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Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

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When Human Brain Needs an Update

Chris PirilloSome
mucho smart peo­ple have ranted
about and ana­lyzed
the Lock­ergnome affair in much detail. What Lock­ergnome did is incom­pre­hen­si­ble
for ratio­nally think­ing peo­ple. That’s a fact, right? I really have a
hard time believ­ing they can jus­tify the change to them­selves, or their audi­ence
for that mat­ter. I do how­ever think Pir­illo is a smart guy and he’s a
funny geek on occa­sion. But this time I guess he missed a few brain­cells —
and it surely isn’t funny. Any­way, this whole Lock­ergnome debate reminds
us of the harsh truth. The human brain can’t adapt as fast as tech­nol­ogy
develops.

While I think the cur­rent Lock­ergnome web­site is deplorable I can see how the
deci­sion came to be. Not the rea­sons they men­tion per se, some­thing a bit more
psy­chol­ogy related. Let me put it this way: how do you feel when upgrad­ing your
favorite soft­ware or appli­ca­tion? I always think it’s a bit scary. Some­times
new soft­ware releases will require users to adapt to a new envi­ron­ment, new
tools or lost fea­tures. While my sub­con­science knows that a new release will
even­tu­ally make me achieve my goals faster or bet­ter, I have a hard time see­ing
the long term ben­e­fits as opposed to the short term required invest­ment in time,
money and efforts.

Cod­ing with web stan­dards is pretty much the same. Yes, it took me some time
to kick the old habits and aban­don my WYSIWYG edi­tor. But you know what? In
the end it made me a bet­ter designer, and I now know why it was and is worth
the short term invest­ment in time, energy and gal­lons of cof­fee. Don’t
get me wrong, I’m still strug­gling and web stan­dards isn’t cod­ing
nir­vana. But it sure is a hell of a bet­ter place than tables. Can you imag­ine
any designer worth his salt throw­ing his comps together in Pho­to­shop 3 —
or peo­ple seri­ous about IT using Win­dows 95? Prob­a­bly not. Though I could argue
that any­one seri­ous about IT should not use Win­dows at all.

So Chris, why the fear? You of all people…

This item was posted by dhilhorst on Thursday, March 11th, 2004.

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4 comments on “When Human Brain Needs an Update”

  1. Posted by Chris Vincent on Thursday, March 11th, 2004.

    To quote the Quizno’s com­mer­cial: “I fear change, and will keep my bushes.”

    To point cyn­i­cally at human nature: “I hate what I do not understand.”

    The same atti­tudes caused geno­cide and unnec­es­sary war more than once in this cen­tury, and thou­sands of other times over the his­tory of human civ­i­liza­tion. From a scale as grand as global dom­i­nance to as minis­cule as a web­site, we’re all the same. It’s all in how you adapt.

  2. Posted by Tony on Friday, March 12th, 2004.

    This is such an insane issue that causes nor­mally ratio­nal peo­ple to behave like crazy peo­ple. Here’s an oppo­site end of the spec­trum example:

    I’m a firm believer that web stan­dards are cur­rently the right direc­tion. I also under­stand the need for restraint and understanding.

    I’ve got­ten (is that a word?) myself into much trou­ble on a forum I fre­quent over a debate about tables. See, I believe in the con­cept that tables should not be used for page layout…web stan­dards, and all. But, there are some on the forum that think table­less design means no tables…EVER. Try as I might to get them to com­pre­hend the dif­fer­ence between using tables for lay­out (usu­ally bad) and using tables for tab­u­lar data (good, proper, and cor­rect), I keep run­ning into a wall.

    There are *some* on the far end of the web stan­dards debate that believe *every­thing* should be done with­out tables. This is just crazy. I’ve been debat­ing with these lunkheads about why you shouldn’t con­vert your cal­en­dars to pure CSS using divs and spans. Sure, it’s an excel­lent exer­cise to teach your­self CSS, but should not be used in prac­tice. Cal­en­dars *are* tab­u­lar data. To prove this point, I’ve asked these folks to cre­ate their CSS tables, then turn CSS off in their browser. Does the data still make sense? The answer is no. How­ever, they still insist that pure CSS — no tables ever — is the one and only answer, and any­one (like me) who thinks oth­er­wise is stuck in the dark ages.

    But, in ref­er­ence to your arti­cle: I, too, think Lock­ergnome is mak­ing a hasty mistake.

  3. Posted by KillAllDash9 on Friday, March 12th, 2004.

    You should let us know where this forum is. Maybe if we all gang up on them… :-)

  4. Posted by jharr on Friday, March 12th, 2004.

    This reminds me so much of the “my grand­son can build my web­page” men­tal­ity. When I have trou­ble with my car I go to a mechanic. I don’t mess with it because it’s more com­plex then I know how to fix and it’s impor­tant it’s done right because I need to get to work and keep my fam­ily safe. So why is that any dif­fer­ent when it comes to design­ing and imple­ment­ing a pro­fes­sional cor­po­rate website?

    It looks like Lock­ergnome has avoided the cost of hav­ing a design pro­fes­sional redesign the site and feels that installing Win­dows and hard­ware tewak­ing a PC some­how have any­thing to do with design­ing a pro­fes­sional site. The skills it takes to design and imple­ment a truly usable and com­pli­ant site have lit­tle to do with tra­di­tional geek tal­ents. Appar­ently folks still have a lot to learn.