Ranting About This Industry (just to hear myself speak)
Friday June 25th 2004
I've been working on this site's internal reconstruction for months now, and I believe it has completely absorbed my being. At work, I think about CSS. While running, I think about CSS. In the shower, I think about CSS. And yeah, not just CSS, but XHTML, and semantics, and accessibility, and usability, and everything else that is affected by this movement towards web standards. I call it a movement, but really it seems like more of a proper education. I, like many, many other web developers out there, learned everything about this industry and profession "on the fly." We're all self-taught, which means that we're all hacks--because designing for the web started with hacks. And for those of us that have been here from day One, it's just been an accepted part of the game we play.
So take 10 years of hacking, and what do you get? Not much, I'm afraid to say. Sure I can read tables like a children's book, and can create them even faster. But where can that take me today? Not very far, I'm afraid. . . see, I'm a big dreamer, and that habit is freakin' me out. Because I dream of being a successful "something," I don't know what yet, but when I look at the industry I'm currently in, I can see where the future is headed, and I know that I'm nowhere near it.
I probably shouldn't be so harsh on myself--I think the current state of this website is a testament to what I've managed to teach myself in the past 6 months or so about web standards and accessibility. But I'm still nowhere near the front of the pack, which means peanuts for me. Meanwhile, high school & college kids these days never lived during the days of Netscape 4, so why on earth would they ever care if it couldn't read a stylesheet? These lucky dogs walked into the game right as it hit puberty and started to mature, and now they're the ones leading the charge and getting the girls.
Anyway, what I was saying about this being a proper education: The way web design used to be (and largely still is today, admittedly), all you needed to know were the basics. Know a bit of code, know how to make a pretty picture, and your job as a web designer was done. It conformed to old browsers, so everyone was happy. Nobody looked under the hood--that's the browser's job, not the visitor's. The only thing that mattered was that it looked good and said what it was supposed to say. Which meant that any joe with Dreamweaver and Photoshop, or worst yet FrontPage, could pull off the title of Web Developer. But CSS and XHTML? Not even WYSIWYGs out there can help you. Because it's no longer about hacking. We're talking about from-the-ground-up, well-planned, well-structured content with presentation carefully laid on top. No software wizard can get you started down that road--your only hope is to be properly educated in that faculty.
Believe me, I'm trying. I read probably 1-2 hours of stuff a day on the web, but it's all over the place, from blog to blog, article to article. The resources I've come across are good, but they're still not. . . a proper schooling.
I've been wanting to write an article about something in this field, but struggle to start because before I do, I want to feel like I know everything about the subject. But it seems utterly hopeless when you consider the speed at which the industry is moving, and the point along the spectrum where I currently plod. . .
Ok, so here are some article ideas. . . I think that the articles out there today are for a very narrow audience, namely the few of us that are both designers and coders. We can work in Photoshop and BBEdit without breaking a sweat. And if the future were up to us, a legion of one-man and one-woman armies, then that's sufficient. But what about designers that have always just been designers? And coders that have always been just coders? Don't they need to be educated about the necessity and complexity of semantics? Shouldn't they be aware of CSS's limitations in design and ensure that the mark-up created maximizes its potential? Or is that asking too much, should we instead insert a 3rd player into the team, one who controls and guides the first stages of any web project--structural design of content--and let him or her bear the brunt of this industry's maturation process? Now there's something to think about. . .