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Common excuses among web professionals

posted by Eric Puidokas April 11th, 2007

Roger Johansson had a great post recently over at 456bereastreet.com. His self-acknowledged rant brings up a lot of good points about the things web developers hear everyday.

Statistics

I often hear about statistics as an excuse for poor web design. As long as a large percentage of the users can use the site, that’s good enough, right? The thing people often fail to realize is your statistics are affected by your current practices. If your site doesn’t work without flash, of course only a very small perentage of your users won’t have flash. The ones that didn’t won’t ever be coming to your site again.

This is what makes following web standards important. Even if your statistics don’t show it to be cross-browser support and standards compliance to be vital now, those statistics you are looking at could very well be skewed by your current poor practices.

IDEs and Frameworks

Another excuse for poor coding is that the IDE or framework doesn’t allow for good coding practices. Johansson claims that back-end programmers should be able to learn, understand, and work within the HTML, CSS, and Javascript standards. This is one point where I have to disagree with him. I don’t think your back-end programmers need to have any concept at all of how these technologies work.

The approach which I prefer is separating the front-end code from the back-end code, and letting specialized professionals handle each. This is one of the main concepts in an MVC based framework. Front-end code (views) can’t affect back-end code and vice-versa. It’s an idea which I fully support and am glad has been gaining in popularity in recent years. From what I hear, even .NET based DotNetNuke is improving in this area.

I’m glad that others in my field are bringing up this kind of discussion. It’s imporant that we don’t become lazy with our practices and that we continue to make the web a friendly place for our beloved users.

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