So the thinking behind RefreshCleveland is partly to promote web standards in the real world and their adoption by designers and developers in the Cleveland area.  But what standards should we be promoting?

There seems to be a rumble amongst the big name advocates on this very subject.  Partly brought about by the “Dear W3C, Dear WaSP” post by Molly.  I saw this trickling through my feeds even before I reached Molly’s blog.  Jeremy Keith’ s post was the first and others followed, while Patrick Lauke and Tantek Çelik slugged it out in the comments of Molly’s blog.

These big names cite apathy towards the organizations and a desire to just get on with it and use the standards we have.  I sort of agree.  I was one of the first people at Optiem to promote web standards within our day-to-day production and I still bang the drum four years on. But I just don’t think we need HTML5 and how long before browsers support CSS3 (they hardly fully support CSS2 now)?  I still see sites that are developed recently that don’t get HTML4 transitional right, let alone XHTML Strict.

Does anyone disagree?  Should we just concentrate on getting the basics right, with maybe the addition of some newer pieces such as microformats and the currently supported CSS, and let the browsers and other developers catch up?

What would you like to see as the standard that Cleveland web firms put out?

Technorati tags: web standards, standards, w3c, advocates, css3

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The Cleveland area meet-up for Web Standards is happening this Tuesday. I can’t make it this month (I used to belong to it years ago before it went into hibernation) but I’m looking forward to attending one soon and seeing who’s out there.

Technorati tags: meet-up, web standards, cleveland

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Eric Meyer’s post, The Veteran’s Charge, is a good reminder to call foul if you ever think about putting “best viewed in…” or any version of that on your site.

I know the iPhone is a shiny new toy to some, but to develop sites specifically for it is insanity - especially as one of its selling points is iPhone lets you see web pages the way they were designed to be seen!

Technorati tags: iphone, web standards

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There are far too many writings on the ‘net discussion the various reasons for a dearth of women in IT. I’m not going to go into them, because readers are knowledgeable enough to figure out the arcane workings of google and search for themselves. What I am going to go into are the points brought up by this blog post by User Advocacy’s Chris Borowkowski, titled “Why most women (and many men) avoid IT“.

The post was inspired by an August 6 article (and the ensuing SlashDot discussion) published by ComputerWorld magazine: “Making IT Work for Women: Four women tell how they’ve survived and flourished in the IT culture“. As a uterus toting member of the girls’ club, I can relate to some of the stories these four women narrate, but I also had a few moments of horror at some of the quotes. I’m sure Borowkowski did as well, which is probably why he wrote his post.

See, as a woman and a mother working in IT, I see IT from a slightly different view than many of my male counterparts. Yes, there is the all too often unconscious sexism and the faint the aura of the boy’s club. However, what horrifies me more is what Borowkowski talks about in his post: the serial overwork, the patronization of workers (work for us because we’ll give you free sweeties, the occasional party and fizzy drinks!), and the general disconnect between upper management and development.

The ComputerWorld article doesn’t seem to touch on the same points as Borowkowski — if he didn’t come out and say that his post was inspired by the article and the SlashDot discussion, you may not associate them together. However, Borowkowski doesn’t seem to buy into the “Aww shucks–I’m just a wee woman in a big man’s world” mentality that Mary Brandel gives voice to in her ComputerWorld article. The parts about women having to compromise because, of course, “You can’t have it all”, the quotes about just being one of the boys, and the general saccharine tone of the article really turned me off. I felt that Brandel’s article was more harmful than helpful in its portrayal of each woman and left many real issues of the IT industry in the dark while Borowkowski brought them into the light.

After reading both Borowkowski’s post and Brandel’s article, I have some questions:

• How do you justify working in IT? Do you feel like you have to justify your career?
• Are your working conditions/hours sane, or are you falling into the same sort of trap Borowkowski illustrates in his post?
• Do you feel that Borowkowski is right?
• Do you feel that there are other elements of IT that attract or repel people from the industry?

So it’s August and the new design is nearly ready. A few of the sidebar items are going to start changing and the tag “refreshcleveland” is starting to crop up in my Google Alerts.

Please bear with us while we move the furniture around.

So my question to this month to the Cleveland web design community is a very basic one. “Why are some of you still using tables for layout?”

Not a hard one to start off but, if anyone does answer, I’m really interested in the feedback. Why this question? Well, as part of trying to get RefreshCleveland going, I did a search for “cleveland+web design” to see who’d pop up. When I looked at the first page results that came through these guys are still using tables for layouts on their own sites:

• http://www.clevelandwebdesign.com/
• http://www.designcleveland.com/
• http://www.ideastar.com/

It could be due to not having time to update your own site, maybe you are tied to a legacy CMS or that you are still not comfortable with using CSS. I’m just interested.

Leave a comment and let us all know.

Technorati tags: tables, layout, css, “cleveland web design”

Tags: tables, layout, css, “cleveland web design