Still… teach­ing… WYSIWYG design prin­ci­ples! My brother is on another com­puter here design­ing some web­page using a word proces­sor in HTML mode, and I’m furtively glanc­ing, wait­ing for the crush­ing moment when he dis­cov­ers that his pretty fonts aren’t going to dis­play like that in a real browser.

Acces­si­bil­ity issues aside, peo­ple don’t seem to under­stand that typog­ra­phy doesn’t work like print.

I’d like to go and rant to the teacher who set the project — not because they use redun­dant and dep­re­cated design prac­tices, but sim­ply in response to their role in per­pet­u­at­ing these. Edu­ca­tors have a greater bur­den of respon­si­bil­ity here, being a cat­a­lyst for the prac­tices of tomor­row. Admit­tedly, edu­ca­tion is not the only cat­a­lyst (I think most peo­ple my age who under­stand the notion of the seman­tic web can attest to this!), but that should not dimin­ish its poten­tial role in this.

I argue that, in their role as edu­ca­tors, they have failed — their influ­ence is a wholly neg­a­tive one in this aspect for sev­eral reasons.

Web design in this out­moded form, regard­less as to the WYSIWYG appli­ca­tion used to enact this, is not effec­tive in devel­op­ing an individual’s design skills.

Note that I don’t speak of web design gen­er­ally — I think, done prop­erly, it pro­vides an excel­lent ground­ing in design in a more flex­i­ble frame of mind (think­ing in terms of fluid lay­outs, for exam­ple, as opposed to sta­tic print lay­outs). My crit­i­cism is applied only to the pri­mary use of appli­ca­tions such as Front­page or Dreamweaver as sole design tools, and more so to word pro­cess­ing and DTP soft­ware that per­form a sec­ondary func­tion in being able to export HTML. Notably, use of graphic design tools is exempt from such a crit­i­cism (Pho­to­shop, Illus­tra­tor, Fire­works… and to a lesser extent Flash — lesser because it is not designed for the pri­mary pro­duc­tion of graph­i­cal ele­ments, rather for the imple­men­ta­tion of these in an inter­ac­tive and engag­ing framework) — these have value in the devel­op­ment of design skills, even if these skills are not directly applic­a­ble in an elec­tronic context.

The notion of markup is for­eign, even whilst the user recog­nises the pur­pose of an appli­ca­tion as being to cre­ate doc­u­ments in a markup lan­guage.

Clearly, such edu­ca­tion ignores the core tenet of the tech­nol­ogy on which it is based. Given the gen­eral pedan­ti­cism preva­lent in computing-related courses (I do not com­ment on the depth of edu­ca­tion, only the nature of that which is given), one would imag­ine that the fun­da­men­tal ele­ments, par­tic­u­larly in a “sim­ple”, uncom­piled lan­guage, would be addressed. Appar­ently not — per­haps it was too rel­e­vant for consideration?

WYSIWYG cre­ation rejects the notion of sep­a­ra­tion of markup (con­tent), pre­sen­ta­tion and behaviour.

The risks are three-fold.

Firstly, that pro­duc­tion of qual­ity con­tent should be hin­dered by the bun­dled nature of the medium — that is, peo­ple will focus on pre­sen­ta­tion at the expense of con­tent. The seman­tic web frees content-creators from this — their pur­pose is sim­ply that, with lay­out being dic­tated at the pre­sen­ta­tional layer. For a broader exam­ple of this, see gen­eral crit­i­cisms of Pow­er­Point as being a time-wasting and hol­low pre­sen­ta­tion form.

Sec­ondly, that the con­tent should be bound to pre­sen­ta­tion, and its longevity would be com­pro­mised by this link. This is a well-documented risk in rela­tion to the seman­tic web, and one of the core rea­sons com­monly given in sup­port of this. Ample evi­dence sup­port­ing this exists, so I won’t elab­o­rate further.

A third risk is the gen­eral acces­si­bil­ity of infor­ma­tion — also well doc­u­mented. The cre­ation of qual­ity con­tent is still pos­si­ble, but if this con­tent is acces­si­ble to no-one due to usabil­ity bar­ri­ers, it is redundant.

Pro­mo­tion of WYSIWYG devel­op­ment meth­ods is counter-productive in all areas — con­tent pro­duc­tion, gen­eral qual­ity of design, and cre­ation of an accessibility/usability cul­ture — and should cease imme­di­ately in all edu­ca­tional spheres presently sup­port­ing this practice.

*steps off soap box*