triv.org

There is a class here at Eastern that I'm going to test out of: COSC 231 - Exploration in Internet-based Computing. Basically, it's the "let's make webpages" class. My friend John is taking it at the moment, and I was rather shocked to hear about the class.

First off, the use of stylesheets is prohibited. That is completely, utterly, absolutely, flat wrong. It's as though they are teaching Java and telling people not to use classes. It's as thought they're teaching music and telling people to not use musical notation. Stylesheets are the absolute right way to control the cosmetics of a modern website. Without them, your website is forced into a quagmire of font tags and color attributes, none of which contain any structural value.

The deeper point here is that the HTML of your page is supposed to describe the structure of the data. "This is a list. This is a header. This is a more important header. This word is important. This word isn't" The style sheet then tells the browser to make the important words bold and the headers green.

Why go thru all this? The simplest reason is accessibility. If a blind person is visiting the site with a reader, then only way that the reader can make sense of the HTML document is if that document has a structure. Once you put style information in the HTML document, that hope is lost.

On top of that, font tags and bgcolor attributes aren't valid in modern versions of HTML. Yes browsers will still work with the page, but that doesn't make it right. It's perfectly valid to write a C program where you name your variables var1, var2, var3, var4, var5, var6, var7 and so forth; but that doesn't mean you've written a good program.

I'm half tempted to hunt the professor down and give him or her a piece of my mind, but I probably won't. I want to get along with the department. I will, however, test out of the class. 221 was boring but basically correct, I don't think I could take boring and wrong.