Last week, two blog entries caught my eye because they discussed a problem I've started to notice, too. In Reflection Jeremy Keith bemoaned the lack of blog comment quality for the umpteenth time; while in The HTML 5 circus Roger Johansson explained that he temporarily left the HTML WG mailing list because there were too many people who just shouted at others without making any positive contribution.
Jeremy and Roger are talking about the same problem. There are quite a few semi-professional web developers who have excellent knowledge of the web standards but spend their time shouting at other people on blogs, forums, or mailing lists, and they are taking over most public spaces of the web standards movement with their ideologically pure drivel; proving the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory beyond any possible doubt. We ought to get rid of them, but I don't know how.
Who are these semi-professionals? How do they differ from professionals?
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Do we need a professional organisation that tests and certifies web developers? This question is suddenly very much in the picture, with
Mark Boulton, Richard Rutter, D. Keith Robinson, and Eric Meyer discussing it at length. I decided to throw in a few of my own thoughts and offer a field-tested rough-and-ready method that is quite reliable for separating the chaff from the wheat: the 2 minutes CSS test.
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Next March I'll be heading off to Austin to be at SxSW. Thrifty as always, I'm looking for ways and means of getting free admission, and the most obvious solution was to send in a panel proposal. Since this year SxSW allows people to vote for panels they'd like to see, you should vote for me if you'd like to hear me speak about JavaScript (and get me a free ticket). The panel is called "JavaScript: the Big Picture" and it's somewhere near the top of the list in SxSW's Panel Picker.
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Quite recently Google published the results of its Web Authoring Statistics research, in which about a billion HTML documents were parsed for popular class names, used elements and attributes, use of JavaScript and so on.
Sounds fascinating? You bet. There's just one slight problem: the actual data is totally inaccessible.
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For at least a year I've been worried about the total lack of relation between JavaScript and "serious" programmers. Unfortunately it seems as if JavaScript is still beneath their notice. That starts to annoy me.
The advent of Ajax makes a solution to this problem mandatory. Who will create the Ajax applications? Those who don't know how to write an application, or those who don't know the language the application will be written in?
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My previous entry The New Amateurs has generated so many interesting comments that I decided to reply to them all in a new entry, which will continue the discussion.
To my astonishment it turns out that some New Amateurs read my site, and that some of them even agree with me. It seems they aren't even too much annoyed by the label "amateurs". Great!
Let's review a few of their arguments.
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Andy Clarke started it, Molly Holzschlag added her powerful voice, and Roger Johansson and Holly Marie Koltz jotted down some interesting notes. It's time for New Professionalism in the website industry.
Basically the idea is that any web developer who refuses to learn CSS and modern, unobtrusive JavaScript, either from ignorance or from a refusal to break old habits, is no longer worthy of the name "professional".
I completely agree; in fact I have been worrying about this problem for quite a while, and no doubt others have, too. Such movements aren't created out of nothing, they are ideas waiting to find a voice, and I'm glad that it happened. We have to reach the New Amateurs and transform them into New Professionals. But how?
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