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I lose all interest in working on something when I can’t do it “the right way”. For example, I’m having to create some new HTML templates from existing code. I’m modifying what someone else has done, and done poorly. I can’t completely re-write it using modern standards and eliminate all the goddamn spacer gifs; but I’m dying to.

I’ve become so used to CSS based, standards compliant layouts that it drains me to look at tables and tables of hacked together madness. Particularly disturbing is that this is an intranet site specified only for IE6+/Win. It was the perfect opportunity for them to do it the right way.

As I was searching for informative sites to link to from this post I ran across Zeldman’s latest lecture, Designing With Web Standards. He starts off by pointing out sites that aren’t designed with standards, and the problems with them. The absolutely hilarious thing is that one of his examples is a site designed by the very company I’m doing work for. The coincidence is almost too much for me. Thank god it’s not a site I had to work on.

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All this being said, I realize that not all of my own websites contain perfectly semantic and valid code. I’ve been doing this for a while, since back when there was no choice but to hack things together. As I get the time I’ve been revisiting my sites and retrofitting them to proper code. It’s going to take some time, and I probably won’t get to all of them.

The important thing is that once you know about the proper way to do something, you start doing it. Ignorance is no longer an acceptable excuse for any web designer who keeps up with their field in the slightest. Even laziness isn’t a good excuse—writing to standards is cleaner, easier, and more logical.

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# August 13, 2003 08:22 PM

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Hear, hear. Indeed it is. I’ve found that a lot of client work and with my day job is the unimaginable frequency with which I find people who still use NS 4x. When they ask, “Why doesn’t it look good?” I find it so hard to stop from saying, “because that’s a shitty browser.”

Posted by: Naz on August 14, 2003 2:14 AM

I don’t understand people who still run NS4. A large percentage of the sites they visit must be horribly mangled looking. Thank god their user base is low enough to justify no longer catering to them. I tend to just import the stylesheet so they don’t see any styles at all, which actual makes the page more usable then the mess it will make out of valid CSS.

Posted by: simon on August 14, 2003 11:38 AM

Yeah, while I’m not nearly as proficient as you (Simon), I still get bugged out when I find out that people are using NS3 (!!) or other archaic browsers on the internet. How do those things happen?

Posted by: miguel on August 15, 2003 2:10 PM

what’s an NS4? jim p.s. point being, even us fairly tech-savvy folk can still be clueless.

Posted by: jim on August 16, 2003 2:02 PM

Netscape Navigator 4.0. Not knowing that is probably a good thing.

Posted by: simon on August 17, 2003 12:45 AM

As Far As I Can Tell

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