First a little about me:
My high school made a legitimate effort to get onto the Web bandwagon
early on. As part of that,
I got to take a class about HTML and the web. Well, my friends and I
had a lot of fun learning
what HTTP stood for and finding new and creative uses for the <blink>
tag. When I got into college,
I continued my work in web design, and learned about CSS, and
Javascript. I learned about
web standards, and the concept that there was a right way and wrong way
to write HTML code. This
made all kinds of sense to me as I was studying computer programming at
the same time. I got a
student job transferring content to the web for the colleges IT
department. Fortunately, the
group I worked with had strict policies about standards compliance and
accessibility. This was
because we were a state institution and had to follow certain rules
about making our content
accessible to all. As a result of these experiences, I have not felt
the need to make a
<font> tag since I left High School.


The thing that has puzzled me ever since is "Why doesnt everyone do
things this way?".
In college, I read about the coming
Utopia of web design when all browsers would fall in line and support
the W3C's standards,
WISIWIG editors would produce clean, simple HTML code and use CSS to
create the visual rendering,
and <font> tags would become a historical artifact. Well folks,
browser support for standards
has arrived and has been around for some time. Still, I look
at many commonly used sites and their source code is still a bloated
mess of 90's style
<font> tags, spacer .gif's, and incessantly nested tables. Companies
designating themselves as
experts in the field of internet marketing and web design produce
templates that could be used
as textbook examples of non-standards compliance. Wysiwyg editors
still produce bloated,
redundant, unmanageable code, Microsoft Word being the worst culprit of
the bunch.


I've spoken with many people, including those in my own company about
this. I think there
are currently two primary obstacles to adopting standards compliance,
particularly the idea
of seperation of content and presentation.


1. Adopting the spirit of Web Standards requires a Paradigm Shift from
"presentationalist" to
"structuralist".
Let me define how I'm using these words:

A Presentationalist views a web page first and primarily as a visual
experience. Such people
are used to thinking of things in terms of colors, pixels, boxes, and
layout. The goal of a
presentationalist is first to create a particular mood, feeling, or
effect in the page. In
my experience, presentationalists tend to be what some people refer
to as "left brained", "artsy",
or even "liberal".

A structrualist views a web page or site more as a logical system,
just as an engineer would
view an internal comubstion engine. The structuralist is used to
thinking in concrete logical
terms, what works, what is connected to what, what "makes sense".
The goal of a structuralist
is to make a web site that will present the information, services, or
products, in a logical,
easy to navigate way. In my experience, structuralists tend to be
more the engineering type,
what people refer to as "right brained", "analytical", or even
"anal-retentive". I suppose I
fit more into this category.


The obstacle here is that the mindset of the presentationalist makes
it diificult to embrace
the core idea of CSS. The CSS standards were created to give
designers more control over the
presentation of their site. However, using CSS requires that you
spend some time, however
brief, writing HTML code without being concerned about what it's
going to look like. That
is, you have to stop thinking like a graphic artist, and start
thinking like an engineer,
atleast while your creating the HTML structure that you will hang the
CSS on. I've talked
with people that just can't seem to let go of the fact that they want
something to be "red 12
pt. font" even if just briefly. These people have a difficult time
grasping the concept that
something IS a "heading" or IS a "paragraph", because they see it
first and primarily as
"some large bold 12pt arial text", or "12 pt text in Times format
with extra line spacing".
These ideas seems simple, and even obvious to me. However,
for the presentationalist, it's like telling a man dying of thirst to
bypass the puddle at his
feet and walk 50 yards down the road where he will find a lake.

Virginia DeBolt captured this idea concisely when she stated "The
look doesnt matter" in her
article at http://www.wise-women.org/tutorials/cssplanning/


2. There is currently not enough support of web standards in the
curriculum of educational
institutions and the various tutorials online.

I just did a web search for the phrase "HTML tutorial" on Google.
There's been a lot of
improvement in this area since I last checked. However, there's still
a lot of sites teaching
people to use 90's style presentational tags, <FONT><center><b>,<i>
etc. etc. Some tutorials
will teach about CSS, but it will be the last section, as if CSS is
meant as an afterthought to
use once the actual work of designing the site is complete.
Unfortunately, those new to the
web design world will read these and assume that is the "correct" way
to do things. Then,
when someone comes around and trys to teach them about CSS, they see
it as doing a lot of
extra work to accomplish the same thing.


