I posted on Coding Forums asking to get some critiquing on a few of my site designs. I’m working towards standards-compliance, both in syntax and structure, and I think I’ve come a long way over the last few months.
I received a couple of posts in response that seemed like they were straight out of the dark ages of web design. I just cringed when he began talking about ImageReady splices. Here are his two posts (edited for spelling and grammar):
SCREW COMPLIANCE. Either it works or it don’t. Everyone having to follow the same rules and code the exact same way seems real boring and not very creative. Personally, I code for everything except IE because PC’s suck and so does Windoze. As long as it works in Netscape and Mozilla, it should work in others too. I am personally tired of seeing sites that say best when viewed in IE 6 or something similar. These days most people have and use more than one browser. If it don’t work in one and it is really important they will fire up another and try.
I am not into doing “ground breaking” work. Just very simple functional stuff for my own e-commerce site. The people “on the bleeding edge” can have it.
I did not say it is impossible to learn from people that happen to be unfortunate enough to use PC’s, I just do not code for them or their software. In fact, what I do know of making pages I have learned on the web and from experimening with the software I have and seeing what works and what doesn’t.
I have no idea what my site looks like on a PC, but I am judging by the hits I get from windoze and microjunk IE users that the site must function all right. I have only been doing this computer stuff for about a year and am self-taught, and usually only have problems when it comes to something like Perl for CGI to interface with the payment gateway to accept credit cards online.
My personal opinion is that 90% of the sites I go to are “overdesigned” with all the graphics and gizmos and just plain unecessary bleeding edge crap that they are pretty much useless.
The web is a good tool. There are great people. But it isn’t all that it is hyped up to be.
BTW, I do my homepage in Photoshop 7 and Image Ready, save it as layer based slices in CSS layers with DIV tags and put it in a regular HTML page in Dreamweaver 4 and it works fine. I’d be willing to bet there are many “standards” that I am not aware of and that are shattered in that page…….LOL
Personally, I’m a huge Mac fanatic. I also love Gecko and Web Standards. But I realize that the web isn’t all about you. The web is for everyone, all over the world. That’s what it was intended for. If you don’t care about how other users see your site, then don’t put it anywhere but your own computer.
