This month, Marcus Alexander of EMC Consulting and Arran Ross-Paterson (of this parish) talk about HTML in the real world, dealing with clients, and what a quality project actually looks like.
LWSWorld - Real world HTML - Marcus Alexander
Everything is designed that way for a reason
Semantic HTML may be brilliant, but all those extra bits are in there for a reason. Until you understand them, don’t mess with them
The best solution is the one that meets the requirements
Clients don’t really care about the technology, just about getting things done on time and on budget. If a solution meets all the requirements, it doesn’t matter how hacky it is, it’s the right solution.
Ask the right questions up front
The client may not have thought of everything, so go through your standard checklist of questions and get everything agreed before you start.
Bugs happen, deal with it
100 bugs in a project is normal, most of them will be problems with other people’s code. Deal with them and try not to let the client get carried away. Products will ship with bugs, just deal with them.
Developers will build a rocket ship to get to Ikea
And then they’ll only leave room in the rocket for a hot dog and some light bulbs. Internal coding standards aren’t very useful, try code reviews and examples of structure instead.
Deployment scripts are your friend
They do all the grunt work for a release for you. Make use of ANT or MSBuild to speed things up.
This month, Marcus Alexander of EMC Consulting and Arran Ross-Paterson (of this parish) talk about HTML in the real world, dealing with clients, and what a quality project actually looks like.
These are my notes on Arran’s talk:
LWSWorld - Why Validate - Arran Ross-Paterson
Greeted by boos from the crowd, Arran’s controversial talk focused on why we shouldn’t worry that our web sites don’t validate in the W3C checker.
Validation
Browsers don’t care, nor does Google. Unless it’s a requirement, just use it as a sanity checker. Your code doesn’t always have to validate to be valid.
Alt tags
Alt tags never fully describe a picture. There’s no point in having an alt tag on an image if it’s not completely descriptive. If the image is just to attract attention, then don’t worry. If it’s an image map, you will need to add some more description.
Calendars
Calendars look like tables, but they could be a list, and surely it’s ordered, but if you’re doing an event calendar, a definition list is the most semantic markup, except that <dl>s are really hard to style and missing tags can cause problems. Having <dd> inside a <dt> isn’t correct according to the validator, but feels more correct semantically.
Don’t abandon standards
Standards are very useful, so don’t abandon them. They’re great for learning and teaching people, to bring them up to a certain level, but as long as it works, don’t sweat it.
This month at london web standards, Opera’s Chris Mills (@chrisdavidmills) and Anna Debenham (@anna_debenham) came down to talk to us about education and the web. Anna has recently been through the UK education system and had her tales from the trenches of what it’s really like to be educated in the web at school.
Sketchnotes of
Curriculum
ICT education on the web and making web sites is awful. Since 2003, ICT has been mandatory at key stage 3 and 4 (SATS and GSCEs or ages 14 and 16 (ish)). Over the past few years, the curriculum has been so basic that children often know more than their teachers. This isn’t the teacher’s fault.
Anna showed us some of the resources teachers are given and one of the bits of coursework. The website was for the band “purple spiders” and consisted of some images, links and a purple background colour. Seriously, it was as basic as that. There were form pages with no submit button. Music download pages that said if you downloaded music you were a criminal.
Software
Teachers have a certain amount of recommended software, and principally it’s MS Office. If it’s not on the list they don’t get funding for it. Almost zero open source software is to be found. Every course told you to use tables for layout, because that’s what the software can do well. Ofsted, the teaching governing body, recognise that ICT is misused.
EdExcel, the examining body, seem to be rising above this. Their 2011 curriculum has encouraging statements like “knowledge of accessibility” and “creative commons”.
Age perception
Anna talked about the perception of age in the web world. There are many success stories, including Matt Mullenweg creating WordPress before his 18th birthday. However, there is a general bias against young people in that experience counts in web design.
Anna also taught us that Flash is terrorism. She put a flash-based interactive room map of her school on their web site which they wouldn’t allow because “it would aid terrorism”. You heard it here first.
How to help
So, what can we do? Courses need to be made more interesting and relevant. Whilst “common software” like Office won’t go away any time soon, the teachers need better resources, and importantly, better tools. Adobe can help here, and so can Microsoft, making their most common tools more web-standards oriented.
