Dave Winer says

A lot of designers miss something important, or forget it -- we're not designers, we don't think like you.

Unfortunately that needed to be said explicitly. Programmers like to get things working .... they leave design tweaks to designers. I love this set-up, because it keeps my eye on the underlying software/programming ball. UI/usability design is just too broad a topic for programmers to know well if they also want to be good coders. Designers are definitely important to the software development process too.

As for this comment:

I think of designers as people who make me look good, not as political advisors. They mostly aren't even very good at the politics.

I understood it to mean that designers weren't technical enough (usually because they aren't interested) to know the why's of the politics in question to make good criticisms. They aren't "in the trenches" like we are so to speak. Fair enough -- universal CSS support sucks right now, and it's not only because it's hard to implement in browsers. It's a complicated issue.

Dave needs a solution for right now and I don't blame him for compromising. This isn't new -- people have been doing this for years to solve browser HTML/CSS rendering differences.

I don't see what the fuss is about. Some standards zealots are trying to put the cart before the horse but they have to realise something: their favourite "standards-compliant" browsers still don't have more than half of the "market" share yet. When they do all of the browsers out there will probably talk more reasonably about standards adoption. Until then people that just need to get the job done probably won't listen to you.

As for all of this mudslinging -- though it does make entertaining reading and I'm probably the youngest out of all of you, I'll say it anyway -- grow up! :)

Posted at April 22, 2003 at 09:59 AM EST
Last updated April 22, 2003 at 09:59 AM EST