Author

Tantek Çelik

Tantek Çelik is web standards lead at Mozilla, where he helps Firefox raise the bar in what web developers expect web applications to support. In a long and influential career, he co-founded the Microformats movement and founded microformats.org, created the CSS Box Model Hack, designed the Tasman rendering engine for Microsoft IE5/Macintosh (the first browser to significantly support web standards), was chief technologist at Technorati, is the author of HTML5 Now, and is credited on a number of recommendations relating to XHTML and CSS. Tantek lives in San Francisco and writes at Tantek.com.

Also from this author

The Vendor Prefix Predicament: ALA’s Eric Meyer Interviews Tantek Çelik

During a public meeting of the W3C CSS Working Group, Mozilla web standards lead Tantek Çelik precipitated a crisis in Web Standards Land when he complained about developers who misunderstand and abuse vendor prefixes by only supporting WebKit’s, thereby creating a browser monoculture. Tantek’s proposed solution, having Mozilla pretend to be WebKit, inflamed many in the standards community, especially when representatives from Opera and Microsoft immediately agreed about the problem and announced similar plans to Mozilla’s. To get to the bottom of the new big brouhaha, exclusively for A List Apart, our Eric Meyer interviews Tantek on Mozilla’s controversial plan to support -webkit- prefixed properties.