RE: Promotion of XHTML

On Mon, 2002-12-30 at 13:50, Alex Rousskov wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Dec 2002, fstorr wrote:
> 
> > It really irritates me.  I get called a geek by my intranet manager
> > at work - this coming from the man who won't use CSS and uses
> > FrontPage for "ease".
> 
> To make any progress, we have to at least identify the primary
> obstacle:

> In other words, what should be the first priority: changing human
> nature, changing Microsoft, changing W3C marketing, changing CSS/HTML,
> or changing browsers?

The problem is making people care about doing something the /right/ way.

Someone learning how to make web pages can sit down and relatively
quickly get the results they want without any regard to proper
structural based web design (font tags, etc).  It's hard to explain to
them why doing this is wrong, especially since "everyone else seems to
do it this way".

You can talk about right and wrong, and accessibility, browser and
platform neutrality, but the problem is most people /do/ /not/ /care/. 
Students glaze over.  They especially don't care when doing it the right
way is vastly more difficult that doing it the wrong way (table based
layout for example). Even if it was easy, they still wouldn't care.  And
for the most part they don't want to understand why they should care,
they just want their page to be cool and work - which they can get with
little effort.

So, in answer to your question: Human Nature.

-- 
Chris Hubick
mailto:chris@hubick.com
http://www.hubick.com/

Received on Wednesday, 1 January 2003 13:50:34 UTC