Sunday 8 April 2007

Does anyone have a web developer to manager dictionary?

This evening I read Chris Heilmann's blog article The business case for web standards - call for wiki participation And I realised how true this is in my work place. now I haven't given any presentations in my work place on web standards, but I have had many discussions with various people about web standards and other practices. In particular I remember trying to explain a certain problem to our managing director and failed to do so in a meaningful way. In trying to portray the problem in a non developer way I ended up confusing him and made myself look a little foolish. I also do this with my wife on a regular basis and yesterday tried to explain what classes and members to her using fruit as an analogy. I failed miserably. Now why is it that us web developers and developers in general fail to convey what we mean to non developers? Especially when it means essential processes and standards are jeopardized, just because people don't understand what it's meant to mean or what it does. This leads me to think about clients and users and how we fail them by not being able to explain why our applications and their websites must conform to certain standards and behave in a certain way. As a community we need to improve our explanations of technology and standards so other people understand the need and importance of such things and why it makes our web experience better. I hope the wiki on the business case for web standards http://icant.co.uk/webstandardsforbusiness/ is the start of trying to find a better way of explaining and discussing web standards with our managers and clients.

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