Standards

In which Pete writes a long rant about web design, leaves it for a day or two, comes back, realises he’s wrong on a number of points, considers re-writing the whole thing, decides not to and posts it as is with the hope that, by having it out in the open, a more reasoned analysis might come to the fore. You have been warned.

I could, and probably should, write this in more depth but it’s been bugging me for a while now and I really should get it out of my system, however incoherently. I appear to be having “issues” with web design.

As you might know, pre-web I did zines. My first zine was kinda shite and my later zines were kinda okay, some might say good. The beauty of zines was I could print out text in columns, stick them onto pieces of paper and photocopy them thus creating a magazine without any need to learn the arcane arts of typesetting or printing. Bingo, I’m a publisher. Regardless of my relative merits in this endeavour these principles of DIY publishing were essential in letting anybody publish whatever they wanted. Without eulogizing too much, I consider this a very important thing.

In the early days of the web anyone who was prepared to learn basic HTML (which was pretty much the same as learning how to use early word processors) could put together a website and stick it on Geocities or Angelfire and bingo, they were an online publisher. It was great and pretty much amplified the zine revolution a million-fold, leading to this whole blogging thing we have today.

But those early web pages were seen as a problem. The implementation of HTML was not consistent and riddled with errors. Similarly HTML itself was something of a bodge, attempting to both describe the data it was marking up and instruct how it should be displayed. For the general user this trauma was not apparent but for those wanting to aggregate and process the web the whole thing was an incoherent mess. So XHTML and CSS were devised, with XHTML giving structure to documents so they can be parsed by computer programmes and CSS looking after how this is displayed in browsers and other output devices. This is all well and good, and generally I’m a big fan of the demarcation between content and appearance but it’s also where my “issues” come into play.

I think this all stems from the web being devised (I want to say “controlled” but that’s a bit strong) by programmers. Programmers are great – they make sure everything we use with our computers works – but they’re sticklers for accuracy. And rightly so. Not only does a program have to be 100% accurate in order for it to work, coding is often a collaborative effort so everything has to written in such a way that any other programmer coming to the project can understand it immediately. And so we have standards, not just for the programming language but for how it is written. And these standards are pretty strict.

And so we have XHTML and CSS, the building blocks of the new and improved web. To cut a long story short learning these is not like learning an old fashioned word processor. If you want to create a website that is 100% standards compliant you have to learn a shit-load of stuff, and even when you’ve learned all that you have to learn all manner of tricks to make it work in every browser.

And, to be honest, I’m not sure I can be arsed any more.

I think my moment of can’t-be-arsedness came with the launch of Movable Type 3.2, specifically the revealing of the new default templates for the CSS. Compare that, if you will to the 2.6 CSS I’d used to teach myself how this stuff works. I accept that for most of you they’re both utter gobbledegook but there’s a fundamental difference between them. The earlier one could be edited by a novice while the current one is a professional document.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with this. Movable Type is a professional piece of kit and so it’s not unrealistic to expect people using it to be professionals in that field. And you can, after all, use the endorsed Style Generator to create your own style sheet with a few clicks.

Which brings me, finally, to my big point. The web has developed to a stage where the entry barrier is too high. Certainly anyone with a Blogger account can be a publisher – their site will look nice and produce RSS feeds and be indexed properly – but they can’t get under the hood and make it their own without some serious research. All they can use are clunky WYSIWYG tools that allow some minor tweaking but only within certain parameters.

Maybe this doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day there are millions of people out there writing stuff that millions of other people are reading with all of it standards compliant so the search engines can accurately catalogue it, and none of them have a clue what a p or div tag is. And that’s fine – they shouldn’t need to really. But what of those who get the itch to go further, who want their blog to look unique or to do something with their templates that hadn’t been done before? What if they want to start getting creative outside of their content?

A few years back I started learning all about database driven content management systems without knowing what a database driven content management system was because I could look at the Blogger templates and figure it out. If I was starting out now I seriously wonder if I would have taken one look and decided, hell, I can’t really be arsed with this.

Or to put it another way, I read something like this article on transitional vs strict markup, the sort of thing I might have studied with great diligence a year or so back, and the first thing that comes to mind is “oh, fuck off already.”

Sure, standards are important but in the march towards compliance I think something quite fundamental to the very nature of the open web has been forgotten – that people by their nature like to make things their own, to customize them and make them unique. The barriers for doing this with web pages used to be very low indeed and, like I said, created the social web we know today. Those barriers have been raised to such a level that getting into web design (both visual and structural) is potentially far too much effort. While I have no solutions at all, I think this is a problem.

Blimey, that went on much longer than I intended. That bug up my arse was bigger than I thought.