Slashdot: "Designers Ignoring Standards"

Slashdot is having a lively discussion today on "Web Designers Ignoring
Standards & Supporting IE Only".  I'm sure most of our crowd swings past /.
on a regular basis, but there were a few comments that I wanted to draw
attention to.

WebMasterJoe (not a relation) had an excellent, detailed rebuttal [1] to
the whole IE-centric philosophy of certain lazy designers.  Meanwhile,
Chelloveck advanced the opinion that "There's no such thing as a WYSIWYG
web page builder" [2] because HTML is meant to be interpreted differently
by each browser, not painted in exact pixels upon the screen.

So... what do you think?  Is WYSIWYG HTML an oxymoron, and/or a pipe dream?
Some of the latest standards seem to be resulting in a largely unified
render across browsers, but the effect could be an illusion.

It seems to me that a great deal of website designers were previously
involved in "dead tree" design jobs, where the content stayed firmly in
place once it was sent to the printer.  Even those who weren't so employed
often think the same way.  Will standards ever address their expectations,
or do they need to change the way they think?

[1] Rebuttal: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=35578&cid=3842759
[2] WYSIWYG:  http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=35578&cid=3842310

The whole article is at http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/08/1313246

-Joseph

Received on Tuesday, 9 July 2002 16:52:15 UTC