Twilight Universe

Doug Bowman of StopDesign.com recently posted a counter point to Jason Kottke’s post on standards complience and semantics at Kottke.org in which he argues againsts Jasons assertion that:

Coding web documents in valid XHTML doesn’t make them semantically useful nor does coding semantically correct documents mean the documents are standards-compliant

Dougie disagrees and thinks that it is a designers ‘natural tendancy’ to code meaniful markup if they are standards complient. Seemingly the only reason for this is his assumption that people will want to make code pretty. He goes so far to say:

A page full of nothing more than divs, spans, and br’s might be perfectly compliant in its use of standards. But generic markup like this will appear anemic in comparison to well-structured documents.

This assumes a couple of big glaring things as far as I can see..

1. Most webpages are coded by designers.
2. Most webpages coders care about the presentation of their code.
3. Most webpages are created by people that aren’t lazy.

I think these are not only Dougs assumptions, but an assumption by a lot of people in the ‘web design community’. Its a set of assumptions that have pretty much created the situation that so many of them are trying to change today - something that Doug actaully seems to understand in the last lines of his post where he says

one without the other won’t get us much further than where we’ve been in the not-so-distant past.

This is very true.

And how Doug can make that statement after a whole post of trying to persuade us that they are already skipping down the street together - if not actually hand in hand - I don’t know.

You see I actually agree with both of them. I agree with Jasons’ conclusions, but I also agree with Doug that most people who code if they do any research into standards will start to code meaningfully (semantically better).

The trouble is I have zero faith that most people will bother to learn about the code. Think about it, how many people that you know have any care what their code is as long as it looks ok when its displayed? Moreover, how many designers really want to get down and dirty with the code as long as they can use a nifty little program to create their design that doesn’t involve them actually messing with the code?

These people probably make up most of the actual ‘web designers’ that are out there, sure they may not code the big sites, or produce the best content, but by volume they are the biggest producers. I have no figures to produce, but think about it for a second… look around the web. These are the people that need to be sold on standards and semantics. Why? Because if they don’t.. then its going to be another 5 years of spacer gifs and tables filled with non-breaking space codes.

The web exploded because the average person could look at html and pick it up and code it, I know thats what I did. Standards complience should make it easier to understand the content and meaning of the code, and style sheets will make layout more obvious. However if the average joe doesn’t know this then where will the next generation of web designers and coders come from?