LockerGnome going out of style

In response to a relaunch at LockerGnome, Matthew Mullenweg calls for a boycott because the site now uses a table-based, low-CSS, markup soup design:

Think of your poor browser, which has to work incredibly hard to try and interpret what is essentially markup gibberish and shape it into something it can present to you. ...

Sure some people don't care about whatever markup is behind the web pages they visit. Out of site and out of mind, right? (Very apathetic American.) But I care, and it's because of people who care that the web has moved beyond the near-unusable mess it was 5-7 years ago. ...

Lockergnome regressing from the standards-based is more than just a bad business decision, it is essentially giving the middle finger to the community around the world that cares about these things.

I'll concede that the Gnome is homely, but aside from accessibility issues, no one should care how pure your markup is. Millions of Web sites use sloppily coded HTML, layout tables, and other things that would make a style-conscious designer or HTML validator queasy. One more won't break the Web.

2004/03/11 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Comments

Rogers said: "no one should care how pure your markup is. Millions of Web sites use sloppily coded HTML, layout tables, and other things that would make a style-conscious designer or HTML validator queasy. One more won't break the Web."

If one more badly constructed website won't break the Web, why is the cost of fixing it to be accessible the main argument against web accessibility? That sounds like a ringing endorsement that the Web is already broken.

Surely it is more cost effective to do the job right in the first place?

#1 · Isofarro · 2004/03/11

Accessibility is the one aspect of Mullenweg's critique that I agree with. But table-based markup soup sites can be accessible, and CSS-based sites can be inaccessible.

#2 · Rogers Cadenhead · 2004/03/11

One more won't break the web. It'll just slow down the progress of building a better web on top of the mistakes of the past...

#3 · pete · 2004/03/11

One thing that makes this an uglier than usual regression is that Lockergnome publishes, among others, a site for web developers, which just lost about a kajillion credibility points.

#4 · d.w. (Dave Walker) · 2004/03/11

http://chris.pirillo.co/test/

*cough cough*

#5 · Chris Pirillo · 2004/03/16