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iWeb markup
Jan. 16th, 2006 09:02 amTodd Dominey complains about inelegant markup generated by Apple's new iWeb application, and for his effort he gets a batch of fairly ignorant personal insults from stone Apple fanboys.
The objections are mostly along the lines of "John Q. Public doesn't care about that semantic web crap." But it is precisely because most people don't care about these issues that their tools ought to try to take care of them. We use machines to do the things we don't want to spend a lot of time worrying about.
When you drive a car, you don't spend much time worrying about the mechanics of the engine or the physics of road handling, and if someone started explaining that stuff to you your eyes might glaze over. But you do want the car not to spin off the road and burst into flames. In the days when amateurs were using the first version of Microsoft Front Page, the users certainly didn't care about validation or lean markup. But they did notice that their pages broke on browsers other than Windows IE and were horrendously slow and didn't work well with search engines, and they didn't know why.
I shouldn't be too hard on iWeb; it sounds as if it is at least producing valid code that generally works on modern browsers, which is a definite step up. But wouldn't it be great if amateurs using entry-level tools could have nicely-constructed markup too, without even having to sweat it?
The objections are mostly along the lines of "John Q. Public doesn't care about that semantic web crap." But it is precisely because most people don't care about these issues that their tools ought to try to take care of them. We use machines to do the things we don't want to spend a lot of time worrying about.
When you drive a car, you don't spend much time worrying about the mechanics of the engine or the physics of road handling, and if someone started explaining that stuff to you your eyes might glaze over. But you do want the car not to spin off the road and burst into flames. In the days when amateurs were using the first version of Microsoft Front Page, the users certainly didn't care about validation or lean markup. But they did notice that their pages broke on browsers other than Windows IE and were horrendously slow and didn't work well with search engines, and they didn't know why.
I shouldn't be too hard on iWeb; it sounds as if it is at least producing valid code that generally works on modern browsers, which is a definite step up. But wouldn't it be great if amateurs using entry-level tools could have nicely-constructed markup too, without even having to sweat it?