Someone I know and like personally and have enormous amount of respect for professionally, Mark Boulton, is currently embroiled in quite the developer vs designer shit–storm, which he mentions in this article. Mark is bang–on in everything he says here.
However, I‘m not going to write about some developer vs designer problem. I don‘t think there is such a problem between professional designers working with professional developers who all know how to communicate effectively and are working towards a common goal. This is more a rant about bad developers, with poor attitudes, giving the profession a bad name.
It all started when Mark mentioned on Twitter the poor semantic quality of the HTML produced by a popular Drupal module. Though I haven't read all of the responses to this, I gather much of them were from developers and were of the ad homonym, personal kind, rather than a reasoned argument against Mark‘s assertion that the HTML was shit (I‘m paraphrasing there, Mark said “beyond bad”).
One of the comments made by an alleged developer in response to Mark‘s blog post included this:
I don‘t know what “semantic html” even is. When I put HTML in my modules, I try to make sure there‘s enough divs that you can do everything with CSS and that stuff makes sense but I‘m not a designer and I‘m sure a designer would look at it and groan
What the F#@%!? Any web practitioner, designer or developer with any self respect should be surprised at that statement from someone who claims to be a web developer. Semantic HTML is HTML that has meaning, it is HTML that makes sense. Adding arbitrary divs just so the CSS is easier does not make sense, it‘s just pure lazy.
Irrespective of the nature of the debate, I‘m astounded that anyone is in any way in doubt as to the virtues of the semantic web. Is this 90‘s nostalgia or something!? Aside from the obvious SEO advantages, there is enhanced accessibility, a smaller footprint and increased portability – due to the separation of content (HTML) and style (CSS).
If there is any other argument against semantic HTML that isn‘t a variation of “I can‘t be arsed”, I haven‘t heard it.
First published on Sep 1, 2009. Last updated on: Dec 29, 2009.
I'm Elwyn Malethan and this is my blog. I am a software craftsman with over 10
years of commercial experience. When I'm not doing my day job at
Wow… You might want to come down off that high horse before you fall off and hurt yourself. Seriously. You wrote an entire blog post to take me to task for not studying an aspect of my hobby that is important to you? My other hobby is photography and I don‘t know my way around a dark room. There‘s another blog post for you.
I like messing around with Drupal. I like to code. I make websites for myself and share what I do with other people. I‘ve spent thousands of hours helping people out with Drupal but, no, I haven‘t spent much time studying the semantic web. I Googled it when I first heard of it and it made my head spin and I went back to my code. Not something that interests me as much as getting a chunk of PHP behaving properly.
Some day I might like to get a job doing this. If that happens, I‘m sure I‘ll have to dive more into the design aspect just to be a well rounded employee. In the mean time, I guess I‘ll continue being a lazy alleged hobbiest developer.
Just don‘t tell the 7K people using my modules that I‘m not a real developer because I don‘t spend my days buried in HTML books. They might look at you funny.
Michelle
I think I get what your saying. You‘re saying that as an enthusiast, and not a professional (in the being paid to do it sense), that you don‘t need to be interested in the best–practices and standards of the medium you work with.
Good luck with that.
On a more conciliatory note. This isn‘t about you and by using your quote to make my point I‘ve made it about you. Lazy of me, I apologise.
I still don‘t agree with your point of view though.
Sure I am. The medium I work with is PHP. I‘m working hard to learn that. HTML/CSS is part of what I do because I need to be able to print the results of the PHP but it‘s not my main focus. I know the basics. I‘m not just adding random divs or using tables for layout or embedding font tags in it.
But I haven‘t studied it in depth. I don‘t know all the terminology. All that semantic web stuff about RDF and OWL is over my head. I somewhat get XML but that‘s about it. I have no reason to learn that, at this point, because I‘m just outputting simple HTML templates. And I think my templates make plenty of sense. They just aren‘t fancy like a designer would make them. Because I‘m not a designer.
That was my whole point, which people keep missing. I‘m saying that many coders know the basics of HTML but don‘t study it in depth like a designer would. In turn, I think it‘s not too much to expect a designer to know the basics of PHP but not study it in depth. A little overlap is useful but I don‘t think one needs to be an expert in both unless you‘re a one man shop who doesn‘t want to outsource to an expert in the other field.
Michelle
Honestly, I can fathom how someone could know PHP but not HTML.