[thelist] Standards n Carrots (was: IE-only sites?)

divaone lparis1 at nc.rr.com
Thu Jul 8 10:28:03 CDT 2004


Umm... I'm on the same train of ambiguity as many developers out there.
Consider the many "single" developers who do not work for any major company,
have no team to either be a part of or lead, and must rely on their own will
and determination to keep up with the plethora of information in our field
today. After 9 years in the field I continue to enjoy research and learning,
but, as referenced to in another post, I don't care for lecturing from
hardcore purists. Change may happen quickly in our world, but acceptance and
adoption does not necessarily follow suit.

Below is something I started on two weekends ago. It is unfinished and
unrefined, and if you understand it then you're about as crazy as I am.
Hopefully, though, it will provide a touch of light for those in the
transition from 'Can of Tag Soup' to 'Zen Garden Masters'.

......................

Perhaps this is just a rant.. but it's a beautiful Saturday evening and I
should be at the pool instead of validating web pages.

Why are web standards like carrots? As kids, many of us don't care for the
crunchy orange things but are told they are good for us. We'd rather have
the sweet and easy orange popsicles that we've come to know and love. But as
we grow into adults, some of us learn to love, or at least tolerate,
carrots. We cook them to al dente and drizzle them with all kinds of goodies
like honey and syrup. It's often an acquired taste.

Many of us began with simple mark-up code with HTML and occasionally threw
in a style or two. Big stuff! Remember <body background="myimage.jpg"
bgcolor="white" scroll="auto" text="black" link="blue" alink="yellow"
vlink="navy" topmargin="0" leftmargin="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0">?
It's not pretty. Now we have web standards and our main goal is a "WOOT" or
two. Perhaps not so general, my main goal is to design a website that will
not be archaic in a year's time.

I'm sure others, like me, have felt pushed at times into the whole standards
realm - "It's good for you... eat it!" But creating a standards-compliant
website (not to mention an accessible one) is not 'sweet and easy' for those
who have tasted the ease of "Hey, it works on my machine!" But standards
really *are* good for us. The FDA has only banned the pesticides on carrots
(ie <table height="100%">). Standards make us take our Vitamin C
(creativity,
control, common order).

As adults - playing in the big league of professional web development - we
take our raw carrots (that are so good for us, but don't always give us the
flavor
we crave) and learn that we can embellish them to masterpiece presentation.
Remember adding honey and syrup? Or images or dhtml or flash? Toss in some
brussel sprouts cheffed up in the same fashion and we can end up with a
virtual
Zen Garden.






More information about the thelist mailing list