Steven Champeon

I love the Internet. I was an early Web developer and blogger despite preferring mailing lists and now I spend my time fighting to keep email a usable medium, with my project Enemieslist, which is trying to classify Internet hostnaming conventions for various purposes of fighting abuse and informing research. I'm a Unix/Mac bigot and loathe every time I am forced to deal with Windows.

Back in the day I was going to be an artist but found out modernism, art nouveau and impressionism had already happened and weren't coming back, so after twenty years without making art I'm starting to again.

I wrote a couple of books on Dynamic HTML, got one of them published (now wildly out of date), wrote for another on CSS (possibly still useful) and coined the term "progressive enhancement" to act as shorthand for the kind of Web design I think makes the most sense. I was on the Advisory Board for SxSW Interactive for several years. I co-founded the Web Standards Project, who made the Web suck less, and hosted the webdesign-L mailing list for twenty years from 1997. I edited a bunch of tech books in the decade from 1997 (you've maybe read at least one of them).

My guitar skills are very poor but I enjoy playing anyway. I was raised in eastern Maine but fell for a North Carolina girl and moved down here in 1993, where I fell for the food and the weather. I have been known to throw legendary cocktail parties and make decent cocktails and put a perfect sear on a pork loin chop. I'm moderately handy. I live in a historic neighborhood just north of downtown Raleigh in an 1871 "farmhouse vernacular", work from home, and we have two cats, Violet and Elijah.