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In a very crude way, you could say that there are three types of people on the Web: there are those who just use it in their daily life without it having any particular meaning to them; there are those who love the Web and have learned all about one or more of its infinitely many aspects. The third group consists of people who have completed an education of one kind or another which helps them have a profession on the Web. These people can be designers, online marketeers, back-end programmers, you name it. They can be anything that involves the Web in some way, but as far as profession is concerned, this third group overlaps entirely with the second. Nevertheless, there are vital differences between the two, differences that play out against our educated group. Why is this?

Let's start with a jump back in time. When the Internet first came around, a dire need for educationers on all things Web erupted quickly. Lacking them, many people saw their chance to expand upon their current knowledge and experience; enough that it would qualify them as experts in the field of IT. Professors and teachers alike studied the ways of the Web and before too long there were courses and studies that helped students prepare for a life as web designer, HTML specialist and so forth.

For a few years, things were good. The Internet grew explosively, and everybody was jumping on it. Then the Bubble came, and while it had a pretty negative impact on the various educations related to the Web, it didn't eliminate them. The thrill and excitement had left these courses, but the need for web professionals continued to grow as time passed. Colleges and universities worldwide started merging the studies with others wherever possible, leaving only more traditional design-oriented courses behind for those looking to become web professionals. This is where things went wrong.

Keeping up: appearances, or to date?

Unlike when the Internet first emerged, the teachers and professors in the field of web-related professions did not as massively educate themselves in the ways of the Web, prior to teaching the material to others. Instead, most of them seemed to believe that now that they'd found themselves nice jobs as educators, they knew all there was to know about the Web.

Over the past five-six years, the Internet grew in new directions and more courses related to the Web emerged yet again. The so-called New Media courses became dominant in many colleges and universities, with subject matter ranging from interface design for the Web to Flash animation and Web Application programming. However, things were no longer good.

The very existance of Web Standards seemed to have slipped from the minds of professors, who focused so intently on what they still knew about the Web from many years ago that they didn't notice the change in the Web. When in 2003 Web Standards and Accessibility finally started to gain ground in much more visible ways, with several high-profile websites dropping old-school, table-based methods in favor of clean and powerful XHTML markup with CSS for presentation, it was already too late for the educations. Their curricula were so Web Standards-unfriendly that people who graduated these courses had to be re-educated entirely if they were to find work in a modern, up to date and standards-oriented web design agency.

Those teaching on the Web had largely failed to keep themselves up to date, and were instead keeping up appearances while hobbyists, often those who chose not to follow an education or who had long already finished one, found themselves intrigued by the new developments on the Web and taught themselves standards-oriented design and development practices. This leaves us to the situation today, which, as you may have guessed, is a grim one.

Clarification

Before discussing the actual results, I want to clarify my research into the matter; every time I used "Web Standards" above, you may have wondered what exactly I meant with that. After all, there are countless of Web Standards and topics on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website - so which are we talking about, here?

For this research I split the concept of "Web Standards" into three rough categories:

Semantic markup

For semantic markup I considered the principle (or lack thereof) of choosing the element for pieces of markup that depicted the meaning of the content as accurately as possible. In short, this meant choosing h1-6 for headings, ol, ul, dl for lists, and so forth.

Best practices

This category is perhaps the broadest of the three, covering everything from using DOCTYPEs to consciously choosing XHTML or HTML, writing consistent and lowercase markup, separating structure from presentation, using onubtrusive Javascript (or better yet: progressive enhancements), and so forth

Accessibility

While this may speak for itself, Accessibility on the Web is still such a vague and intangible concept that it bears repeating: making all site content available to all audience regardless of their abilities or disabilities, offering alternatives for people unable to read, see or hear certain content. There are too many different issues in Accessibility to really be described or incorporated in curriculum, so instead I looked at whether they simply mentioned Web Accessibility at all and if so, how they described the issues and whether they offered tips, guidance or practical examples for students to learn from.

Even though they are not complete in covering all aspects to modern web development, these categories of analysis do cover all of the most important factors that, when combined, define the big difference between a modern web professional and someone who's stuck in the past.

