Is the general quality of Web Development diabolically low?

[Stevie_D]

@ro0bear

<offtopic>
p.s.
how do you do a mention link?
</offtopic>

The easiest ways are to put [MENTION]…[/MENTION] tags around the person’s name or to put a semi-colon after the name (not sure how that works with multiple mentions on the same line though)

[system]

@PCSpectra

As mentioned already, validators are a poor metric of quality.

I know, but they are useful for spotting mistakes in your own work.

[Sega]

@ro0bear;
Correct markup is important and it’s hard to make sure you have your site validated when you’re using WP, Joomla or Drupal. These C.M.S. don’t completely validate, and at times we have to use plug-ins on the C.M.S. to make site editing easier for the customer.

My procedure is as follows:

1. Design website
2. Code Website in Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict
3. Put on WP and add the plug-ins
4. Now invalid markup on LIVE website (too bad)

PS: to mention do the following, put an @ followed by the name of the person and a ; semicolon. This should do it!

Also for off topic use this [ ot ] [/ o t ] without the space.

Off Topic:

Got it!

[system]

@ro0bear

I know, but they are useful for spotting mistakes in your own work.

Everybody seems to agree, the validity of the code it’s not an indicator for the website performance: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/03/html-validation-does-it-matter.html

And, depending on the nesting levels in your code, not all mistakes will be spotted correctly by the validator. The validator it’s a limited value tool.

[system]

[QUOTE=itmitică;5158648]Everybody seems to agree, the validity of the code it’s not an indicator for the website performance: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/03/html-validation-does-it-matter.html

And, depending on the nesting levels in your code, not all mistakes will be spotted correctly by the validator. The validator it’s a limited value tool.[/QUOTE]
You can never be sure you have spotted all mistakes. That’s the number 1 thing you learn about testing! I agree now that validity is not an indicator of web design quality, but I do think it is a very useful tool.

[PicNet]

Just to add on to what the others were saying, validation isn’t the only indicator of a good website. A bigger picture view should be taken. From most business owners POV, the indicator of quality is the return on investment they’re getting. They don’t care about validation if it’s performing a vital business role and doing it well. Of course I’m not backing the idea that standards don’t matter, but sometimes we just have to use common sense and accept some compromises (be it in design or code) to get the site performing.

[TomB]

@PCSpectra

As mentioned already, validators are a poor metric of quality. At least the W3C validators. Semantics are far more important, IMO. Using tables for data, etc.

In the world of PHP the quality of code is the worse I’ve seen:

1. There is no standard framework (Zend is defactor sure but not that common)
2. Low learning curve means limited experience developers can begin work right away
3. Patterns and principles seem to observed and attempted but often patterns are difficult to comprehend in the context of a request/response environment.

Quality of code unfortunately, has little bearing on the opinion of users of software. WordPress, last I checked would fail most quality assurance checks, but it’s a huge success.

Just my two cents

I totally agree. Most production code I see is cringeworthy. There are a lot of bad PHP developers out there. One of my main gripes is the lack of patterns and principles. People, often even experienced developers, are stuck in the thought process behind a “page” and a “request” rather than observing beneficial OOP practices. The fact that all the major frameworks reinforce this type of thinking just exacerbates the issue as well by wrongly sticking with the thinking that a “controller action” is a transaction script that generates a single “page”.

Quality of code vs user experience is an interesting topic in itself. Code that’s working insofar as it does what the user expects can be messy or clean, strict OOP or 50 nested conditionals. The user would know no different.

The problem occurs when something breaks. Bad code is harder to fix and maintain, introducing bugs which negatively impact end users and difficult to maintain spaghetti code creates extra work when it comes to maintenance, making it more expensive for the client and the potential for their site to be down for longer than needed potentially resulting in lost sales.

For users, well written code also tends to be more secure because the developer has actually thought things through. This means there’s less likelyhood of a password breach, their details being stolen, etc.

As such, I’d argue that code quality does effect users quite dramatically, they just don’t see it!

@PicNet

Just to add on to what the others were saying, validation isn’t the only indicator of a good website. A bigger picture view should be taken. From most business owners POV, the indicator of quality is the return on investment they’re getting. They don’t care about validation if it’s performing a vital business role and doing it well. Of course I’m not backing the idea that standards don’t matter, but sometimes we just have to use common sense and accept some compromises (be it in design or code) to get the site performing.

Of course the issue comes in 2-3 years in the next generation of browsers where things stop working. The client calls up saying “Why is my site broken?”. The person who developed it may not even work there any more and it takes time to debug/fix. Not that there’s much we can do about that, but by making our best effort to stay standards compliant and not rely on browser quirks and hacks it can be potentially avoided.

[system]

@PicNet

Just to add on to what the others were saying, validation isn’t the only indicator of a good website. A bigger picture view should be taken. From most business owners POV, the indicator of quality is the return on investment they’re getting. They don’t care about validation if it’s performing a vital business role and doing it well. Of course I’m not backing the idea that standards don’t matter, but sometimes we just have to use common sense and accept some compromises (be it in design or code) to get the site performing.

If you look at a even bigger picture than the business though, look at the state of the world wide web. Do we not have a responsibility to try and keep websites compliant to a central markup standard? It means that the data in the web can be semantically and syntactically correct and all sorts of technologies can read that data in the correct context. There are a lot of things machines can do for us if they can understand the context and meaning of web content, and it is much easier for them to do that if the content follows a central standard. The web is there to hold information, not just pretty images that can be visually interpreted by humans but make no sense in terms of markup. An example I stated previously is screen readers for blind people, but that is only the tip of the iceberg.