Re: Politics: Strict Guidelines Considered Harmful

> 
> Forgive the cliché but - aren't we 'throwing out the baby with the bath
> water'?  As long as a tag like <font> does not impede accessibility I see no

The problem with font is that it encourages laziness in page authors who
are not fundamentally committed to accessibility.

> being pointed at the wrong people.  The content providers are often from a
> 'paper' publishing background and with that mindset they want the slick
> company brochures or whatever, to look a certain way.  Often, all the

My impression is that only the people commissioning the design come from
such backgrounds.   Although I haven't looked at it for a couple of
months, I always get annoyed by the design of British Telecom's web site.
One of the things they do is poor colour contrasts; their paper promotional
material doesn't suffer from this.

Having seen pages designed by fourteen year olds, my impression is that
most commercial web page design is implemented by people who've set up in
web design straight from school or college and have no real graphic design
experience.  By the time they go commercial, the design tends to have been
toned down a little, but is usually still very garish.

(This is possibly unfair to fourteen year olds, as 60 year olds new to the
web seen to overdesign in similar ways.)

When one gets to products sold for use on customers' intranets, the 
brochure may be designed by professional graphic artists, but the user
interface is more likely to be designed by the marketing department itself.

Received on Friday, 22 December 2000 13:20:54 UTC