Yes, you.

I was linked to a quote on twitter by someone way higher profile than me, and it appears to have sparked a bit of a debate, so I’ll weigh in.

Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse.

I 100% wholeheartedly agree with this. How can you possibly design for the web if you don’t understand the limitations of the platform? Sure, you can draw a picture of a website, but will it work? If you’re lucky. Not EVERYTHING you can draw is easy or even sensible to interpret to a website layout, so you’re really limiting yourself or risking a substantial backlash if your design process isn’t influenced by a knowledge of CSS, browser inconsistencies and all of the cool little things web browsers can and can’t do.

I have to work with quite a few people who are “web designers” but don’t know HTML and it’s the most frustrating thing. It’s so clear when you’re working with a design of someone who doesn’t know the platform.

A couple of responses were to do with top chefs not working in their own restaurants or product designers not making the products they design. That has missed the point entirely (which is odd, because the source of one of those comments is incredibly well-respected) – chefs CAN cook, and could do it beautifully if they wanted/needed to. Product designers MUST know about the production process of the product they’re designing – you couldn’t just sit down and design a car or an aeroplane without knowing about production, materials and the thousands, probably millions of things you need to know about the product and production process.

So, from now on, if I work with you in your design capacity and you don’t know HTML or CSS, you’re not a web designer, you’re a website picture drawer.

Words are a tool for effective communication. To my mind, communication is the relaying of one concept from an individual or group to another individual or group. If a message makes it from one party to another, understood and intact, communication has been successful. Unfortunately, in conversation, you get assholes who receive the communication, unpack it, understand it, then point out to the sender all the things that are wrong with it.

Person A: How is this pronunced?
Dickhead: Don’t you mean pronounced?

What has this achieved? Dickhead has made an individual or group aware of the fact that Person A mispronounced something, but he’s also conveniently informed everyone that he’s basically a complete waste of oxygen and should probably be avoided at all costs. I would urge you to do the same. If someone prefers the perfect execution of a message to the content of said message, they are probably not worth your time.

As a footnote, I am very pedantic when it comes to planned written communication. Misspelled signage, incorrect punctuation et al are a sign of laziness or unjustifiably high self esteem (I know I’m right, I don’t need to look it up). Short, observational blog posts do not count as planned communication, so if you’ve spotted a mistake, I’m not a hypocrite and your observation of my hypocrisy is moot. Ha.

I’m what you might call a seasoned moaner. If something displeases me, people know about it. I have an opinion and I like to exercise it – it’s quite a good way to start up a conversation.

Yesterday, I spent 3 hours trying to SSH into a mediatemple share, only to find out that I’d been IP banned without being told. My attempt to connect was timing out and timing out with no feedback whatsoever. At this point, I didn’t have a client login, so I could only assume that (seeing as my colleagues could connect to the share) it was an issue with my connection. After 3 hours of debugging, I asked for a client login which was promptly created. When I logged in to the web interface, I was greeted with a “someone is trying to log in from your IP, but we’ve banned them” message (which the person who created the account didn’t get, by the way!) that allowed me to remove the lock from my IP.

Needless to say, I was furious (I have quite a short fuse), so TO THE INTERNETS I went. What followed can only be described as the best way to handle a public complaint about a company/service:

So, now I’ve wasted my afternoon, but I’m not mad about it any more – I’m actually pleased that mediatemple took my thoughts on board (or at least appeared to – whether they’re implemented or not is largely irrelevant, next time I can’t connect, I’ll just check if I’m locked out again!) and made the effort to resolve a problem, even though I didn’t direct it right at them.

So yeah, moaning is OK sometimes. As long as you’re moaning about something that cares about how it looks!

Microsoft are constantly wasting my time. I am a Mac fanboy, this is no secret, but I am going to make no mention of Windows users here today.

Are you a web developer/designer? If so, then Microsoft waste your time, probably on a daily basis, too and it’s going to get worse. When I heard about IE8′s impending release, there was the same heart-sinking feeling as when IE7 was first installed on one of my VMs and I realised that not enough had changed. We were promised better standards compliance, and whilst that was delivered, it wasn’t even close to enough. After having installed IE8 beta 2, it’s just disappointing. IE8 devs still clearly can’t add up, as elements that are laid out perfectly in Firefox 3, Safari and Opera are falling all over the place in IE8.

Now, I don’t profess to being able to write my own web browser. If I could, that’s probably what I’d be doing. I don’t develop web browsers for the same reason I don’t fly spaceships or present kids TV – I can’t do those things. So why is it that Microsoft employ this team of people who clearly have little interest in making a web browser that actually works? My guess is that they don’t care about their users (surprised?) or they don’t care about the developers working on their platform (again, surprised?).

For this reason, from today I am not going to be indulging them or their inferior software for my personal projects. I won’t open or test my sites in Microsoft browsers, and subsequently I won’t make any attempt to fix anything for those browsers. Instead, what I will do is give IE users a one-time, tiny notice that I don’t support Microsoft and politely suggest they try an alternative browser. I will also offer a style-less, javascript-less version of everything I do for people whose experience is completely hampered by Microsoft’s inadequacy.

Hopefully, any developer who reads this will adopt the same mentality for their sites and in a perfect world, users will start seeing how little their experience is taken into account by the software giant. It’s all about numbers, baby!

Someone has to start the ball rolling, and why would users when the internet looks fine to them?!