Over the past few days I have been reading with interest articles by Paul Boag and then John Oxton talking about people being over critical of work they do (”it doesn’t validate”, “the menu button’s are a little bit off in IE4″, “the CSS is a bit of a state”) which is in the public domain and therefore of cause open for such criticism if people see fit.
I had to read these with interest - I now I have been a bit guilty of this in the past but never to such a petty extent and NEVER to complains about someone’s blog or article site - as the guys say these people are just a bunch of dick heads with little knowledge of how the web actually even works; I put them in a similar boat as those on forums who say “well why would you want it to work in IE for?” I do have to say that from a client who actually knows how to code I am left in a position to comment on people code rather more than I would like.
For reasons (most of which I never quite work out) we sub-contract out basically all of our web work to external companies and I expect it to be good - I was unemployed for 2 years unable to get a job in the web, even when working for free so I feel that I was not good enough to work for these people - should definitely be better to what I can do; that’s what we are paying for right?!?!
I try not to get over critical of work but I do draw a line when I see something which I know is rubbish (incorrect layout of a table or form is my biggest bug bear, as well as using divs for absolutely everything); when people tell us that they can create CSS layouts (and many also claim their sites to be fully AAA compliant, which means warning bells) and I see work coming back from them which clearly doesn’t do any of this I do get a bit angry as I feel try are trying to take the easy road with us (we are a University and I know we don’t have a reputation of high quality work).
Am I being too critical? Should I stop being so picky? When should I stop complaining?!?!?!?
Comments are closed.