[thelist] Excuses and Zealotry

I ran across this today (though it happened yesterday) and it got me
thinking about the excuses software vendors, developers, designers use to
justify their actions.

http://discuss.userland.com/msgReader$14609

If you aren't using a Mac (or using a Mac with old Netscape - like 3) take a
look at the page Dave references by Jeremy Bowers, then read the statement
about Mac users below his reference.  Try to find any discussions of it in
the "Discuss" area of the site. You wont. (Except for a couple lines by Dave
under the title "New policy: No whining").

At first, it really pissed me off. It still does, but after a little
reflection I came to see it for what it is.

You see, I grabbed the source for the page that crashes Macs (using
Anarchie) and ran it through Tidy - wow.  It returned 216 errors - some of
them fairly serious.  Now, I've made excuses before for things that didn't
look right, or didn't function in a specific browser/platform combination,
but never before I looked to make sure that I was right and that I hadn't
made a lot of errors.

Jeremy has created a site for *him* - it's his personal site, and if he
wants to use it to experiment with bleeding edge stuff, more power to him.
I'm not going to say it's good design for a commercial site, or one whose
audience includes a broad spectrum of people though. It only works on IE 4
and 5, and only on a Wintel box (don't know if it works on Linux - Dan?).
Fine, cool. Your site man - have fun, learn, create, let me know when I can
see it function, I'm interested in what you are doing.

Dave, OTOH, seems to think that anyone using his services and software can
do no harm. He blames it on Apple. Utter bullshit. The truth is that Jeremy
wrote something that worked on *his* machine and didn't care to work it out
so that it would work on anyone else's machine, which is a fine explanation.
Dave seems to think that anything that comes out of his system has to be
correct though. This is not the case. It's possible to write poor code with
any tools, even the best. To say that "it's Apples fault for not being up to
date" is pretty weak.

The lesson here, I think, is that becoming too enamored with oneself and the
work one produces can be severely damaging. I've lost my faith in Dave
(which, in all honesty, had been slipping since the release of Manila and
Soap).  His objectivity is gone.  It wasn't that long ago that I considered
Dave one of the "Honest Brokers" of the Internet and wired society - I'm
sorry to say that he's gotten religious on us.


Don't let this happen to you.  Remember that people need to have faith in
you if they are going to feel right about the recommendations you are making
and the work you are producing. We present ourselves as experts in the
field, and showing zealotry undermines this.

-- 

bob davis
bobd@members.evolt.org