Re: Selector for parent/predecessor?

> But how do features 'encourage' authors to write poorly performing
> applications? It's education and samples that do that.

New features are picked up by the early adopters as they allow them
to make their pages look different from the rest of the web.  They
basically get used for fashion reasons.

They then get into the popular text books, because readers of those
books are after visual effects and don't want to know about negative
implications (standard sales psychology here).  From those that I've
sampled in the book shops, I'm not convinced that many of their 
authors have actually read, or at least understood the actual
source documents.  (ECDL is supposed to have some sort of academic
credibility, but the web page section of the book I sampled on that
was all bad practice.)

I'm not so sure about university level education, although I've seen
no evidence of recent graduates having been taught properly about
HTML, but I'm pretty certain that the ICT primer given to junior 
school students is normally given by someone whose only read one of
the above books, so students are learning bad habits from the very
start.  In my view, web page writing ought to be taught as part
of native language teaching, rather than the ICT syllabus, as getting
good results comes from the same grammar, structure and semantics skills
as ought to apply to essay writing.

As to samples, the samples that most HTML coders use are the web pages
of the early adopters, which they will cut and paste without 
really understanding.

Received on Monday, 21 August 2006 21:56:29 UTC