nerkalog

nerkles June 30th, 2005

• You say to yourself, “it looks good in Internet Explorer on Windows, now my work is done.”
• You are unaware that certain color text on certain color backgrounds is literally unreadable to a noteworthy section of humanity.
• It never occurred to you to think about how your site is experienced by people with disabilities.
• You think closing an open tag is just too much darn hassle.
• You think the <blockquote> tag is for indenting stuff.
• You think that what comes out of Microsoft Word or Front Page actually counts as HTML.
• You’re waiting for a rainy day to learn CSS.
• You honestly believe that people who don’t already love you will stick around to read your content, no matter how wonderful or important it may actually be, even though your site is hideous.
• You are so enamored with Flash that you only learned enough HTML to slap your Flash content onto a page.
• You think <h1>, <h2>, etc. are for making text big & bold… or you think using the <font> tag to make stuff big and bold counts as a section heading.
• You don’t read A List Apart and the blogs and books of its contributors and other web smarty-pantses all the time, and joyously learn all you can from them.
• You expose your clients to more of the gory details of what you do than is necessary (unless they wanna know).
• You don’t “do nuance”—like learn the difference between <i> and <em>, and why it matters.
• You don’t update your methods when they are proven obsolete (or worse).
• You get all offended by lists that poke you in your shortcomings instead of seeing them as an opportunity to improve your work and learn something.

Feel free to contribute to this list, including links to where people can learn to do better.

I’m trying to give a friendly kick to the butt of complacency, not be a total jerkface. In keeping with that spirit, anything mean in the comments will be deleted.

• Funny Bits , General , grumble , web stuff
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