Zeldman was right.

September 06, 2002 | 2 Comments

Well Zeldman’s article seemed to open quite the can of worms. I’m back on the bandwagon. Well, truthfully I was never off - Just a bit pissed and tired.

In anycase, somewhere in all the hallabalo someone mentioned that if strict standards were enforced from the get go it would be hard for the average joe, like my dad who just launched a site he built all by himself (and I think he did pretty well - Nice job dad!) with Dreamweaver and Fireworks, to get a Web site up. I mean, my dad wanted to do it on his own, I didn’t lend a hand at all. He’s DYI, you know? Well anyway - it was pointed out that the web wouldn’t be the great place it is today without all the great homepages, and DYI sites. I have to agree.

Zeldman today made a great point:

“Amateur” sites are not the problem, and indeed for many of us personal sites are the heart of the web. It’s the legions of improperly authored professional sites that are the problem: those with busted scripts, insane clusters of browser-specific style sheets, and fifteen kinds of workaround markup in every paragraph. Those are the sites that don’t always cut it in modern browsers. Those are the sites — often developed at tremendous expense — that are in jeopardy of becoming obsolete.

If you look at my personal sites, I’ve got them all coded to Web standards, and as much as a pain as I think it’ll be at work, I’m going to do my best to get, at the very least, out external site coded to Web standards. Right now it’s a mess - and after some thinking on this, the reason why it’s a mess, and the reason why I get so frustrated at time is EXACTLY what he is talking about! If we’d had standards in place back then, our redesign would be a snap. Kudos to you Zeldman.

Anyway, it’ll be a hard road for awhile, so…Wish me luck!

Filed under: Web General

Comments

1. tracy said:

what type of paint can i use on regular light bulbs to paint scenes. i want to be able to light these bulbs up after painting on them.thank you

Posted on December 18, 2002 01:48 PM | #

2. Book Review said:

I’ve seen a lot of “professional” sites that it no one appeared to have taken much time to get right. The problem is that the people doing to work are usually hourly employees being paid by an outsourcing or consulting company to do the job.

Those kind of sites tend to get worse with age, as the latest client request is met with indifference to usability and how well it fits into the rest of the site, while still no one truely cares what the outcome is.

Over time, most non-professionals are working on their site because they actually care about it, so with age it gets better.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t some true professionals that do a good job working out there, but they tend to be few and far between.

Posted on October 2, 2003 09:02 AM | #