The last post on this sub­ject gen­er­ated a bit of inter­est, so I thought I’d share some more thoughts on the same. Who are you call­ing attention-seeker? Seri­ously, though — this time, I’m aim­ing to share some more con­struc­tive thoughts on how to improve the situation.

First up, a response to some of the com­ments. I think that there’s a very def­i­nite need for the teach­ing of web design in any gen­eral IT course in schools or other insti­tu­tions. Con­sid­er­ing they’ve been teach­ing progam­ming in these since the begin­ning of time, a lit­tle markup is hardly too much to ask.

You don’t learn web design in year nine, the bur­den isn’t on a year nine com­put­ing syllabus/teacher to teach web design to any great level of competency…

Clearly, they believe you do. “Any great level of com­pe­tency”, here, is appar­ently none at all. Exist­ing courses do not ren­der stu­dents pro­fi­cient in web design, but rather in use of a word proces­sor to cre­ate unprint­able doc­u­ments. I would sug­gest that if they elect to teach any­thing resem­bling web design, the first aspect of the course should be to exam­ine a basic doc­u­ment struc­ture — first a doc­u­ment type dec­la­ra­tion (DTD), then doc­u­ment meta data (header infor­ma­tion, links to archives, stylesheets, alter­nate doc­u­ment for­mats, etc.), then con­tent using seman­tic markup.

Only after this should design be explored, in terms of using CSS to adjust posi­tion­ing, typog­ra­phy, and graph­i­cal ele­ments of design.

All insti­tu­tions seem to teach the WYSIWYG model — but I have stopped grip­ing over it — mainly because I know that most peo­ple in these “intro” classes won’t make it very far in Web design — and if they do — they will even­tu­ally learn the right way to do things.

I’d argue against this pas­siv­ity. I note the point, but would sug­gest that the rea­son given ignores web design train­ing as an ancil­lary thing — that is, peo­ple do these courses not as graphic design­ers look­ing to shift or expand their focus, or peo­ple look­ing to move into web design as a career, but rather as a part of their reg­u­lar employ­ment. An exam­ple has already been given by Steve in his arti­cle and com­ments — his friend wasn’t being edu­cated in order to advise oth­ers in web design, but rather as an ancil­lary part of her job, much like prepar­ing printed hand­outs. Sim­i­larly, many other pro­fes­sions also require a degree of web literacy.

Hav­ing said that, I’d agree that adding your own “two cents” to these courses is counter-productive: at least, per­haps, the atten­dees will achieve a smat­ter­ing of design knowl­edge. More to the point, these courses should be changed at an edu­ca­tion level, not as a stu­dent or attendee!

I’d also don’t think that print expe­ri­ence is irrel­e­vant or unhelp­ful — quite the oppo­site. The CSS Zen Gar­den project attests to this, in that it is pri­mar­ily about design. Print and web design are not mutu­ally exclu­sive, and, in many cases, are com­ple­men­tary. There’s also noth­ing inher­ently wrong with learn­ing to use Pho­to­shop (or sim­i­lar util­ity) to splice images for web pro­duc­tion — this is a valid tech­nique for cre­at­ing graph­i­cal lay­outs with CSS, too — although I per­son­ally don’t use this method, oth­ers do, and, pro­vided they’re not using tables for their dis­play and are includ­ing mean­ing­ful alter­na­tive tex­tual descrip­tions (alt text) where applic­a­ble, there’s absolutely noth­ing to be said against this.

Regret­tably, an under­stand­ing of graphic design for a print medium often instills a false con­fi­dence in authors — it is the role of edu­ca­tors to ensure that the dif­fer­ences between web and print design are made clear where they are respon­si­ble for the dis­sem­i­na­tion of design prac­tice knowl­edge, and there is much that may still be done in this area.