Stop quitting and cheating the user.
Today I was cleaning out my gmail account and I stumbled across a particularly favorite blog post of mine and my co-workers. As I was laughing at the comments about the yellow part of the pie chart, I thought it would be interesting to see what kind of comments were made about the post. I agreed with some of the comments, but there was one that made me madder than a baptist in a brothel.
Here is the comment:
…I know when to use tables and not worry about semantics. Semantics are not the goal, the goal is great user friendly web design. Most of the time tables do this just as well as divs, and this includes accessibility and portable devices if you know what you are doing. Divs should only be used when they work, if they don’t work they should not be used. It is as simple as that.
Unlike some other people I am able to recognize that css itself is very raw at the current stage of its development, the browser support is insufficient AND THIS IS NOT MY PROBLEM. I will switch to all css no sooner than it becomes stable, this is just the responsible thing to do, to myself and to my clients who are paying me by the hour and are never easy to find.
I totally disagree with this person. Tables should be used for tabular data, and to say that Divs should only be used when they work and if they don’t work they should not be used is like quitting to me.
Semantic markup along with accessibility and usability are the goal, if even one of these are over looked or not considered we are not doing our jobs as professionals. Web standards are our lives! When slicing a site, for whoever it may be, we owe it to ourselves as well as anybody who browses that site to code our site using semantic markup while always doing our best to make the site easy to use and accessible.
We know browser support is not great but it is our job to ensure that the user has a positive experience when browsing the sites we create. Some, probably most, users are unaware of the issues related to lack of proper browser support with regard to css, but again its our job to get it right. There are too many resources(books/online tutorials and information) for a “professional” to just give up.
Thoughts anyone?
Tags: accesibility, semantics, usability
February 9th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
If that person can’t figure out how to use DIVs correctly, he shouldn’t be allowed to touch HTML.
February 11th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
There’s no point in being mad at that guy. He wouldn’t understand or acknowledge web standards even if they were solid objects that you could throw in his face.
The sad thing is if anyone actually pays him any money.
Regards
Nalle, Sweden
February 11th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
@Nalle, I’m no mad at just that guy I’m at the large number of people who think like him. But you are absolutely correct the sad thing is if anyone pays him any money, and they probably do pay him.