Boyink! - Spring Forward on the Web

There are basically four reactions to posts on Web standards and frankly more advocacy doesn’t seem to be helping most of them. Full Post >>

Keith Robinson takes a break from lobbying for web standards.  I was just in a phone conference today with a 3rd party development firm having to make the case for CSS over tables, and I wasn’t real happy for having to do so.  If the conversation had come up during the vendor selection process they might well have not gotten the job - I shouldn’t have to preach to the choir.

Comments are closed, but you can read the comments other people left.

1. Dan Dombrowsky on June 17, 2004

   You know, I’ve been thinking about this for a bit now.

   As a developer, I feel what I guess you could call disdain for the Web Designers here where I work.  This is not because they are the kind of stereotypical wacky creative folk that make up the art and design field, even though they are. It’s not because I’m jealous of their creative talent, even though I am just a bit.

   Rather it is because they don’t know html.  I mean really.  They haven’t a clue.  They sit in their cube with their shiny 21 inch flatscreens and drag and drop things into Dreamweaver.  Inevitably their code is riddled with 40 nested table, with no rhyme or reason or apparent purpose. 

   Now, if they came up with a design comp in Photohop and handed it off to me to turn into html I could respect them.  If they took the time and effort to write clean presentational HTML I would treat them as a peer.  If they wrote super-clean semantic standards-based code and used appropriate CSS for styling I would buy them lunch every day for a month.  But no, alas, they do not.  And they wonder why I take screen shots of their designs and write the code myself…

   Anyways, I guess the point of this rant is that there are sooooo many people who really haven’t a clue about the benefits of web standards (like free lunch for a month, courtesy of me).  And Keith was such a good advocate that its a shame to see him stop talking about it as he becomes more well-known.  But I digress, there is still definitely a need to explain to clients the benefits of standards and our bosses too.  And yes of course the designers.

2. Michael Boyink (Author) on June 17, 2004

   I feel for you Dan!  I’m lucky to work in situations where the developer/designer lines are pretty fuzzy, and the designers seem to be getting it.

   What was funny about the situation I was in with the 3rd party is that it was reversed from the norm.  We delivered CSS-based templates, and their developers started to re-create them in tables.

3. Dan Dombrowsky on June 17, 2004

   Hmmm, that is a bit of the shoe on the other foot isn’t it?

   I find that especially with developers (and I am one, so I ought to know) there is still a reluctance to use CSS.  In fact quite a few of those I know regard HTML as trivial and unimportant, as long as their programming logic is sound, and they never bothered to learn CSS.

   It’s almost like the designers don’t want to do standards because they’d actually have to learn HTML and CSS.  And developers have their own language like PHP or ASP and don’t bother with the “easy stuff”.  Sigh.  I definitely see what drove Keith to quit.

   This is all from my personal experience of course and I have nothing against either group.  I just think both of them have their reasons to ignore HTML/CSS standards and in the long run it hurts them more than it helps. But oh well.

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