molly.com
Friday 24 September 2004
DOCTYPE RIP
PROFESSIONAL PROGRAMMERS PLEASE comment on this one. A software developer I know and I were IMing last night and after looking at a web site he was working on, I mentioned that, while his HTML looked okay, he was missing a DOCTYPE.
T: I always rip out the DOCTYPE’s and meta stuff.
m: yeah? So, it’s okay with you as a programmer to write tag soup?
T: I’m just saying - I always cut them out. Visual Studio .NET will put them in - and I rip them out.
m: sigh. My life’s work means nothing.
I didn’t understand his rationale at all, mostly because he didn’t provide one. He went on to tell me he was just a “dumb programmer” and what did he know? I tried to explain that HTML was a language with specifications and that conformance requires a correct DOCTYPE. At that point, I stopped talking to him. I was extremely tired and I didn’t feel like arguing.
Filed under: standards
Posted by: Molly | 4:01 am |
September 24th, 2004 at 4:09 am
Hy Molly!
I don’t get it. Didn’t T mention why (the heck) he (?) is doing so? I mean, ripping the DOCTYPE has nothing in common with some (eventual) quirksmode issues. So in general, there is no need to do so for what ever reason (at least i don’t know of one).
September 24th, 2004 at 4:31 am
It depends on what his previous experience is. If he’s an old schooler where it was beaten into our heads to code as inexpensively as possible, then I can see where he’s coming from. It could also have come from those that say they need to code as tightly as possible to save bandwidth (there are those “teachers” that preach that also. If he wasn’t coding something trying to use the latest and greatest standards (ie using css for display instead of tables), then he could get away without the doctype on it.
As a “professional” developer though, I personally would not develop like that anymore simply because I know that it may cost me more work in the future, and I’m infinitely lazy about not wanting to redo stuff. I’m still of the school of thought that I need to accomodate all the browsers because I don’t want to alienate any potential customers.
September 24th, 2004 at 4:50 am
Dave: wouldn’t making “code as tightly as possible to save bandwidth” require “the latest and greatest standards (ie using css for display instead of tables)”? I think in most cases it would. My guess he’s just uninformed.
Molly: Perhaps you could write a shortcut script for your IM client that spits out a series of reference URIs that point to relevant documentation when triggered by a key combination for when you don’t feel like informing the uninformed (or, worse, arguing the stuborn).
September 24th, 2004 at 5:33 am
I’m in the software development field and I would not rip out the DOCTYPE. Does that make you feel better? Hehe.
September 24th, 2004 at 5:47 am
I find that many application developers and other programmers just don’t think of HTML in the way that an HTML programmer does - they are not as intune with the philosophies and best practices associated with good HTML development.
But hey, what do I know…I’m just and HTML monkey. ^_^
September 24th, 2004 at 6:16 am
I know a couple of programmers who thought of XHTML/HTML as a “simple markup” language that should not require specs or standards - it should just be. They thought that way until I showed them what doctype, CSS and valid XHTML could do for them when used properly.
I have another friend who recognizes the value of standards, and has gone so far as to bring me into several projects to do front end work for him.
Perhaps your friend is simply stuck in the old way of thinking that programming is so far ahead of markup as to make consideration of proper markup menial and beneath him. Perhaps markup is an afterthought, not a true concern.
Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had that conversation with someone.
September 24th, 2004 at 8:12 am
Ask him if he’d rip out ‘using namespace’ declarations in a C++ program? More or less the same concept.
September 24th, 2004 at 9:02 am
Writing compliant code is not hard nor time consuming. Since making the switch to XHTML/CSS, it has almost become second nature. As a matter of fact, I have a blank document saved in a local directory entitled xhtml_template.html, which I always load up to start with. It includes the bare minimum code for a valid XHTML document, and saves me the trouble of having to type it out every time. Heh, actually I made it a “hello world” page just for fun.
Some people are rather indifferent when it comes to the proper way to code, and such people usually default to the method which offers the most initial ease (tag soup). But others who habitually write invalid code, actually stand passionately against standards. It’s kind of like racism. They’re simply afraid of what they don’t know.
