Sur­prise sur­prise… some peo­ple don’t agree with the opin­ions expressed in my post on the mean­ing of the term “stan­dard” in rela­tion to the web. wow, I didn’t see that coming!

One com­ment and one blog post in par­tic­u­lar I would like to com­ment on. Warn­ing: I intend to use some analo­gies to make my points. Please don’t argue my analo­gies down and then claim that makes my argu­ment invalid — that’s not how this works. And remem­ber that great say­ing about argu­ing on the inter­net and the spe­cial olympics. I won’t repeat it here but Google it if you’ve never heard it.

Derek Vad­neau said (in part):

I’ve got more than a ham­mer in my tool­belt so why not use what gets the job done faster?

John Wilker posted in Why are so many things, Black and white?:

I see it all the time, “my lan­guage, frame­work, micro archi­tec­ture, schema is bet­ter and any­one who can’t see that isn’t a professional/isn’t looking/is myopic/is not will­ing to grow”.

There’s a sim­ple answer: when peo­ple started using tables for lay­out back in the Netscape 2 days, they were hack­ing. Misu­ing the ele­ment. Doing some­thing wrong. It’s just that no one realised the impli­ca­tions until a few years later.

Tables are not the tool for lay­out of pages. They are for dis­play of tab­u­lar data. It’s not some­thing a mat­ter of opin­ion or some­thing that’s up for dis­cus­sion, it’s black and white, clear and sim­ple. If some­one told you they use their katana sword to trim their nose hair, you might sug­gest a small trim­mer or per­haps a pair of nail scis­sors (at least you’d know what to get them for Christ­mas). Sure, a katana sword does the same job, but that wasn’t the intended pur­pose and there are other risks involved (namely, removal of the nose along with the hair). Tables work for lay­out, but that wasn’t the intended pur­pose and there are other risks — degraded acces­si­bil­ity, HTML bloat, design lim­i­ta­tions, etc. You wouldn’t expect a pro­fes­sional beau­ti­cian to use a katana to trim nose hair, and nei­ther should you expect a web pro­fes­sional to use tables for page layout.

Here’s another one: imag­ine a builder. There’s a new type of — I dunno, let’s say roof tile. “Pres­i­dent of Builder­Corp, why aren’t you using the new BrandX roof tile? It’s cheaper, the colour lasts twice as long with­out fad­ing, and I hear an expe­ri­enced crew can get it up in less time.” Pres­i­dent of Builder­Corp says “I don’t have time for that new fan­gled stuff. My crew would have to learn a new way of lay­ing tiles, and while they are get­ting up to speed I would be los­ing money.” It’s only a mat­ter of time before con­sumers start to request the new mate­ri­als — when BuilderCorp’s com­peti­tors start using the dif­fer­ence as a mar­ket­ing tool — and that’s going to start cost­ing Builder­Corp business.

Web stan­dards and CSS-P are no dif­fer­ent. It’s all about pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment. I talked about it on my other blog, zom­biecoder kay- the one where I only talk about stan­dards — in Being Pro­fes­sional. That arti­cle has ref­er­ences to other posts on the topic by Molly and Andy Clarke. Now Joe Clark has come out with a post in the same vein: Failed Redesigns. The tone of these kinds of posts is start­ing to get more seri­ous — it’s 2006 now peo­ple, it’s time web pro­fes­sion­als started act­ing more like pro­fes­sion­als in other industries.

I have a the­ory about pro­gram­mers (and not just Cold­Fu­sion pro­gram­mers). They learn HTML in five sec­onds flat — it’s easy right? Coma­pared to actual pro­gr­m­ming lan­guages, it is. They never bother to learn it prop­erly because it’s not con­sid­ered impor­tant. Expe­ri­enced pro­gram­mers scoff at obvi­ous new­bie mis­takes, like the mis­use of pound signs in CFML, yet these same pro­gram­mers think noth­ing of huge tracts of CSS with iden­ti­cal redun­dant font dec­la­ra­tions on every rule. Mis­use of HTML can make it very dif­fi­cult to change the look and feel of appli­ca­tions — I see this all the time in oth­er­wise bril­liant open source appli­ca­tions and com­mu­nity code. If more pro­gram­mers realised how sim­ple and pow­er­ful plain HTML with pre­sen­ta­tional infor­ma­tion sep­a­rated out into CSS files can be — apply­ing the same prin­ci­pals that work so well in appli­ca­tion code –the world would be a bet­ter place. And really, peo­ple who can mas­ter CFML or OO or SQL or write CMSs or what­ever can surely learn to apply a lit­tle intel­li­gence to their web application’s output.

Surely?