[thelist] My 12 year old son can do websites

Alex Stapleton alex at vort-x.com
Thu Jan 15 05:50:15 CST 2004


You can not simply say that it is the underlying code with makes a website
succesfull. It is more than that. It's like saying that it's water which
makes people live. It's important to it, but it isn't all of it. A website
is there to be used, and hence most importantly of all, it's success is
highly dependant on how usable it is, and how much people actually want to
use it. The underlying code merely facilitates that.

Certainly some WYSIWYG editors add a lot of cruft which may prevent search
engines properly indexing them. But the structural layout of the page, the
proper use of <h1> <p> and so in is not what is most important to a search
engine. Links are what is generally most important. And as far as I know, no
WYSIWYG editor, gets the HTML wrong enough for Google to ignore the links on
it. It's still just as findable and usable as it was before.

To say that a website is bad merely because the XHTML wasn't written by hand
is wrong. Users don't care. They just want it to work. And when it comes
down to it that's all that matters. Sure standards compliance is a nice
idea, but what we really wan't is browsers to just bloody draw everything
the same way. Standards are the way to get there, but flexibility in parsing
"badly" formed XHTML is nothing but an advantage.

To summarise. Websites are for users. Users don't care about code. If it's
got good content, and they can use it, it will do. Nice looking things are
well...nice and you can make nice looking websites without having to
pedantically code everything yourself. A 12 year old probably can make some
decent looking designs which are also usable, they may even be able to get
them to look alright in multiple browsers. They probably can't write content
though.

>-----Original Message-----
>From: thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org
>[mailto:thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of Ben Morrison
>Sent: 15 January 2004 10:52
>To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
>Subject: Re: [thelist] My 12 year old son can do websites
>
>On 15/1/04 9:35 am, "john at johnallsopp.co.uk"
><john at johnallsopp.co.uk> wrote:

>Well It is possible to make a *good looking* site using off
>the shelf products, but its the underlying code that makes a
>website work successfully.







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