John Allsopp

Currently

• Working on Style Master 5
• XRAY and MRI
• Investigating CSS3 support in Safari 3 and the iPhone and iPodTouch (mSafari)
• Working on Web Directions South 2007

A short bio

I'm a software engineer, speaker, writer, educator and surf lifesaver, 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.

• A dao of web design for A List Apart. Published April 2000. In which I argue that the web is its own medium, and we must find its genius, not simply try to shoe horn it into the media of the past, like Television, radio or print. People still say very nice things about it.
• The Big Picture on Microformats for Digital Web Magazine. Published August 2006. Who's doing what with Microformats. An overview of tools, publishers, services and more using microformats in mid 2006.
• Add microformats magic to your site Vitamin Magazine, published August 2006. An introduction to microformats, and how to use them.
• Message to the messengers Published May 2004. Respect goes out to all those who helped make CSS the success that it is - many of whom you've never heard of.
• 5 Questions to ask your web team Also appeared in the online technology sections of the Age and Sydney Morning Herald Newspapers. 5 things all web site managers must know about the sites they are responsible for.
• Web pages aren't printed on paper. A forerunner to the Dao of Web Design - first published in 1999! How I gave up trying to "control" web pages and discovered adaptability.
• Webpatterns and Websemantics, published November 2005. Where will richer semantics for today's web come from?
• Semantics in the Wild, published November 2005. How do people really use semantics in the web development?

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.

• As of February 2007, I am about to be involved in my fourth conference as an organizer, Web Directions North, in Vancouver Canada, after 3 successful conferences in Sydney Australia (and two series of workshops around Australia as well).
• WE04 and WE05 are widely considered to have been the first web standards focussed conferences anywhere in the World, and were held in September 2004 and September 2005. was one of the organizers of these conferences, held in Sydney, Australia
• Web Directions South in 2006 was organized by my business partner Maxine Sherrin and me. The site features podcasts, slides, live blogging, photos and more from the conference.
• Web Directions North 2007 is organized by Maxine Sherrin, Dave Shea, Derek Featherstone and me. We hope it will be the first of many on the North American Continent.

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

• South by Southwest interactive (SxSW) 2005 and 2006
• Web Directions '06 on Microformats - features podcast, slides and liveblogging transcript
• Open Publish 2004 2005 and 2006
• Open Standards 2004 2005 and 2006
• Port 80's Ideas 3 in Perth, April 2006. Features slides, podcast and transcript.
• Web Standards Group Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Wellington, Brisbane.
• AGIMO, the Australian Government Information Management Office, on blogs, wikis and the conversation based web
• The Traveltech conference
• The Australian Tourism Futures conference
• Multimedia Victoria
• Digital Media 2.0

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

Upcoming speaking dates