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Explaining semantic mark-up

I think it’s important for a web developer to view HTML documents without any external formatting applied. That means without CSS, no JavaScript enhancement, and, if you want, no images as well; instead just the raw content. Look at it, read it through. Does it make any sense? Do you understand which parts are more important than others, which texts are headings, which parts are connected to each other?

If the answer is yes, the document is probably marked up in a nice understandable semantic fashion.

That’s all well and good, and addresses what. But Robert closes with, more importantly, is why:

The benefits of using good semantics in a document are:

• It will be more accessible to people seeing the document in an environment where CSS cannot be applied.
• It will be understandable and coherent to people having it read to them with the help of a screen reader.
• It will help to get a better search engine ranking, since search engines can easier distinguish the importance level of the document’s different parts and what message is being conveyed.
• It will be a lot easier for web developers to maintain the code, and to separate content (HTML) from presentation (CSS).
• In most cases, there will be less code, which isn’t cluttered by formatting, meaning that the web page will be faster to load.

Anyone in business knows this rubric. The problem that designers have is that we always want to produce good work while clients always want it cheap and fast – perhaps this is why designers are so poor. Occasionally we succeed at making everybody happy but when clients expect all three every time – well, then we don’t expect to be working with that client for very long.

Indeed.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, October 17th, I’m giving a talk on business blogging to the Montana Society of Association Executives. I’ll post my impressions (and the PowerPoint) afterwards.

Report (aka, Gmail to the rescue)

Well, it wasn’t a total disaster, but if a technical detail could go wrong it did. My laptop wouldn’t display through their projector. I don’t yet know if it was my laptop, Linux or their projector; it’s entirely possible I have a bad video port on my laptop. The hotel didn’t have wired internet access like they said they did (if they did it was through an ancient 6pin [RJ25?] jack), and I didn’t have my wireless card configured yet in Ubuntu Linux because I didn’t want to risk bricking my laptop right before the presentation. The gentleman who brought the projector also brought a spare laptop, but I couldn’t open my presentation on it, and his copy of Acrobat Reader wigged out when I tried to load my backup PDF version of the presentation. Finally, my saving grace was the fact that the other laptop had wireless access, and I was able to display the raw text version of the presentation, sans titles and graphics, via the Gmail “view attachment as HTML” feature.

As if I wasn’t nervous enough.

You might think I’m being negative, but all things considered I think it went well. Hopefully they don’t think I’m a complete dolt. I’m going to send I’ve sent a copy of my presentation in PDF format (117kb) to my contact and she’ll distribute it to the members. Perhaps that will help me save face.

Ask 37signals: Do I need a designer to make pretty?

Thinking of designers as someone who paints the application pretty in Photoshop is a common but unfortunate misconception. We certainly don’t have any designers like that. Instead, our designers apply their talents to the native materials of the web by working directly with HTML, CSS, and occasionally Ruby code or JavaScript.

That’s a slightly odd notion to a lot of web programmers. They consider HTML, CSS, and especially JavaScript and Ruby code to be their domain. If designers work with exactly the same materials, how are they different?

This really only seems to apply to the IT sector, which is all the more frustrating. People outside of “the biz” don’t seem to care about the difference between designers and developers as long as the work gets done for a reasonable amount of money and in a reasonable timeline, and looks decent and appropriate for their business or organization. They wrap it up brilliantly as well (emphasis ours):

So stop thinking about designers as artists who work in a different universe of neat graphics and start thinking of them as someone who decides what goes where, which form elements to use, how to split features between screens, what words to use, and how everything fits together in a coherent experience.