AI interface design in 2025 looks like web design in 1997. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot each handle the same tasks their own way, with no shared conventions for parsing content, showing reasoning, citing sources, or requesting permission before acting. The cost of this fragmentation is already visible: rework, user distrust, and products that age fast. The window to shape these conventions is open, but not for long.
The article's core argument is historical, and that is what makes it worth reading. Jeffrey Zeldman, whom BusinessWeek called the King of Web Standards, did not invent HTML or CSS specifications. He co-founded the Web Standards Project in 1998, launched A List Apart that same year, and spent years convincing designers, developers, and eventually browser makers that shared conventions were worth fighting for. The pressure came from practitioners, not committees. Netscape shipped the blink tag, Microsoft answered with the marquee, and designers rebuilt the same site three times for each browser and called it a living. Zeldman ended that by organizing the people paying the daily tax of the chaos.
The argument this piece is really making sits in Zeldman's 2003 book, Designing with Web Standards, which was written not for developers but for the people who sign checks. That rhetorical move, taking a technical standards fight and framing it as a business-cost argument, is exactly the playbook the author says AI interface designers need to run right now. Read the full piece for the parallel to hold up: who the Zeldman figures are today, what the equivalent of the Web Standards Project looks like for AI, and why Dan Maccarone's framing of this as a revolution makes the timeline urgent.
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