I’m involved in a whole load of different online groups and lists where people (often newbies) ask questions about web design and development. The usual occurrence is that someone will ask a question and they will get an answer to their question and a description of what is wrong with what they’re doing. I have to admit I do this too.
What’s up with us? This has to be wrong.
I’m very passionate about building a better web. I strongly advocate the use of web standards and general good practices. I can get anal about it at times. The worst thing of all is that I do it in the face of those who are simply trying to get their content online. I’m risking coming down so heavy with what their doing wrong that it obliterates what they’re doing right – namely publishing their content on the web for others to share.
Taking a purest line, no one should publish anything on the web unless it is ‘clean’ and ‘valid’. However, ‘clean’ and ‘valid’ takes knowledge and skill, or tools that can do that for them. Generally speaking, your average person who is wanting to publish their stuff online has none of these things. If they were excluded, the web would be full of geek and business information only.
What makes the web so useful is the diversity of the information. It’s not all geek and corporate. Much of it is ‘nice places to visit’, ‘somewhere to stay’, ‘my family tree’, ‘my research on …’. It’s all this data that makes the web a daily resource. If people can’t publish this stuff because they need four years of training and knowledge imparted into them first, then we all lose out.
Bottom line … the world needs badly made websites and the people who make them. Anyone who wants to publish their stuff on the web should be wholeheartedly encouraged. Sure, gently guide them to good practice if that’s possible but don’t let it get in the way. We’ll cope. We have technology. Let them get their stuff online and sod the rest.
Ultimately it’d be great if there was a low-cost general page building tool that got things right. Dreamweaver is close to getting this right (there’s still a way to go), but it’s reet expensive. FrontPage will never get there because it’s always meeting Microsoft’s agenda. I guess we need an easy-to-use open source visual web editor that understands the importance of web standards – but hey, we don’t need it that much.
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We have DOCTYPE switching so that browsers can display non-valid sites built by non-professionals or switch into standards mode when a site has been created by people who have a better idea of what they’re doing. DOCTYPE switching is great because it avoids penalizing anyone, yet it allows browsers to rigorously support standards.
I also agree with you that we need simple tools that generate valid pages automatically.
Finally, the point you’re making reminds me of the things that made me uncomfortable about the early drafts of XHTML 2, which seemed to be a spec for experts, not for schoolteachers or grandparents or the millions of other non-web-professionals who need to make web pages.
I’m with ya, thanks for writing that.
”MM really should release a ’lite’ version of Dreamweaver”
How close does Macromedia Contribute come to what you’re envisioning?
John: Contribute is a neat tool. It’s best placed as an editor of existing pages than a creator of new ones, however. I don’t think I could recommend it as the sole editor for a newcomer, because I’d feel bad once they hit its limitations. However, the UI is simple and the price is digestible. It’s definitely a good tool in its place. (One I’m proud to have been involved with since early development stages).
I keep thinking back to FrontPage. FP is an important tool, simply because it’s everywhere. It’s hard to find a ’home user’s Windows PC without a copy of FP. An ideal situation is to have a tool with that kind of exposure that can also write good code.
After all, I truly believe that what’s good for the validator is good for the author.
What I mean is that a server like Apache has a ”DefaultType” of ”text/plain”. Standards are also nice because one sure way of being valid is to be simple, and just having people start with plain text is pretty simple (that what I thought when a lab-mate and I downloaded and compiled httpd on my old lab’s Sun 10 years ago).
So I tell people just to write a plain text file, then take a look at in a browser. Put around it, take a look. Divide it into , take a look. Then put and in there. Then put a DOCTYPE, link to a stylesheet and do some simple stylesheet stuff (margins, heading colors, fonts). Just start simple and go from there, and they end up with pages that are valid, load quickly and don’t have some Frontpage graphic, javascript thing that kills the browser.
Then the most common question I get from people is ”now, where do I put this?”
I don’t know, XHTML2 doesn’t really worry me (well, probably because I don’t do this for a living and don’t do anything fancy), but I thought thatthe whole point of XML-izing html was that one could use XSLT to manipluate it. Is XHTML2 so different from XHTML 1 that one couldn’t write a XSLT stylesheet that will bring 1 up to 2? I read some things about (which is just like LaTeX—my first markup language—and one whose processors are more strict than any web browser—I’m suprised what makes it through sometimes) for , for everything non-text...
but you could try out mozilla and its integrated frontpagelookalike, its sure easy for newbies to do stuff there.
It depends on your attitude if people are receptive to your knowledge and advice. However, they ask questions for a reason, so they are receptive in a way already, a fragile advantage. Often you have to discourage using certain techniques that they take for granted. Doing that in a subtle and friendly way is the hardest part.
Or, one of your Usenet/IRC homies and you act together to play ”good cop, bad cop”. That sometimes works too. :D
Since I just appeared here.. I am the overall web guy at U of Waterloo in Waterloo Ontario, Canada. I came across this site as I was tracking down information on Contribute. We use Macromedia products pretty heavily here as there is no central web support office but many (40-50) part-time web page creators spreed across campus that have produced 300 000 pages.
The problems I see everyday have been largely dealt with my encouraging the use of Dreamweaver MX and strongly discouraging FP. But there is a long way to go here.
That is where I hope Contribute can pick up the slack, but ya.. Macromedia needs to drop their prices or expect an open source tool to take its place for average web site creation.
But regarding helping people out in forums... So many of the people I help out are trying to sell their services! This rankles me (when it is a noob problem) I get a little upset when I see people selling websites which are about to implode.
But hey... at least they are trying to learn I suppose