Karl and I purchase a computer-related magazine every week called Micro Mart. The ‘net geek that I am, I always head straight for the Internet articles and every single week by the time I’ve finished reading them I end up seething. Why? Because one particular employee of the magazine is constantly recommending deprecated, proprietary or just plain bad coding. On multiple occasions I’ve told Karl we should protest and not buy it and he always tells me to just write in. Tonight I did, annoyed at alt being called a tag:
ARRRRGH!
Excuse my little moment there, I’m just screaming in frustration. Can somebody, anybody, please tell me why it is that on page 74 of issue 892 you refer to ‘alt’ as a tag on multiple occasions when it quite clearly is an attribute? A tag is surrounded by the less than and greater than symbols, and in my years of developing web pages, I’ve never come across
.Can somebody also please explain to me why the Basic HTML feature you ran, as well as [name removed]’s column, is constantly filled with deprecated/proprietary coding and why he constantly feels the need to alternate between upper and lower case tags/attributes?
Lastly, why was no mention of the Document Type Declaration (doctype) made in the aforementioned feature when it is one of the most important tags there is?
Why teach coding from the past when we can teach coding for the future?
Jemma Turner
Standards Fanatic.
Take that, you crappy-coders, you!
11 Mar at 9:01 pm
Wow, I caught a fresh post! :P Way to go Jem! I can’t believe they’d actually publish such crappy coding. Holy shit, if it was up to me, I’d hang people for it. Hmm, why don’t we all start a petition? We could pass it on to Blair and try to make it illegal to recommend the usage of deprecated and invalid coding. Yay for standards fanatics. -goes off to design some shirts on Cafepress-
11 Mar at 10:10 pm
I think I should do the same thing with my IT teacher. Who uses bgcolor now?! Eh :/
11 Mar at 10:20 pm
Heh, that made me chuckle – I hate it when people are ‘teaching’ you and alternate lowercase and uppercase codes. :(
11 Mar at 10:23 pm
wahey! I hope they print the letter and give the author a kick up the bum :)
12 Mar at 12:28 am
Yay, the wrath of Jem!
12 Mar at 1:26 am
Go Je-em, go Je-em… :P
12 Mar at 1:48 am
Arrgh, (un?)fortunately, I never buy those magazines. Probably because I’d get murdered by my parents for wasting money or something. But wow, that’s really stupid. Go you! (cheers)
12 Mar at 2:03 am
You’re our saviour, Turner – go you! V xx
12 Mar at 11:19 am
Go Jem! Keep us updated on the answer though.. or at the very least on what might happen in the next issue of said magazine.
12 Mar at 3:12 pm
Heh heh – that was quality! Please keep us informed of any responses!
12 Mar at 3:34 pm
That is so going to get published in the reader’s respond column ;)
12 Mar at 9:42 pm
It’ll either be published, or get ignored and thrown away. But they’d better change their ways! Heh.
12 Mar at 11:58 pm
As queen of writing complaints, I applaud you. I hope they print it and get shamed. Even if I don’t know what the hell you just complained about. :P
13 Mar at 4:44 am
*note to self* never piss Jem off :)
13 Mar at 7:06 am
I’m hoping that your response is published or at least addressed somehow. Who knows how many people are going to be confused or misled by the particular writer?
13 Mar at 7:08 am
Wtf? Even a newbie knows that! Im curious about what kind of reply you will get, lol.
13 Mar at 8:23 am
You go!! :)
13 Mar at 10:56 am
Good rant; that’s awful (the magazine’s coding examples, I mean). If you haven’t already sent it, though, perhaps consider removing the ‘aaargh!’ and ‘screaming’ parts? I think that letters carry more weight if they sound calm/professional and like they haven’t been written in the very moment of the rage. And you are a professional, so… :)
13 Mar at 1:29 pm
Jem you have to realize that many people are not onto the whole “validation” thing and although it seems like people are, most of the industry isn’t. This includes designers that are actually being paid for their work. And although it’s very nice to push to have everyone validate “for the future”, you yourself, are unsure how this validation will actually turn out in the future. Yes yes, you say, “it will be widespread and everyone will be validating”… are you even sure about that? We’re talking about huge masses of people that have to validate and unless the coding that works and doesn’t validation stops working, than no one really has a reason for such coding anyway.
13 Mar at 7:03 pm
Don’t patronise me with your “you have to realize” and “designers being paid for there work” crap Demoness, it doesn’t suit you. I have worked “in the industry” and been paid for my work. I have never said that everyone is validating, nor have I said everyone will validate.. but I do expect a computer/internet-related magazine who have a valid website and who constantly bang on about the latest and greatest of everything to at least have a basic grasp of HTML before teaching their “version” of it to their unsuspecting readers. Having unvalidated working coding is all well and good if it *does* work.
