It’s disheartening, but I got an email this morning from a former co-worker (teacher).  He is a Web design/development teacher, and I feel like he has his act together.  Here is his email:

So my professor taught us how to use the font tag last night.  No joke.  I had a hard time not saying anything.

I am not sure if this makes it better, but she said that we had to use “” with our attribute values, though, because then it complies with web standards.

Do I say something?

And here is my response:

This is a really hard situation to be in. I definitely don’t think you should say something in front of the class.

Tread carefully, but I might talk to her alone and explain that you have been doing web design for a very long time. Explain why you use CSS over font tags (why you as a web designer separate content from presentation. Not “you” as in the general public). You’ll get a feeling if she is receptive or not to what you are saying.

Is this a prerequisite for another class? Do you have to take this class? If she isn’t receptive to what you are saying I would try to get out of the class.

Jason

It’s one thing to try to force the teaching of CSS for complete and total page layout on a college professor. I could stomach an argument for the use of tables for certain presentational effects. However, teaching the use of the font tag in 2008 is irresponsible. That might be a little strong considering I don’t know the background of this teacher. Perhaps my friend should try harder to point this professor in the right direction. Your thoughts?

In my opinion, an API should be many things. Perhaps the most important thing it should be is easy to use. If it isn’t easy to use (because documentation is poor, naming in inconsistent, or because it’s just not well thought out or organized) than it will likely only lead to frustration. Not only will it be difficult to develop on a poorly thought-out API, but it will be incredibly difficult to maintain and extend an application built on this poor API. I’ve been thinking a lot about style guides recently, and the troubles clients often have when they can’t effectively use the site styles we (developers/designers) have put together for their project. With that in mind I wanted to talk about how your style-guide is your client’s API. You are the programmer/developer/frontendguy/whatever. You have put together an incredible application that allows the client to create and maintain pages (complete with enough Ajax to sink a ship). Now you hand the application over to the client, and they need to begin the process of populating content.

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