If they forced me to code the way they code, I’d resign. I will follow standards.
Edit:
Just FYI, the stuff I posted is going to be our company website, I hate it but I can’t do anything about it.
That’s the spirit!
If you were an engineer, you wouldn’t want to design something that would fall down; or if a doctor, prescribe a medicine that would kill. Web designers need to hold to the same standard. 
Good way to put it actually 
Why not run various pages through the W3C validator and print off the error reports and just leave them laying around where they might be noticed. If you do it for pages where you have to make changes and make sure that there are no errors in the part you changed then if they ask about the reports you can simply say that you were checking that your changes didn’t add anything into the page that wasn’t HTML - since the validator simply tests if the tags are valid HTML or not.
I would recommend that you approach this situation very delicately – that is if you would like to keep your job.
The fact of the mater is that you are the bottom of totem pole. As an intern you probably aren’t even on the totem pole. Therefore, no one is likely to take you seriously. That is unless you come off extremely confident and have facts to back up what you are saying. However, this will not guarantee any results. The thing you really have working against you is your position. That might be impossible to overcome dependent on how confident you have been the whole way through. If you have been coming off shy when confronted than chances are you won’t be able to recover because you will have already formed an impression that you don’t really believe in what you are saying.
The fact that you asking here whether certain practices are “correct” or not leads be to believe that you have come off uncertain to your superiors. Thus are going to have a very difficult time convincing them otherwise. Therefore, I would recommend to start looking for a new job because you are unlikely to change anything. Politics plays a significant role in this. Politics that you can’t overcome unless you have seniority, are liked or have formed an image in others mind that you know what you are talking about which doesn’t seem so.
The key to having people embrace new ideas is believing in what you are saying and having extreme confidence in it. Lacking that your thoughts will be nothing more than background noise. Especially when compared to people with a high level seniority over you that have been with a company for much longer amounts of time. I have seen it time and time again. In office setting seniority and confidence matters more than correctness of information. You can have the dumbest idea but if delivered well with extreme confidence with a little seniority to back you up people will embrace it. That is the way it works.
Believe me I tried that, and it doesn’t work because they’re using the right tags in completely wrong ways. It’s valid HTML, but semantic rubbish. They brushed me off when I said that heading tags were for structuring the content. And besides, the div instead of ul is too stupid even for the validator to notice.
Nevertheless, thank you for your thoughts.
I have shown my despair of their abusing standards (via groans, and facepalms). I am (and they know it) a very honest and open guy. The reason I have kept shut up is because they’re “superior” to me, and the last thing I want to be is right and be called a Heretic.
However, the lead designer (and the guy who chose me for the internship) seems to have a little faith in me, so I might have some hope there.
Thanks for your thoughts.
Of course, if they force me to write non-standard code, my job wouldn’t matter much.
Obviously they have never heard of Screen Readers or even understand the basic semantics of markup or even how a Search Engine would view and weight the page. Let alone Separation of Concerns. If they are misusing TABLE for layout they are allowing themselves to get into a inflexible maintenance nightmare.
I tried to explain screen readers to them. Their reply: “Who cares about them?”
The people who “care” are those that use or require them. Ask those clueless guys if they; “Enjoy surfing the web with their monitors switched off?” As obviously they don’t need them; “Who cares about web masters that need monitors?”. >;-)
Approximately 3% of e-commerce consumers are visually impaired, or otherwise require the use of a screen reader to read text on a screen.
For an e-commerce site with 10,000 visitors per month, then, at least 300 of them are likely using some form of a screen reader - maybe this company enjoys discriminating against their visitors? It’s not just people who need AT that benefit from a well structured site.
Sri Lanka Government departments and agencies are required by the Protection of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act. No.28 of 1996 to ensure that online information and services are accessible by people with disabilities. So it’s not like there aren’t some web accessibly laws in place in the country.
Extremely well written and you should take heed of his advice.
When I was first starting out a fair few years ago now, I knew some of the code I was looking at that I’d inherited from “senior” developers was poorly written, but I was so low on confidence (for whatever reason), that I didn’t really hold enough authority to put my points forward. Over time I proved that my code was better than theirs and eventually managed to get promoted within that company. However, in the job I now have, I respect my own ability enough to consider myself something of an authority figure, and people seem to respond to that confidence with respect.
Having said that, I’d still always consider another person’s opinion on something, especially if it can improve a system I’m working on in any way.
So much of this stuff is about confidence and how you come across, and some of this will come to you over time.
If they use “simple/stupid” because they dont know how to use “smart/correct” — you are in trouble =/
Delicate approach wont work if they simply dont know what they are doing and are not willing to learn.