September 24th, 2004 at 9:18 am
Coming from a programming background, I used to do that too. What pages I was capable of creating at the time did not appear to suffer visually from having the doctype and meta tags removed, so in the spirit of eliminating all unnecessary bits I would always delete those lines.
Now I know better.
September 24th, 2004 at 10:01 am
Let me prefix this with saying that I am what my co-workers would call a markup nazi.
Since your friend was talking about doing this in Visual Studio .net, I totaly agree with him on removing all of the crap meta tags and bogus doctype that VS.net adds. The problem is that the docype that Microsoft decided to give to their pages is not complete, it will not trigger any browser to switch to “Standards Mode” and is doing nothing but taking up bandwidth. Here is the doctype that is added by default.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" >As for the meta tags that he was talking about, they have no use outside of VS.Net. There are 4 of them, and they help VS rememeber what it is doing, and also promote VS itself. Here they are.
<meta name="GENERATOR" Content="Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 7.1"><meta name="CODE_LANGUAGE" Content="C#">
<meta name=vs_defaultClientScript content="JavaScript">
<meta name=vs_targetSchema content="http://schemas.microsoft.com/intellisense/ie5">
So, is that developer wrong in removing a few pieces of information about the underlying technology of the site that he is building, and one that tells the users that he is “trageting” IE5? I would say no.
You might want to point your friend to Asp.Net Resources, a great site giving tons of usefull information about creating standards based sites in ASP.NET (using Visual Studio), as well as inform them that they can change the template the VS uses when creating new pages by editing the template found under
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\VC#\VC#Wizards\CSharpAddWebFormWiz\Templates\1033if they are using C# (for VB, pretty much just replace VC# with VB7).September 24th, 2004 at 11:05 am
Amy,
You know HTML, and many of these programmers don’t. I met a guy who said he doesn’t do HTML web pages anymore, just PHP. “But… PHP still has to output something, and that something has to be HTML or some sort of markup language.”
And while he agreed, he also sort of just nodded and stared like a dog that’s just been shown a card trick(RIP Hicks!). So I dunno… people are crazy.
September 24th, 2004 at 6:54 pm
I used an incorrect doctype for a really long time (missing the url). I thought it was correct. And ‘professional’ software developer can just mean that you get paid for it. And I think the tendency to remove all the extra crap that gets put in by the fancy editors is more prevalent in programmers than knowledge about doctypes.
September 24th, 2004 at 7:03 pm
I’m a programmer and havnt met this species of programmers till now. Must be a special blend or something. I’m hacking along since 1991, started into HTML in 1998 and dont have a problem with standards compliant source code.
What does a ‘programming background’ have to do with this? Nothing. Obviously I’m better off thanks to learning HTML, etc. by reading SelfHTML, not by just simply stumbling along, but still I do not understand why people remove DTDs. Must be some kind of mental handicap or short-sightness I dont suffer from. *shaking-head*
cu, w0lf.
September 24th, 2004 at 7:20 pm
Programmierer: Genies oder Idioten?
Manchmal fragt man sich, ob sich die Rettungsversuche überhaupt lohnen. Lohnt es sich, die Menschen zu retten? So wie ich die Sache sehe, ist die Intelligenz bereits ausgerottet, und es leben nur noch die Idioten!
Also selbiges gilt anscheinend auc…
September 25th, 2004 at 12:35 am
this whole topic goes far beyond web standards… it goes as a far how all languages are being altered, corrupted, etc. by the mixing bowl… the means of communication are changing so rapidly that many lose sight of their purpose
September 25th, 2004 at 2:19 am
[…] ch für einige Menschen, die sich selbst als ‘Programmierer’ titulieren - laut mollys letztem Eintrag gibt es offenbar da einige ganz besondere Charaktere, die in jedem Stück (X) […]
September 26th, 2004 at 11:14 am
Molly, Molly, Molly. (shaking head)
Under those circumstances, you ARE allowed by U.S. law to kill such a person. Do the world a favour.
