Who is this guy?

As you might be aware, my article on web standards got slashdotted, which to me is pretty exciting.

Clearly the article touched a nerve as it had the most comments on any article on the front page last time I checked.

One question I saw pop up a couple of times is "who is this guy"

One comment asked

I'd like to know a little bit about the guy who wrote this article. He links to some of the usual standards gurus in his sidebar (Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, CSS Zen Garden) but I can't find any background information on him. I'm not saying that his musings aren't valid, but I'd like to know where he's coming from and what sort of relevant work he does that involves web standards. This would give the article more context and help me to understand better why he says what he does.

So a short summary might be in order

My name is John Allsopp
I live in Sydney, Australia, Bondi to be precise
For many years, through my company Western Civilisation (the 's' in Civilisation is the Australian British spelling, and the name is supposed to be ironic) I have developed Style Master and Layout Master.

Style Master is the only Mac OS X and Windows CSS Editor. it supports all of CSS 2.1, and is far too detailed to go into here. Take a look if you are interested.
Layout Master is a dedicated CSS positioning page layout tool.

I have also written many articles, tutorials, guides and CSS, HTML/XHTML and related web standards courses.
Most of these are free, some of the courses you can purchase.

These are brought together at the House of Style which was one of the earliest dedicated CSS resource sites.

I was involved some years ago with a the Web Standards Projects CSS Samurai, whose work I believe was important in the improvement in CSS support in major browsers in the late 1990s.

Currently along with the web standards group, westciv is organising Web Essentials a major web standards conference in Sydney Australia in September of this year.

Outside of this I am quite involved in LifeSaving. There are a number of posts on this blog about that.

Thanks for the interest, and don't forget to subscribe to the RSS feed

John