¶ Zeldman recently opined that, since the mainstreaming of web standards,
there should be more talk in design circles of content, design and usability. I wholeheartedly agree with him on this point, but then Jeffrey lays into the recent round table discussions on placement and use of headings, implying that such arguments are harmful to Web standards uptake because they are geeky, petty and off putting.
With greatest respect to those involved (after all I was one), I feel Zeldman overplays the reach and influence such forums will have. Clearly the designers and developers engaged in the discussions felt the arguments worth spending time on – these folks thrive on attention to detail and there are still questions remaining unanswered.
So yes, I’d like to see more stuff written about web design as a whole, but discussing the finer points of coding (or raging about minutia
) still has its place and is not going to turn off the uncommitted or uninformed
because these things are rarely discussed on mainstream blogs anyway.
Comments
1
“these folks thrive on attention to detail”
Dan Cederholm’s SimpleQuiz is based around discussions of the minutia, and he was able to turn it into a book. Based on that success, I’d think that some people enjoy exploring the options so they can be more clear on their goals and more confident that they have at least used markup as it was intended to be used and it provides the appropriate semantics.
Perhaps it isn’t the discussions themselves that are troubling – maybe it is more that these discussions sometimes degrade into mud-slinging arguments and flaming. Perhaps that is when they become harmful?
2
There are a lot of subtleties in the way Zeldman speaks and it is easy for two people to differently interpret his meaning. I personally did not feel he was implying that our little Headings conversation was harmful to web standards. More that it was just a lot of talk by people who could otherwise be spending their time discussing more salient matters… and I wholeheartedly agree with that. When Colly first sent out the invitation to discuss Headings on his site, my first reaction was similar to Zeldman’s. “This is a bit pedantic, isn’t it?”
While he is right that there are more important matters to discuss, we all volunteered a few minutes to give our views and that’s just fine as well. If we were all being flown to a conference in Australia to participate in a day-long debate about Headings, then that’s a bit different. THAT would be a serious waste of time. A nice little discussion on CollyLogic seems fine to me though.
3
I’m really not so sure about this point , I think raging about the minutia does turn off the mainstream and I think it goes some way to answering rachel’s question about why there are so few women involved in web standards – it’s simple really we have more important things to do. If web accessibility is for real then it has to get over this early stage and a handful of people arguing about a h1 is hardly going to set the world on fire is it! Get with it guys.
4
The problem as I see it isn’t the people who talk about coding, heading levels and standards, but the people who who forget the big picture.
I have read too many flames by people who regard serving up XHTML as text/html as a crime against humanity. And there are people whose only comment on a big, inaccessible tag-soup site being given a CSS makeover is to comment that that there is an unescaped ampersand in a url so the designers shouldn’t have bothered.
As I see it, the best approach to web design is to see standards as part of the process of moving web design forward. They go alongside interesting content, usability, accessibility and good visuals but they are not the only part of good design.
Pushing standards as the most important thing was necessary in the days of Netscape 4 when the web risked being fragmented. These days there are plenty of good designers who understand modern web design. The diminishing group of web designers who don’t want to give up familiar table hacks are not going to start listening now, and the people who pay money to get websites designed don’t really care how sites are designed, only that they achieve cost effective results.
If we want to move standards based web design forwards we need to show how standards work. This means we need to consider the totality of web design, not just one aspect of it.
5
Besides details, what is there to discuss?
6
I would agree, I think that there should be more discussion of usablilty and design issues.
7
Personally, I’d like to see Zeldman a bit more social – he’s never even had comments on his site. I never see him post comments on anyone else’s site, either.
A discussion about headings may seem rather pointless, but it keeps the logic flowing. It keeps the mind thinking. As soon as we become “settled” in all that we know, we lose our passion for what we do.
I like the “detailed discussions,” as well as the broader topics.
Zeldman should speak his mind in comment forums, etc. I highly respect him, but I would like to see more influence. And he can do that by showing up more.
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