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Apr. 17th, 2007 06:34 pm
Fangeeking
This guy is not only very cute, but brilliant. He did a session today about web standards that made me want to stand up and cheer.
One of the things that has kept me away from getting serious about web designing is how the ubergeeks have taken over the whole thing, leaving many of the rest of us in the dust. And creating completely unusable sites in the meantime. What was (and is) happening is that they'll come up with some new tech and then start throwing it around, willy-nilly, like some five-year-old discovering that he can write his name in the snow.
There's a really bad tendency, among capital-G geeks, to just do what's cool simply because they can instead of thinking through whether said coolness really belongs in the project in question, and whether it may just be a trend that's going to look dated in a year, and therefore make their client have to re-invest in new design all over again.
Then there's the issue of ugly code. Amateurs like yours truly can get away with ugly code. CS majors have no excuse. And the people who make things like GoLive have no excuse whatsoever. Attempting to make a simple, table-based splash page for the SMFH was miserable when I was trying to use GoLive because it kept fucking with my code. Example? The bloody thing put paragraph and font formatting tags on EVERY LINE OF TEXT. Every. One. Not just on carriage returns, but on everything, even when it was pasted over from a plaintext doc. WTF?
What Keith was going off about that made me squirm with glee is the idea of a hierarchical structure for sites:
1. Content (This is key; never obscure your content with design or geekery. Period.)
2. Structure (This is how your content is structured, and you use basic markup to format it, link around,etc.)
3. Styles (CSS--the frame for your content)
4. Functionality (interactive elements, forms, etc.)
If you separate all these elements, you create a site that can have the higher layers stripped off, and still present the content. This then makes your site universally accessible--by every browser, screenreader, device, whatever. You may not have the exact same experience with the site with different browser tech, but you will still get the essential information.
It's such an amazingly simple concept and one that also makes such incredible sense that it's really frustrating, even depressing, that so few professional webbies are doing things this way. They get so full of themselves, and so excited about all the backflips they can make a site do that they ultimately forget that every site--EVERY site--is built on content, and obscuring that from a wide segment of your audience because you'd rather have, say, Flash menus instead of standard links for navigation is just stupid. If you're creating something that is purely for the sake of doing it, fair enough. But if you're actually presenting content, quit fucking around, and just do what the content demands.
One of the things that has kept me away from getting serious about web designing is how the ubergeeks have taken over the whole thing, leaving many of the rest of us in the dust. And creating completely unusable sites in the meantime. What was (and is) happening is that they'll come up with some new tech and then start throwing it around, willy-nilly, like some five-year-old discovering that he can write his name in the snow.
There's a really bad tendency, among capital-G geeks, to just do what's cool simply because they can instead of thinking through whether said coolness really belongs in the project in question, and whether it may just be a trend that's going to look dated in a year, and therefore make their client have to re-invest in new design all over again.
Then there's the issue of ugly code. Amateurs like yours truly can get away with ugly code. CS majors have no excuse. And the people who make things like GoLive have no excuse whatsoever. Attempting to make a simple, table-based splash page for the SMFH was miserable when I was trying to use GoLive because it kept fucking with my code. Example? The bloody thing put paragraph and font formatting tags on EVERY LINE OF TEXT. Every. One. Not just on carriage returns, but on everything, even when it was pasted over from a plaintext doc. WTF?
What Keith was going off about that made me squirm with glee is the idea of a hierarchical structure for sites:
1. Content (This is key; never obscure your content with design or geekery. Period.)
2. Structure (This is how your content is structured, and you use basic markup to format it, link around,etc.)
3. Styles (CSS--the frame for your content)
4. Functionality (interactive elements, forms, etc.)
If you separate all these elements, you create a site that can have the higher layers stripped off, and still present the content. This then makes your site universally accessible--by every browser, screenreader, device, whatever. You may not have the exact same experience with the site with different browser tech, but you will still get the essential information.
It's such an amazingly simple concept and one that also makes such incredible sense that it's really frustrating, even depressing, that so few professional webbies are doing things this way. They get so full of themselves, and so excited about all the backflips they can make a site do that they ultimately forget that every site--EVERY site--is built on content, and obscuring that from a wide segment of your audience because you'd rather have, say, Flash menus instead of standard links for navigation is just stupid. If you're creating something that is purely for the sake of doing it, fair enough. But if you're actually presenting content, quit fucking around, and just do what the content demands.
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