The Internet Police

KompoZer is a tool you can use to express yourself on the web. It doesn’t mater if you have ten years of experience and understand all you know about web authoring or if you started yesterday. The reason you get KompoZer, a free download, is to use it. Use it at a tool for learning or for creating web sites. Use KompoZer to create a web site that says what you need to say and looks the way you want it to look. Create with the knowledge that the web is free and there are no Internet police.

There seems to be a school of thought that says we should not publish a web site unless we are fully trained and conversant with Cascading Style Sheets. A support forum has a number of seasoned contributors who have so intimidated new users that anonymous posting is used. Members of the forum can ask questions through a proxy to avoid public humiliation. Only three questions have been asked so far under the proxy technique but the mere existence of the procedure says a lot.

I’m clearly in the exact opposite school from these self-appointed web cops. My suggestion is that you immediately download KompoZer for free, fiddle with it a bit and publish your ideas to the web. The world will not end, the Internet backbone will not melt down nor will Earth become warmer (well maybe a little warmer). There are no Internet police.

Novice WYSIWYG Issues

The whole point of a WYSIWYG HTML editor is to allow a novice, with no technical background, to create a web site. KompoZer has simple, word-processor-like buttons to take care of basic formatting. The buttons provide for text size, alignment, lists, links and so forth.

Most of us new web authors would like a little more to our page than a single column, simple text presentation. Like this blog, the header, footer, and two column format is very popular on the web. A novice with that layout in mind has two choices: (1) Master CSS or (2) Use tables to control layout.

Right now, throughout web-land folks are cringing because I used the “T” word. Their point is “Table” is a dirty word, depreciated, and anyone who uses them to format content should be drawn and quartered. Well guess what?

A survey of web sites indicates slightly more than half use style sheets, 55.55% to be exact. Frames, a really frowned upon design approach, still account for 13% of sites. That means that 32% of the sites rely on tables for layout. That is a pretty big number when you consider there is one web site for every 250-350 people in the U.S. My suspicion is the number of web sites using tables for layout is much bigger than 32%.

I think the number of sites using tables to control layout is a lot higher. Sure when you look under the hood the code starts out with a CSS reference but digging a little deeper, “inspecting” is what the Firefox extension Firebug calls it, one finds that tables are used for presentation in conjunction with CSS style sheets. These are not novice sites either. We are talking about big names that paid major bucks for their web site designs and site maintenance. Wal-Mart is an example.


Wal-Mart recently overhauled their web site and updated something like 2 million pages. I would argue that is a lot of work and much more than you and I will ever do. Looking under the hood at Walmart.com shows a number of interesting things. Yes, pages do reference CSS style sheets. Interestingly, they also use code from DynamicsDrive.com just like you and I. The pages also use tables for layout.

Standards Not Police

This issue has bothered me from the time it became bothersome to my friends. They fell prey to the righteous advocates of Cascading Style Sheets who verbally beat them for mentioning the “T” word. I put it this way in a forum post: We also founded this forum with the belief that we should help others prepare their web sites even though they have no experience or technical understanding. We are troubled by feedback that indicates some from that group feel they are being viewed down long, arrogant snouts of more capable web authors. We know that is not the intent of helpful comments, but we are mindful of the impact on some of our members.

To be honest that comment was made nearly three months ago. It has taken me a long time to respond to the self-appointed Internet Police because this is not an easy issue to adequately present. The simple fact is the more I learn the dumber I become and the more I need to research. Maybe my research will make your life easier.

In case you get bored easily you can stop now and use tables to control your layout. If you are truly a novice web author no one will come pounding on your door. There are no Internet police.

There are standards for the Internet and those need to be considered -- posts to follow.

I believe in freedom of speech, freedom of the Internet and even free beer. Even though advocating free beer I hope you enjoy it responsibly. The same is true of the Internet. We all share the Internet and we all have an obligation to use that resource responsibly.

The Other Parts

This blog is intended to do two things. Firstly, it advocates for KompoZer, which I think, is a great piece of free software. You should get a copy and get to work on your web site. Secondly, this blog advocates for novice web authors in the hope that sharing my hits against brick walls will make it easier for you to publish to the web. The hope is these two objectives will encourage freedom of expression on the web. That is good for us all.

The web is all about communication that begins with your ideas and creativity. As with any media there are standards for communicating. There are standards for communicating with browsers and with your visitors. We need to look at those standards to be responsible.

I posed the question, “Just Who Do You Think You’re Talking To?” in an earlier post and that is a significant question. If you are talking to friends and family then I can accept a lower standard than if your site is designed for the world in general. If you are talking to the world then your site needs to be accessible to all and that is a higher standard. There are great links for exploring that aspect of web authoring and I’ll share those with you.

The third thing to come is a discussion of the concept of Internet Police. The basic thought is no one has the right to tell you what to put in your site or how to format the content. You have the right to do it your way. We should take a look at some of the consequences of your decisions and things you may want to consider as a responsible web author.


Wysi
; .