That is unless you come off extremely confident and have facts to back up what you are saying
Thing is that he is coming to a senior telling him that the guy is wrong and should learn to do his job better. How can that go good? I am pretty sure that those seniors are aware that they use outdated technics so to say.
I would approach it from the side of “let me please do the whole project the way i am doing it and then if you dont like the result i can do your way and we can see which one loads faster / easier to correct / whatever”.
I disagree with this, because the inevitable result is: “Ok, we don’t like the way you did it. Go back and do it our way now like you promised”.
Load time and compatibility would be a solid argument vs their “dislike”.
Nah not really, because the load time differences in reality would be negligible (most likely, unless they’re not compressing images and not minifying javascript and css etc).
For people who refuse to learn new standards, I doubt a few seconds difference on a page load would make any difference anyway.
It is also possible in theory that writing the site to be standards compliant would actually add to the load time, depending on the context.
i see, well gentle arguing is whats left then i guess.
or even better: trying to find a new job
anyway: dont give up on the standards =)
Hi,
It does seem tough.
Have you taken the angle that increasingly Search Engines are penalizing page rank in organic searches if the mark-up is semantically incorrect - for example overuse of DIVs, improper use of Heading tags … (the list goes on).
Reinforce this idea with we can’t control how restrictive and penalizing Search Engines will become with semantic enforcement - there is a transition to stronger enforcement - but we can become more semantic in the way we do things so we don’t have to deal with massive changes in the future.
You add that increasingly governments are legislating more rigorious standards for companies that do business with them, so moving forward you may be restricted in where you can get business unless you become good with accessibility standards and symantic markup.
Regards,
Steve
I’m not saying this about all designers but a fair share of designers out there could really care less about the quality of front-end programming. Seems to me like you are working in a design focused environment rather than an engineering focused one. If that is the case I would take this opportunity to recognize that you would like to work for a company more focused on engineering than pure aesthetics. Of course there isn’t any reason both sides of the coin can live in unison but most often than not the ones who seem to push creative edge also push the technical edge which leads to a nice looking but poorly engineered product. Designers that appreciate and understand the importance of balancing the two are hard to come by. More often than not that is the reason most engineering companies have a front-end developer – to keep the designer true to the technology and write proper front-end code. Though you seem like your stuck in a environment where technical quality isn’t important and for that I don’t what to say besides hit the road.
I’ve been in this situation so many times before it isn’t even funny. Mostly I’m working under someone who has no clue about html - just hacks things together until it works. I always find it strange that designers in a company do the front end markup a lot of the time, whereas I think it should be the developers - creative and coding require such a different set of skills it’s rare to find someone who can do both well.
I’ve ended up working under people who are only there because of the length of time they have been with the company or just that they were the only one doing the web side of things when the company needed to expand their webdev team, without them having a clue about modern development practices, industry standards or even OOP in a lot of cases. Every time I’ve been there I’ve thought I could bring them round to the accepted industry standard ways of doing things (not that they bother to do any research about what they are, mind), and I end up just bashing my head against a wall and being very depressed about the job I’m in instead. They are mostly from the ‘but it works this way’ or ‘using best practices takes extra time’ brigades, and have no clue about the massive maintenance nightmare they are creating by doing so, and no clue that doing this properly in the first place actually saves time in the long run - they were all so short sighted. I have ended up leaving every time this has happened and never did persuade them that there is a ‘better’ way to do things - some people just can’t see it. One company even brought me back as a contractor at the same time as I was doing my new job in order to work on the sites I had built there, their own coders were so clueless about modern frameworks / design patterns they can’t understand the framework I used for most of my projects there!
I am so much happier where I am now, where best practices, industry standard web dev techniques and design patterns are used all the time. If you have the choice, quit the job. It sounds like they aren’t going to see your point of view however you put it.
Wow! Even I didn’t know that, guess I could use this, thanks.
I do think that search engines are now searching in that way, but I doubt they’d see the light. But still thanks for your thoughts.
I do have the choice, and if they still don’t see to any reason, then I might as well transfer my position. Thank you.
Here I don’t think front-end development was much of an issue until recently, the higher management wants to do everything to standards but don’t know anything about it, and neither do the ones who implement it.
Don’t worry I won’t give up the standards!
I can imagine someone telling me that i should do outdated designs, i would probably freak out
Also, i am quite happy that more and more people starting to realize that designers shouldnt do front end. Moreover some designers are ux / ui, some are creative, some are illustrators… wow, thats an awesome world.