How to get it wrong
What would you expect to get taught if you took a course on web design? There are plenty of these courses around, at various levels, giving some sort of diploma or certificate at the end. What sort of level of knowledge does this represent?
Well, the basic structure of web pages is defined using HTML or XHTML. Increasingly, CSS is important. Many pages make use of JavaScript. If you were, then, to jot down the outline of a basic web design course, the principal component, you might expect, would deal with HTML; some time would be spent on CSS, and there may be (but probably not) a brief look at the use of JavaScript. (Of course, there are other elements which would need to be covered — in particular, the use of images — but let’s leave them to one side for the moment.)
You might expect that…
The reality seems to be rather different. A friend recently took one of these courses. She’s told me about it in some detail, I’ve seen her course literature, and the web site she had to build.
This course covered none of those subjects; in fact, HTML was never even mentioned. The course — and I suspect some of you are ahead of me here — was not in fact about web design, it was a course in the use of MicroSoft FrontPage.
Now, it would be entirely possible to rant on and on about the evils of FrontPage. Every so often on Usenet or a web design mailing list, someone asks, “What’s wrong with using FrontPage anyway?” For every (usually unenthusiastic) defence of FP, there are generally ten or so responses pouring vitriol on the program. It’s also not unusual for someone to mention that if a designer comes looking for work at their company with FrontPage in their CV, they don’t get very far.
I have myself only used FP once. That was enough for me to vow never to touch that program again; I loathed it more than Netscape Composer, which is saying something. It took perfectly good HTML and wrecked it, deleting tags and inserting non-standard markup. I’m told that FP2000 is not so bad, but I think I’ll pass on trying it. To judge from what I see on the Web, pages built with FP are still laden with bad markup and IE/Win-specific markup.
But this isn’t specifically about FrontPage. The so-called web design courses would still deserve criticism if they used any of the supposedly WYSIWYG HTML editors.
Dreamweaver, for example, is well-regarded by many web designers, but it would still be a bad idea to take students on an introductory web design course and simply teach them how to use Dreamweaver.
The point, which needs to be hammered home until it is really understood, is that the Web is not WYSIWYG. This is how All Things Web put it at least three years ago, and it is still true:
It’s frustrating but true. The Web is not What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get. Well, actually, that’s not exactly true. What you see is what you get, of course.
The problem arises when you mistakenly assume that what you see is what everyone else gets. The key thing to remember here is that there are millions of Websurfers out there who don’t use your favorite browser, your video card, your screen settings, or even the same kind of computer as you.
Using one of the “WYSIWYG” editors lulls you into a false sense of security. This is particularly the case with FrontPage, because most of its users, as far as I can tell, are also Internet Explorer (for Windows) users.
If you design a page in FrontPage, what you see is more or less what you get in IE5/Win. It won’t be what you get in Netscape in its various versions, in other browsers, or even using Internet Explorer on another platform. (Discovery of this fact may prompt the “designer” to put something like “best viewed with IE5.5” on the site — a bad idea.)
The simple fact is that using one of these editors with no further knowledge of the underlying technology is rather like driving a car without knowing how to check the oil. All of these “WYSIWYG” editors produce code with some errors — even Dreamweaver, which is much better than most. If you know nothing about HTML, you can’t fix the problems.
As an example, in the web site my friend designed there were several links which presented this sort of appearance [the example needs CSS support]:
Link
It looks messy and amateurish; her links looked like that because creating the link in FrontPage was done by selecting the link text and filling in the target in a text field. The code produced looked like this:
<a href="targetpage.html">Link <br> </a>
It’s a classic beginner’s mistake, and easy to correct — unless you have no idea of how HTML works, or how to edit it, or even that it exists. Without the ability to edit HTML, even such a simple problem can’t be fixed.
Now you might argue that these courses are for people who know nothing about computers or the Net, and FrontPage is easy to use. (I’d quibble with that last point, but let’s not go into that.) Surely it’s a bit much to expect them to cope with the intricacies of HTML?
If you were to say that, I’d say: come off it, we’re not talking rocket science here. This isn’t programming. HTML, used properly, simply defines the components of a web page (and if that is too much for you, the chances of you producing a worthwhile web site are pretty low).
What components do you need to have in a well-formed web page? Not many: <!DOCTYPE>, <html>, <head>, <title>, <body>. Those are the elements which must be present in a web page. The pages may still work if some of them are absent, but there is no guaranteeing that: it is down to the capriciousness of the browser.
This is not a complex basic structure to understand. Adding further elements need not greatly complicate matters. It really is not very difficult to comprehend the correct usage of header and paragraph tags. Tables would take a bit longer, but it would be well worth the effort: hand-coded tables are much easier to work with in the long run than the products of the “WYSIWYG” editors, which can be excessively complex.
However, what was wrong with this course did not stop with its total failure to teach the basic information you need to work with web pages. The site my friend designed was breathtaking, for all the wrong reasons.
At first sight, it was a simple, OK-looking page. Heading, centred photograph, some text and links. Some of the links were a little messy, as I’ve already mentioned, but otherwise it looked OK. Then the scrolling text started; a few seconds later (this was from a local disk) the jangly background music began.
Now, these features were not ones my friend had just bunged in because she felt like it: she was required to include the <marquee> tag — a Microsoft-proprietary element of which the best that can be said (if you feel charitable) is that it isn’t so thoroughly loathsome as <blink> — and a background sound.
No, there was no mention of the fact that <marquee> only works in Internet Explorer; no mention of the fact that many users don’t have sound cards, or that those who do may be intensely irritated by the background music. No, of course there was no discussion of the effect of using sound files on download time. If they didn’t mention that with reference to images…
Ah, yes, images. I’ve talked a few times about images, the appropriate file formats and the importance of keeping file size down. Absolutely no mention was made of any of these topics. It is hardly surprising, then, that one of the students produced a page which which weighed in at 6.5Mb — after all, no one had suggested there was anything wrong with using the .BMP format for images. (Yes, of course he got his certificate.)
We’ve still not finished: a look at the markup of the pages showed it to be absolutely stuffed with IE-specific (and I mean Windows IE-specific) markup. Yet another requirement for the finished page was to include page transitions (basically, wipes using different patterns in moving from page to page rather than simply loading a new page). It only works in one browser, it greatly bloats the page, but the students had to incorporate it.
This isn’t a course in how to design a web page, it’s a course in how you shouldn’t design a web page. Code which only works in one browser on one platform, use of huge, uncompressed images, incorporating background sound without any way for the user to disable it, giving absolutely no instruction on how to directly write or edit HTML — in what way is this course appropriate for the Web? The more I learned about the course, the more I read its literature, the more I wondered if the lecturers knew anything about the subject at all. Beyond, that is, Microsoft publicity.
What is the point of a course like this? It teaches nothing good at all; it teaches much that is bad; it gives the students a certificate which is not worth the paper it’s printed on. It gives the whole concept of further education a bad name, and in this particular case Reid Kerr College should be ashamed of itself.
If you are thinking of putting together a web site but are nervous, feel unsure of how to do it — don’t be tempted by one of these courses. Get a good book on the subject (not a ‘learn everything about web design in a day’ effort), visit some of the sites in the web design part of my links page: there’s plenty of good information out there, provided by people who know what they are talking about. Clearly, not a description which fits the organisers and teachers of courses like the one my friend took.
© DC 2001. All rights reserved.
