn about CSS. Dave Shea, founder of the CSS Zen Garden, calls it "the place to learn CSS". I originally wrote the first edition of the guide in 1997, in a week or two of intense work. It has been maintained and updated by myself and Maxine Sherrin.

Presently, it is probably viewed by well over a million people a year.

You can even get it for your iPod

Self paced training

Since 2000, westciv has published a series of self paced training courses, covering XHTML and HTML, CSS, color and graphics for the web, with a particular focus on issues such as standards based development, accessibility, and best practices more generally.

From time to time we publish these courses in weekly installments.

Books

Microformats

I have recently had my first full book published - the first dead trees book by anyone on microformats. It's published by Friends of Ed, the web focussed offshoot of major tech publishers Apress.

Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 (yes, it uses the dreaded 2.0 phrase, but as I invented it, I can use it ok!).

Firefox

In 2004 I contributed a chapter to the late Nigel McFarlane's Firefox Hacks for O'Reilly Publishing.

In 2006, along with Maxine Sherrin, I inaugurated a prize in excellence in Australian web design in Nigel's memory, the McFarlane Prize.

Articles

Over the last 10 years or so, I have written many articles, for online and print publications. Increasingly, I tend to publish articles on one of several blogs I run. This means I can bang out spur of the moment nonsense I then get to regret at leisure.

You can find more articles by me at westciv's learning section

Blogs

Dog or Higher

Not quite my first blog (we had a short lived hand coded "blog" at westciv focussing on web standards design some time before), the first one I put a lot of effort into. My (now) wife said one day "you need a blog". I do everything she tells me, and so "dog or higher" was born. The name is a Simpsons quote I explain in a very early post.

Microformatique.

As you might guess, Microformatique is a blog about microformats. I started this a few months back as an informal clearing house of ideas, events and so on, about microformats, to complement the more official channels.

Digital Web

I'm an invited blogger at the venerable Digital Web Magazine, where I do a regular roundup of news on microformats.

Web Directions

We publish confernece news, opinion

Conferences

I somewhat fell into organizing conferences. Here are several I have helped put on.

Speaking

I am asked often to speak at conferences, and do my best to say yes. Some of the events I have spoken at include

Email me if you would be interested in my speaking at your conference or other event.

Upcoming speaking dates

June 24thRemix Australia— at Melbourne, Australia
I'm speaking on the "future of webapps" panel, with Brian Goldfarb, John Butterworth, and chaired by Read/Write Web founder Richard McManus.
July 10thEnterprise Content Management— at Canberra, Australia
I'm speaking on a panel about Open Surce and closed source CMS.

Recent speaking dates

February 7th, 2007 Web Directions north— at Vancouver, Canada
A session covering the theory and practice of developing and designing with Microformats - along with Tantek Çelik and Dan Cederholm
March 23rd IA Summit - full day workshop— at Las Vegas, Nevada
Designing with Structured Data, along side Karen Loasby, Margaret Hanley and Thomas Vander Wal.

Slides (PDF)

March 23rd26th, 2007 IA Summit— at Las Vegas, Nevada
WebPatterns - Design patterns in web site architecture and User Interaction

Slides (PDF)

April 17th, 2007 Web 2.0 Expo: Microformats, Much More Than Just Promise— at San Franisco, CA, USA
Microformats are community-generated standards for identifying types of data in normal web pages. How do these rapidly spreading conventions make it easier to design interactions for the Web? How can you create scripts or stylesheets to leverage these simple formats, and what new applications exist that haven't been explored?

Projects

Webpatterns

A project to develop a pattern language for web page and web site architecture, which I started in late 2005. While seemingly in hiatus, I continue to work on these concepts, and discuss them with anyone silly enough to listen. I'll be presenting on the concept at the IA Summit in Las Vegas in March of 2007.

Web Standards Project

I was very fortunate and honored to be asked to be an early member of the web standards project, and was a member of the "CSS Samurai".

Podcasts

A number of my presentations have been podcast including

Web Directions 06 - Microformats Ideas 3 - Port 80 (where I somewhat disastrously experimented with audience participation - getting the audience to clap when I changed slides so that the podcasting audience could synchronize their slides to the podcast. Take it from me - doesn't work).

I'm sure there are others lurking out there

Interviews

Consulting

Though busy, I do sometimes find time to do some consulting, particularly with a focus on the convergence of technology and strategy, particularly in web design and development. If you are interested, please email me.

Miscellaneous

Flickr

Photos I take of my exciting life you can find on Flickr

ClaimID

My identity at ClaimID

More?

Want to know more? You can read all 300 or so posts at Dog or Higher, or maybe say hi at one of the upcoming events I list. I am very amenable to beer and chatting (at appropriate times, of course).