I also had the oppurtunity to teach a class in a technical college on
web design. The
officially adopted textbook was terribly out of date. It never
mentioned web standards,
compliance, accesibility etc. It had one badly written chapter about
CSS at the end of the
book just before the appendix. It taught proprietary tags such as
<BGSOUND> and <MARQUEE>
as if they were a part of the HTML specification. Most of my students
were relatively new
to HTML, and if they had just read this book, they would have learned
a lot of bad, hard to
break, habits early on.

I consider these bad habits of 90's style code bloat to be a virus
that is being passed on
from user to user. When college teachers and published instruction
materials pass on these
techniques as if they were the currently accepted standard, its like
an infected person going
into a theatre and sneezing.

In article <1142627773.757975.27600@i39g2000cwa.googlegroups. com>,
"Monte Gardner" <monte@gardnerweb.org> wrote:

<snip a lot of well thought out stuff IMO>

With me, you're preaching to the choir.

leo

--
<http://web0.greatbasin.net/~leo/>

<snip>

I hear what you're saying, and agree with most of it (well, at least with
the bits I understood).....
I'm guilty of producing some god-awful code, and I make no effort to hide
the fact that it's earned me a fair bit of money at various times.....
However, I would desperately love to *re-learn* my ways.....But I never seem
to find the time.....

I think a large part of the problem is that the majority of the internet
using public actually fall into your *presentationalist* category......
They view the visual aspects of a website, and their decisions are swayed
and influenced primarily by the way in which they interpret the aesthetics
of a site....
The site visitors who actually take the time and effort to view the source
html of a webpage are extremely few and far between.....

So as a result, a lot of designers/developers (myself included I'm ashamed
to admit) tend to think "it doesn't matter so long as the visitor get's the
relevant visual experience".....

I know it's wrong, but it kind of explains things a bit.....

On Sat, 18 Mar 2006 14:32:05 GMT, "Swampy Bogtrotter"
<samandjanetknox@tessco.net> wrote:

Quite so.

....and very sad individuals who should get a life, yes me included

Exactly. Though the purists will argue we are driving away potential
customers, with the same credible argument that Sadaam Hussein had
nuclear missiles and biological weapons he could launch in 45 minutes.



Explains things a lot. There is a gulf between academia and
commercialism

Matt

Matt Probert wrote:
Crikey...Someone mark todays date on the calendar.....This has got to be the
first time I've ever posted a reasoned and intelligent comment in this here
newsgroup.....
;-)

--
http://www.samandjanet.co.uk
http://search.ebay.co.uk/_W0QQsassZs...trotterQQhtZ-1

Swampy Bogtrotter wrote:

And speaking of the calendar, don't forget -- it's nearly March 20th.

--
Blinky
Killing all posts from Google Groups
The Usenet Improvement Project: http://blinkynet.net/comp/uip5.html
Coming Soon: Filter rules specific to various real news clients

Blinky the Shark wrote:
It certainly is....Steak And Blowjob day.....Sounds like a mighty fine
occasion to me......

--
http://www.samandjanet.co.uk
http://search.ebay.co.uk/_W0QQsassZs...trotterQQhtZ-1

Swampy Bogtrotter wrote:

And it's the only holiday I know of with two dates. Great if you missed
the March 14th celebration. Greater if you celebrate both.


--
Blinky
Killing all posts from Google Groups
The Usenet Improvement Project: http://blinkynet.net/comp/uip5.html
Coming Soon: Filter rules specific to various real news clients

"Monte Gardner" <monte@gardnerweb.org> wrote:

Maybe that's because what you call web standards are w3c
*recommendations*. I doubt the textbook was about ISO HTML.

--
John Freelance Perl programmer: http://castleamber.com/

Firefox Fast Search:http://johnbokma.com/firefox/keymarks-explained.html

Blinky the Shark wrote:

Are you referring to the three-year anniversary of the invasion? There's
all kinds of protests planned around here (not that they'll get covered
by the news).

--
David Hennessy
http://maidix.com/