[WEB4LIB] Re: flash image on our home page

[Richard L. Goerwitz III]

"Kevin W. Bishop" wrote:
> 
> >I can write to spec without being boring.
> 
> Amen, Brother!

This reminds me of a situation I came up against - one that resem-
bles the scenario that prompted this whole thread.  Recounting it
may help the uninitiated understand better why there's been a lot
of fuss on Web4Lib about nasty little toys like Flash.

I used to work as the lead research programmer/analyst for Brown
University's Scholarly Technology Group.  Part of my job was to
manage the technical training and, to varying degrees, supervise
the work of student-programmers.  Some of them I worked with more
closely than others.

One day, while checking the work of a student I seldom had much
interaction with, I noticed that he was developing wildly mal-
formed HTML for a professor whose website he'd been basically put
in charge of.  None of the HTML validated.  It was, from a tech-
nical standpoint, a mess.

I went in to ask him about this, and he had three basic responses:

  1) it looked great
  2) it worked with netscape and IE
  3) he didn't like to play by the rules

Situations like this are what separate the men from the boys when
it comes to web design.

First off, you have to know the rules and why they're there before
you can have a clue about when it makes sense to break them (some-
thing I regularly do, I admit).  Secondly, though, just about any
designer with a lick of taste can figure out how to make a web page
look good with IE or Netscape in a few hours or days.  That's not
web design.

The problem comes in when IE changes, or Netscape changes, or some-
one expecting ADA compliance tries to use an alternate browser - or
some Unix geek tries to use Lynx.  The list goes on and on.  Unless
you adhere to the standards in intelligent ways, nothing is guaran-
teed to work.  And in fact, stuff is almost guaranteed not to work.

As a side-note:  Down at STG (my old workgroup) we used to undergo
major site redesigns every few years.  We'd change servers, restruc-
ture our web hierarchy, and change the way we handle standard head-
ers, footers, etc. (sometime restructure our entire page layout
standards).

In almost every case I was able to design utilities to automate 
this process.  Our main web designer was able, most of the time,
to run a simple utility on a page that would convert it wholly from
the old format to the new format.  We could redo whole sites in a
matter of a few days.

This was only possible because we took some care to produce valid
HTML.

At any rate, my point is that any kid can do a web page.  But only
skilled, technically savvy designers can design pages that can be
manipulated easily, upgraded, and used as input to a variety of
browsers (e.g., ones used by the visually impaired).

There aren't many people like this around.

Sadly, most IT managers don't even recognize them when they see
them.  And most techs who _think_ they understand how to put to-
gether web pages are actually pretty clueless as well.  As a result
there are a lot of websites out there that are difficult to use and
sustain.  They tend, as one pal of mine used to say, to be "colo-
nized and abandoned" (or at the very least, they become an inordi-
nate maintenance burden).

My sense is that librarians are uniquely well-positioned to under-
stand the sorts of issues I've raised here.

-- 

Richard Goerwitz                               richard at Goerwitz.COM
tel: 401 438 8978