Photo by Patrick H. Lauke.
Peter-Paul Koch is a mobile platform strategist, consultant, and trainer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He concentrates on Web technologies, mobile websites, and W3C Widgets.
He specialises in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and browser compatibility. He has won international renown with his browser compatibility research, frequently speaks at conferences, has founded Fronteers, the Dutch association of front-end professionals, and advises browser vendors on their implementation of Web standards.
In 2009 he shifted from traditional desktop browsers and sites to the mobile Web, and he never looked back. He discovered that mobile devices and browsers are in even more need of description than their desktop counterparts, and set himself to the task.
On the Web he is universally known as ppk.
Currently Vodafone is his largest client and sponsor of the mobile compatibility tables.
You can always get in touch with him to discuss interesting mobile platform projects.
Peter-Paul Koch has been a professional front-end engineer since 1998. He focused on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and browser compatibility even when doing so was not yet fashionable.
After a few months he concluded that there was no website that provided the precise, correct, hype-free browser compatibility information he needed, so he founded his own site in 1998 and started testing browsers. This project eventually grew into QuirksMode.org, which was launched in 2003 and revised in 2006.
In 1999 he persuaded his bosses that front-end engineering is a separate technical discipline; a fact that registered on very few radars back then (and is occasionally disputed even today). He became the lead front-end developer of Netlinq Framfab, then the second-largest Dutch website creation company.
In this function he helped the ten or so front-end developers he led make the transition from table-based layouts to CSS-based ones. Although back then the state of the browsers precluded making full use of CSS’s capabilities, the front-end team made a dedicated effort to use as much CSS as possible, something that was unusual back then, especially in larger companies.
In 2006 he created the Omroep.nl media player in which all programmes from the Dutch public broadcast corporations are streamed. He was responsible for the JavaScript interface and the CSS skinning; not for the backend or the actual streaming.
Go to uitzendinggemist.nl and select any broadcast. The media player will pop up.
He went freelance in 2002, creating clean HTML/CSS templates for national and international clients. He also helped several companies make the transition to full CSS by his training courses.
In 2008 he stopped creating websites himself and focused on teaching others how to create websites through his consultancy and training.
In 2009 he started working for Vodafone on mobile web consultancy, training and browser compatibility research.
In order to keep up with the state of the art he continues to code several private, fun projects, some of which may eventually be published. He also continues to work on QuirksMode.org.
Hell is other browsers — Sartre
Peter-Paul Koch has been running QuirksMode.org and its predecessors since 1998.
It is the prime source for browser compatibility information on the Internet, mainly thanks to the Compatibility Tables, where front-end engineers from all over the world find hype-free assessments of the major browsers’ CSS and JavaScript capabilities, as well as their adherence to the W3C standards.
On his influential QuirksBlog Peter-Paul Koch follows the browser market, advances in front-end technology and theory, and related topics. Increasingly, he blogs about the mobile Web and its unique problems.
Recent speaking gigs include:
Peter-Paul Koch is a frequent speaker at conferences in Europe and the US. He loves talking about modern front-end techniques and meeting web developers across the globe. He loves it even better when somebody else is paying his bills.
In 2009 he stopped speaking about JavaScript and started to concentrate fully on the mobile Web.
Peter-Paul Koch has always been an avid writer, and, in addition to his site, has written technical articles for the Apple Developer Connection (2003) and the Opera Web Standards Curriculum (2008).
He has also published articles on influential e-zines such as A List Apart and Digital Web Magazine.
In 2006 his book ppk on JavaScript was published by Peachpit/New Riders.
Browser vendor use the Compatibility Tables to improve the quality of their products and to provide compatibility information.
Peter-Paul Koch advises the Microsoft Internet Explorer team and the Opera teams on the standards compliance of their respective browsers. He is in touch with most other browser vendors, increasingly also the mobile ones. He is not being paid for such work, which allows him to retain his independence in judging compatibility issues.
In 2007, Peter-Paul Koch initiated the founding of Fronteers, the Dutch organisation of front-end engineering professionals, which currently unites about 150 professionals.
Its main goal is to further professionalise Dutch front-end engineers by cooperating with educational institutions in the updating of their curricula, instating a form of certification, organising conferences and meet-ups, and participating in policy-setting bodies.
Peter-Paul Koch was elected chairman. He played a major part in organising the Fronteers 2008 and Fronteers 2009 conferences.
Peter-Paul Koch’s education did not prepare him for front-end engineering at all. He studied Ancient History at the University of Amsterdam, specialising in the later Roman empire (5th century AD).
He has an excellent knowledge of history, and can, in all states of intoxication, give a short presentation on pretty much any topic in classical or Western European history until 1945.
He once considered writing a doctoral thesis on the Old-Norse Thidrekssaga and the theories of Heinz Ritter-Schaumburg. He wrote one scholarly article on that topic for a Dutch magazine and created his very first website (1998) to store the preliminary results of his research. He apologises for the frames. On the other hand, he’s quite proud that this site uses some CSS.
He finished history teacher’s training, but when no jobs were to be had he switched careers. A state-sponsored course threatened to turn him into an “Internet Advisor,” but he ignored his teachers succesfully and trained himself as a front-end engineer.
Currently he has six to twelve mobile phones lying around on his desk. Occasionally he
hears a sad and world-weary kind of soft beep, probably because one of them wants attention.
Unfortunately he hasn’t yet been able to figure out which of the six to twelve phones
it is.
The one thing he never does with any of these phones is make a phone call.
His grandfather was a coffee planter on Java, so he is genetically predetermined to be an expert on most languages that have “Java” in their name.
His DOM Compatibility Tables are reliably estimated to have saved the global web developer population about € 5 million on hair transplants in 2007 alone.
He feels like Caesar when he talks about himself in the third person, but he will not conquer Gaul. More importantly, he will not write his memoirs in Latin.
Contrary to popular belief he did not invent the Thursday.