Appreciate Your Front End Specialists
Sunday, May 18th, 2008
The glory of web design obviously goes off to the graphic designers. The blood and guts of web design bends towards the backend programmers. And the new geeky cool of web design gets into the ground of usability specialists and information architects.
What about appreciating the good old (X)HTML and CSS people that glue it all together? The value of POSH (Plain Old Semantic HTML) is under-rated in nearly every commercial / educational relationship I inhabit. It’s low tech. It’s beneath the radar. Its what kiddies do when they first want to make a web page - if they’re too dumb to use Facebook.
When you’re forced to do about 12 to 16 hours of totally avoidable Quality Assurance on 5 pages of web forms delivering radio fields via switch cases in PHP it makes you appreciate the high quality front end specialist. That person wouldn’t have cost me over a day of my life by saving themselves a few minutes research about how to markup a web page semantically. POSH - and how hard can it be? For some reason the blood and guts of design people just don’t get the importance of high quality, smick, state of the art semantic front end code. They even go so far as to say they’ve validated these pages already via the W3C HTML Validator as XHTML 1.0 Strict. Obviously someone has been tolling on my little joy boy for that to be true.