Depressing results

About 30 universities and colleges were examined, scattered around the following countries: Canada, the United States, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, the Czech Republic and Sri Lanka. While this is obviously not the most extensive research one could conduct, I've discussed the situation with people from around the world, what their faculty was like and what the situation was in other educations that they might have some knowledge on. With only one exception, being the Czech Republic, the situation seems to be very consistent across all countries and all institutes.

So let's discuss the various categories and see how most educations "scored":

Semantic markup

As already expressed, the results are saddening. Several institutes mention semantic markup, but that's pretty much it; no actual teaching on implementing or practicing the use of semantic markup, or even teaching why it is both important as well as desirable, takes place.

Projects and assignments that involve (or focus entirely on) building a website are checked against semantics only in rare cases, and when that actually does happen, it remains to be seen that the professor actually knows enough about semantics to do a proper check.

Best practices

If the above made you shake your head, this will make your standards-happy heart ache and cry: there are no best practices or even decent practices present. DOCTYPEs are absent more often than not, and sometimes when they are present they are used wrongly (think twice in a page, once at the top and once in the middle somewhere). Tags and attribute names are mixed-case, attribute values are generally unquoted, consistency is absolutely nowhere to be found. Validation? What's that?

So what about separation of structure and presentation? Most professors still tell their students that the Export to HTML feature in Photoshop is a great way of creating and publishing your websites. In fact, some teachers know about XHTML and CSS and the whole separation thing, but will tell you that "too few people use it; it's insignificant and doesn't matter, so don't do it". I really wish I was just exaggerating with that example, but sadly, it's ever more the reality: some teachers simply advise you to stay away from CSS-based development.

As far as DOM Scripting is concerned, it's simply a nightmare: bad practices and highly obtrusive Javascript are taught, and it seems that most professors never even heard of either unobtrusive Javascript or progressive enhancements. The New Media courses do involve modern techniques such as AJAX or Google Maps and Flickr APIs, but if you're looking for an institute to tell you about good, clean Javascript practices, you're unlikely to find any.

Accessibility

The Accessibility results are by far the worst of them all. Accessibility teaching is truly nowhere to be found; just the mere mention of it is a rarity. Almost all techniques that are taught are inaccessible, sometimes even harming usability itself. There is no awareness of any kind regarding the mere concept of making content available to all users, and this often includes something as simple and basic as cross-browser testing! Some professors don't even care about any website, be it one they made themselves or something a student made, working in more than one single browser. It doesn't even have to be Internet Explorer 6, it can be any browser!

I could go on and on here, but it's just too painful to write. The situation is, simply put, terrible beyond words.

Not the end of the world

Fortunately, there is some light in all this darkness. The above may have given you the impression that every teacher and school out there (or at least, the ones examined) is completely alien to Web Standards, but this is not exactly the case. For most of it, it depends on the actual professors themselves. If you're lucky, you'll have a teacher that fully understands the importance and benefits of standards-based design and development, someone who will teach you semantically rich and valid XHTML, with CSS for presentation and nice DOM Scripting as progressive enhancements. These teachers also do whatever is in their power to get the word out to colleagues about this, but sadly they often meet resistence and disinterest. Not just from Faculty management, but from their own colleagues who teach the same classes.

Also worth mentioning is the fact that there are educations out there that have become aware of the situation, and are currently trying to get their curriculum up to standards, their professors up to date and their students properly educated. Some schools are already incorporating fully Standards-savvy courses, complete with accessibility training. We can only commend them for their efforts and help them out as much as possible, because it is a very difficult and challenging thing to accomplish.

But a handful of great, up to date professors here and there, and the occasional college or university that has "seen the light" is not enough. Every year, there are countless of students graduating who have absolutely no knowledge of modern, accessible and Standards-compliant web design or development techniques. They completely outnumber the amount of graduates that do have an up-to-standards skillset, and until we can change that our efforts are nearly futile. We need to fight this at the source, to put an end to the constant stream of new designers and programmers who need to be re-educated all over again.

We cannot allow this to continue much longer.

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