13 Mar at 9:29 pm
I actually think the whole ‘screaming’ thing adds a bit to the letter. If not I’d look at it as something the person is taking lightly and doesn’t really mind, just feels like pointing out anothers mistake. :P In my opinion, it shows the people that people CARE about correct coding.
14 Mar at 1:26 am
I just *love* your complaint. Hopefully you’ll get a good response ‘eh? I’d love to hear what they have to say to your letter. I bet it will be quite interesting.
14 Mar at 2:07 am
Web standards are made for a reason – to improve the web. They will never be broken ‘in the future’ – not if people keep up with them like they’re supposed to. And if they don’t, they’re the broken ones, not the standards. As far as I’m concerned, what the W3C says goes.
14 Mar at 1:55 pm
I wonder what kind of negativity will come to Jem’s website if (*cough* I mean, when..) it gets published? From people who think that the stuff in the mag is OK. Doesn’t matter, they will either be sent away crying or be converted to Jem’s ways. *agrees with Jennifer and notes to never cross Jem*
14 Mar at 2:15 pm
Or they will see it as a rant of some annoying kid, laugh at it, and toss it in the trash. And while you’re sitting here thinking about it, the person who read the letter will go home and completely forgot that it even existed. I have to agree with Gemma. The screaming parts are pretty unprofessional. What you really should have done is tried to write your own article and sent it in, so that you could have gotten a job at that magazine. Keep in mind though, the author might have had the correct information to begin with, but his/her editor might have edited it to something incorrect.
14 Mar at 2:18 pm
If they laugh at it – at least they read it. I don’t care if it gets published, I wrote it to get something off my chest. A point that seems to have escaped most people..
14 Mar at 5:13 pm
I agree with Jem. I think it’s a perfect way to express her feelings :) Any chance of you scanning in this particular article from the magazine, Jem? I’d love to read (and laugh at) it but I havent seen that magazine anywhere. Today in ICT, I was forced, as part of my ‘Web Design’ course, to embed a sound into a website. Plus, all of the examples were incorrect. The tags were all capitalised. I just sat there, moaning to myself, while all of the other people in my form learned everything the wrong way from the young age of 12. Psht. This is why they are such n00bs. Because they’re taught incorrect html. I once had an argument with the tekkies in my school about Firefox. They all said IE was better. Call themselves technicians? My arse. Rant over :) Just thought I’d add my experience of web-and-computer-related hypocrisy.
15 Mar at 8:43 am
Jem lays the smackdown! :D
15 Mar at 4:22 pm
Jem, I didn’t mean to patronise you so if you took offense to that… well, that really is your issue. I’m not going to apologize for something that I didn’t intend. And neither did I say that I disagreed with you, if a magazine was to be teaching any sort of coding (especially if it was about computers and what not) than valid might be the way to go if they have a valid website. But you didn’t mention that they had a valid website. You could have approached the letter in a completely different matter. Could you not sound less like a nazi? If you had written that in a more professional way, it would have sounded less “CODE THIS WAY OR I WON’T BE READING YOUR MAGAZINE.” Anyway, what I’m saying is that it just sounded like a poor letter in general.
15 Mar at 4:26 pm
I just don’t understand where people are getting this assumption that I’m trying to be professional? If I wanted to be professional I’d have spent 3 hours writing the letter and another 2 proofreading and double-checking everything. I also probably wouldn’t have published it here on my weblog. As it is, it was a quick 3 minute rant at a magazine which was intended as a way to get something off my chest, nothing more.
15 Mar at 7:38 pm
Meh. It just seemed like a immature way of handling it.
16 Mar at 4:32 am
Normally I’d be on the side of ‘professional equals better’ but not this time. What a lot of people don’t seem to understand (and what Jem has said several times) is that it was expressing anger over obvious ignorance. People don’t take any pride in their work anymore. When you write a report for school do you watch your spelling, punctuation and grammar or do you just do it however you please because you aren’t a ‘professional writer’? Whatever happened to doing the best you can and learning as you go along? An immature way of handling it would have been calling them and bitching at them. An immature way of handling it would have been using netspeak and calling them n00bs!!!111 People who write into magazines are usually only doing it for fun or to rant at the publication. The ones that are serious are usually the most pathetic and only posted so that the rest of us ‘normies’ can laugh at them. Jem’s letter probably won’t be posted because it’s pointing out a flaw that they haven’t fixed (even though they may know about it).
16 Mar at 8:35 am
FUCKING HOORAH! Someone gets it!
16 Mar at 12:41 pm
Why does a rant letter have to be professional? That’s what it is, a RANT. It’s not a job application.