Jan 11, 2010
This ...
... looks an awful lot like this...
... wouldn‘t you say?
Is this plagiarism? Decide for yourself?
First published on Jan 11, 2010. Last updated on: Jan 11, 2010.
Articles tagged with 'web'
Sep 1, 2009
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