September 27th, 2004 at 12:44 pm
See, this is what you get when your fortune cookies start turning up empty
September 27th, 2004 at 2:37 pm
Molly, I run into similar things with developers that come from non-HTML development backgrounds. The tight code comments are part of how it got to this state as well as having browsers more or less just show what was intended. Oddly, most application developers I know that worked in Java, C, C++, etc. all learned the interface layer and how to optimize the interface layer.
When it comes to web, most of these same developers never learned the interface layer, the browser. Most thought all you need is to put in tags and it will work. These folks also often started learning the interface getting told they needed a HTML, HEAD, and BODY tags and their closing counterparts. I also often see these same developers using odd tags because of their presentational aspects.
Part of the lack of knowledge can be blamed on the web is easy mindset and everybody claiming their children were making web pages. A hard core application developer saw kids making pages and believed it was just simple. Well, to understand and use the interface layer well it does take some learning. When this gets understood, we will see a lot get better, or start to get better.
September 28th, 2004 at 5:18 pm
A dear friend of mine, programmer by heart, whom I just convinced of coding in XHTML 1.1, recently even researched the DOCTYPE’s to find a suitable one for his coding needs. He didn’t do it for functionality but for standards, good style, syntax, rules and most of all validity and usability. Keeping to standards makes life easier.
It’s okay for people to be individualists, but not like this. Get a hobby.
"I ripped out a digit in my phone number and replaced it with a Japanese symbol. - Why? - Because I’m hip and like to confuse people."
September 29th, 2004 at 6:29 am
http://www.quirksmode.org/ has some good reasons for not using a DOCTYPE
September 29th, 2004 at 7:01 am
I think some programmers look at HTML as just so ‘easy’ and don’t take the time to really learn it, and maybe don’t understand the consequences of quirks mode and browser incompatibility, etc. I was that way until I learned XHTML and CSS and now I follow strict XHTML 1.1 standards and feel much the better for it.
September 30th, 2004 at 12:35 am
Back when I was making websites for fun in the late ’90s I used to leave out things like the doctype declaration myself because I didn’t know any better. But intentionally deleting DOCTYPEs & meta stuff in 2004? Bizarre.
This reminds me to put up a page with doctype templates on my site though.
October 4th, 2004 at 7:37 am
I’m a software developer as well as a web designer/developer. The only reasons I can think of why your friend does that are:
1. He is used to having to rip out the extra crap that IDEs put in - normal in the programming world.
2. He is a typical programmer who never bothered to learn architecture, program design or standards - thus making him look like a ‘tit’ in the programming/hacker community as well.
3. Most programmers are too busy learning software development languages (C++, Java, Assembly, C# etc) and thus don’t have the time to ALSO spend time looking for up-to-date HTML resources. Most of the time they will just learn something from an old article on webmonkey (or find an old ebook). I know they do that because I used to have to point them to HTML Dog when I saw their code.
As for someone who said that “the person thinks markup and web development is not as advanced and far on as the software development world (but not in those words)” - Software Development has had standards and architecture for far longer than web development (obviously) and its languages are far more complex. Therefore, I can also say that web development is easy for me because i’m used to dealing with harder languages. However, I did have to teach myself Information Architecture, design packages etc - but that comes under web design.
The thing to understand is that about 40 - 50% of programmers in the software development world are absolutely crap and make spaghetti code, the same way that about 40 - 50% of web developers don’t adhere to standards and ALSO produce spaghetti code.
Just to clear up: Web programming/scripting languages ARE easy for a software developer. However, a web professionals job is complex because there are so many issues to deal with (accessibility, design, IA, HCI, scripting/programming etc).
October 4th, 2004 at 9:52 pm
I’m interrupting this thread. Thanks for stopping by my blog. Carry on.
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I’m not an elitist when it comes to web standards (I actually try to make fun of elitists whenever possible), but you definitely want your site to be easily read by a machine for Search Engine Optimization. Don’t you?
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