Starting at Square One

As the Weird Al Yankovic song above says, "Everything I know is wrong, and everything I thought was just so important doesn't matter." Well, maybe not everything, but a lot of things I believed to be true about web programming are wrong.

You see, I'm a marketing and public relations (PR) professional. In my world, not only is presentation everything, very rarely is presentation separated from content. I have a background in print publications including newspapers, magazines, books and newsletters. Formatting and presentation in print pieces are the key to a good end product. In PR and advertising, if a piece is not flashy or "cool" looking no one will read it. The same is true for websites. Formatting and presentation is everything!

Often in PR we try to control every thing on a web page the way we do print pieces with strict spacing, color control and layout. We want it to look the same in every browser and on every screen.

After reading the first 50 pages in our textbook, "Developing with Web Standards" by John Allsopp. I realized that many of the controls our profession wants for the web are unrealistic and in many ways just plain wrong. It was as if Allsopp was speaking directly to me on Page 12 when he wrote,

"Many developers (and marketing departments) think this means that our sites should, or even must look the same in every browser. In fact, the opposite is true. By striving to make our sites identical across all browsers, we can quite easily exclude users."

Exclude users! That's not at all what a marketing department really wants. We want to include everyone and control the way a site looks. Allsopp has an answer for that too.

"Embrace the web's flexibility as one of its greatest strengths, not as a weakness ... It's users who should be able to choose how they view and interact with the web. We have to give up the notion that designers and developers are the ones who are in control."

Really, "Embrace the web's flexibility" is your answer? Is this Allsopp guy some hippie web designer telling corporate marketing departments we can't control everything? No, he's just a realist who obviously knows the very nature of the web is changing all the time, and that chasing after control will lead to an "us vs. them" battle over who decides how the web should look and operate.

To be honest, as a user I wouldn't appreciate anyone telling me how to use the web. Or in what browser to view it. (I use Chrome whether you like it or not.)

So I'm ready to learn about the underlying beauty of web development as Allsopp defines it, semantically structured content that provides information to the most users possible. If I listen to the old, print piece model, I could end up with a pretty site that is inaccessible to users with disabilities or those using a mobile device, etc.

That's not to say I don't want the sites I build to look good. However, I'm learning appearance isn't the first order of business, and neither is control. As Allsopp puts it,

"It's easy for designers and developers to get caught up in the appearance of a website or web application, but much of the real beauty of the web lies beneath the skin. If we develop our sites only to please the eye and ignore the needs of software, like browsers and search engines, we miss more than half of the users of our work."

Looks like I'm not only learning some new languages in this course, but also a new way to view the web and the work I do with it.