Talking down to non-techies
Comments: 2 - Date: August 11th, 2008 - Categories: In The News, Off Topic!
I was reading How to Create a Successful Web Site For Nothing (or Almost Nothing) in today’s WSJ, and my jaw dropped at this paragraph:
There’s one more free and easy way to improve the design of your site — using HTML programming code. Fortunately, you don’t need to have programming skills to use HTML. All you need to know is that a block of HTML — essentially, a bunch of gobbledygook words and symbols — can add extra features to your site.
I guess they didn’t have room for the 3 sentences it would take to explain what HTML is, but dismissing it as “gobbledygook” seems a little extreme. The section in the article about how to get your website found by search engines was actually kind of useful. No gobbledygook required.
Comment by Silvia Mihailescu - 29 August 2008 @ 3:18 am
they sort of exaggerate. There is some technical skill required. I know I have been asked more than once on how an widget can be added….and not by non-tools-friendly people but by colleagues in my beautiful Y generation….take even that easy wiki markup language (seems easier than html to me) we have for our WIKIS…if it would be that easy then why is everybody messing a wiki when tries to edit it?
so no, I don’t agree with them…it’s easy but not a “gobbledygook” :-)
Comment by Tim Raisbeck - 13 October 2008 @ 11:45 am
It is sort of interesting to note that the issue really is context dependent. After all, there are undoubtedly many people who program in Java or develop applications in Visual Basic who might consider Assembly Language as Gobbledygook, and people who program assembly who consider these types, and their 4GL cousins not programmers at all.
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