Sometimes even Seth Godin gets it wrong
Yesterday evening Seth Godin wrote a very short (and very meaningless) post titled, CSS. While the post was surly full of good intention, it is the absolute worst thing your boss could read; or the most annoying thing. It promotes ignorance within the workplace and gives justification to those yet to buy into the “CSS hype”. Is Seth Godin truly ignorant to CSS and so obviously five years behind the times or is this some SEO trick or perhaps a favor-post from his web development team?
Don’t get me wrong, I love Seth Godin — everything he does and says inspires me; I am looking at a copy of “The Dip” right now on my bookshelf (a must read). However, even those we admire and respect can’t always get it right. My issue with Seth’s post is that it is quit meaningless. It seems directed towards those unknowing of “CSS”, but offers no insight into what CSS actually is; why the post, why now, where is the context?
Seth states that he “pretends” to know what CSS is and is speaking about it with authority to his web development team. I ask, how naive is his web development team — and why in late 2007 do they need a lecture from someone admittedly clueless to the topic of CSS? CSS is no longer a qualifier for being special or forward-thinking — it is an expectation! Seth, you are he man, but CSS stop being the “current big thing” over a year ago, now it is just “the way”.
Perhaps I am not Seth’s typical demographic; perhaps my knowledge and passion for CSS is a bit much. However, anyone that promotes speaking to professionals on a topic of that profession that they themselves have to pretend to be knowledgeable about gets a big thumbs down in my book. If you don’t know what CSS is then why are you speaking to your web development team about it?
- September 28th, 2007
- 11comments
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Martin… I can’t agree with you more. It Hurts my heart to read Seth Godin’s post.
Will comment again later when the shock wears off.
I hate this attitude in management! Granted, the people managing designers and coders aren’t always those things themselves, but shouldn’t they make an effort to at least have a cursory knowledge of their staff’s duties?
I had similar experiences with someone I work with recently who didn’t even realize CSS was something done by hand until she attended AEA with our team. Here all this time she’d been pretending she knew what we did and was taking it into consideration in scoping our our projects. I felt deceived to say the least.
Sorry my point of view was lost on you guys. I fully understand the power of CSS, and my point was to help management start down the road to realizing how it frees them to modify and upgrade an entire site without being at the mercy of page-specific code.
My goal wasn’t to educate people on CSS. It was to sell them on educating themselves.
Thanks for reading, and sorry to hurt your heart.
@Samantha Warren and @Beth –> We are on the same page with our frustration, thanks for the comment.
@seth godin –> wow, I have the most respect for you and consider it an honor that you would even take the time to comment on this blog. I wanted to assume your post was well intentioned, however, I think your post was missing what your comment perhaps had — just a little insight into what CSS was or could do.
Your post didn’t sound like you wanted people to educate themselves on CSS, it seemed more like you wanted them to know enough to bullshit their way through a conversation. I think a lot us who are extremely talented and knowledgeable yet very low on the corporate ladder get very upset and find it highly annoying when those above us pretend to know what they are talking about and use that 10 minute knowledge to dictate to us how to do our jobs; when the reality is that we probably already know best and could actual help educate you.
Martin, I think you nailed it on the head with why this post was so shocking. Rather than explaining what web standards are, Seth Godin pointed people at examples of nice Design, like unmatched Style and CSS Zen Garden. But really… what are the chances that a person of great influence with low technical knowledge is going to open up the source code and pick it apart? Seriously? An explanation or a good resource list would have really helped.
It is challenging enough when you have to work with people who don’t fully understand the web let alone those who pretend to. I feel like this post kind of just was saying “Its cool to just wing it, nod your head and use big fancy words and people will think you know all about the ‘current big thing’ “. It is promoting ignorance.
Some online references people could use to “help people educate themselves” include The Web Standards Project FAQ and this this great article by Jeffery Veen over at Adaptive Path .
@Samantha Warren -> Thanks for the follow-up comment. Also, thanks for the reference links — good catch. I am here complaining about the ignorance of the post while I should be correcting it; much appreciated!
I have to side with Seth here, guys. I read his post differently. My sense was that he was encouraging management to care about CSS and push for standards. You don’t have to know the details about a topic to be right to insist that it’s applied. I don’t know much about how the lights are wired in our office, but I specifically asked that they work — does that make me annoying? ;-)
We worked with Seth to build Squidoo in 2005, and I was impressed that he knew and cared enough to insist that we applied CSS standards, even though he couldn’t write the code himself. He understood from a business perspective how CSS could impact the future of Squidoo, and he’s been right. I much prefer clients who show an interest in standards to those who don’t.
@Brian, I see your point and recognize that Seth’s post was well intentioned. There was a time when getting people like Seth Godin to mention the words CSS was a huge win on the fight for standards; but now I almost feel as though a post like his most recent trivializes CSS more so than promotes it.
However, using your example of having the lights work — there is a difference in my mind between asking that the lights work and dictating to the electrician how to wire a building when you’ve admittedly have no electrical knowledge.
I think it is both fair and reasonable to ask for things to work, but can or should you dictate how they are created from inception? Asking for dimmer switches is reasonable, dictating which pair of pliers to use, what brand of electrical tape to use or even what gage wire to use when you are not the certified electrician is perhaps not best for the actual electrician or the job.
I just feel as though you can’t tell professionals how to do their jobs better when you’ve admitted to being naive on the subject you are preaching. Again, it would be like you or I going into an Electrician’s Association and preaching that they turn off the lights before changing a light bulb (sort of a common sense best practice), when neither one of us has ever changed a light bulb. We do know why to change the light bulb though — to make sure the lights work!
I haven’t read Seth’s post; therefore, I can’t make an educated, informed reply regarding his recent push for Web Standards via XHTML and CSS. Maybe another book he’s developing?
Yet, you would *think* that Seth Godin, one of the world’s most highly-respected authorities on ‘All Things Marketing’, would know a tad more about Web Design with Standards? Semantic, valid, structured markup, separated by presentation and behavior can produce wondrous results for an organization’s organic SEO, search, accessibility and 508-compliance.
But, until the United States’ Government makes a real push for organizational change (E.G., the U.K., New Zealand, Norway, Germany, Denmark) for responsible design, “most organizations” in the U.S. are clueless about Web Standards, yeah? When Target was sued for non-regulatory compliance by the National Federation for the Blind in ‘05 or ‘06, many thought web standards would be thrust to the forefront here in the U.S. Unfortunately, we were wrong?
As a follow up to the Target Lawsuit, here’s some recent information from The Web Standards Group.
Enjoy~
elias
Thanks for sharing Elias — much appreciated. The target case is going to be interesting for sure — to see how much it really shapes the accessibility front.