KuraFire Network

I don't know what exactly triggered it all, but Hayo is completely right: people are buzzing (pointlessly) again. Hayo rejects the buzzwords, and rightly so.

Maybe someone can enlighten me, but didn't we bloggers used to be the people saying it for what it was? Weren't we the ones who would try to get other people to stop their silly antics such as using buzzwords or, worse, creating buzzwords?

I've been out of the loop a fair bit, as I've still not had a chance to catch up on my blogs. As a result of that, there are about 2650 blog posts waiting for me to read 'm, or rather, give them enough of a glance to know whether I should read them or not (due to being outdated or just plain uninteresting - no offense, but we all know that happens). But reading through Hayo's post, I was, well... shocked. Some examples:

Cameron Moll ventures into highly dangerous territory by actually spreading most discomforting nonsense in Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign. Read it and weep.

Now, I have the utmost respect for Cameron's work in the past, and he's had great ideas, great articles and wonderful little things like the Screen Grab Confab series. But this new article is just painful.

Why he felt it necessary to add to the confusion about what design actually is, is beyond me. It's been a pretty well-established case among designers that the difference that Cameron discusses in his article is between a restyle and a redesign. However, Cameron is now proclaiming it to be between a redesign and a realign. Come again? Let's look at that in a clear manner:

	Visual alteration	Recreation of the interface1
Established, well-understood principle:2	Restyle	Redesign
Cameron's new suggestion:	Redesign	Realign

Brownie points for whoever spots the obvious problem first.

It's completely beyond me why Cameron wants to confuse people even more. D. Keith Robinson wrote his thoughts on the issue in Realigning Design, which coincidentally provided a good example of why this practice is confusing (and inherently a mistake):

This starts by realigning (thanks for the useful term Cameron!) ourselves as designers.

Wait, what? Now we have to realign ourselves as designers, yet Cameron is talking about how redesign is actually realigning? Already do I see people getting lost on this.

The issue is really not that hard, but I get the feeling that these good chaps are too busy to keep their focus clear. We have visual changes to sites, serving no purpose other than to give the site a fresher and/or more modern look; this is called doing a restyle. Next, we have integral changes which go back to the Design process's drawing board and research all the various facets of a website again: has the target audience changed? Has the content changed dramatically and does it need a new approach to the interface to be as effective as possible? And so forth. This is called doing a redesign.

I suggest we try and simplify things by putting more attention on what real design actually entails. Design is not just a cosmetic layer which you use to present information and/or functionality. Design is a very intricate, complex process, wherein research is done in all areas that are relevant to the product: visual presentation, interaction, usability, audiences, user expectations, common practices, the list goes on and on. That's what design is truly about. Not just the choice between colors, or whether you should use a 1 or a 2 pixel wide border.

That said, I sincerely hope that the designers among us will ignore Cameron's article entirely, and above all, never, ever start referring to themselves as "aligners" ("re" or not). Seriously, the term "alignment" has little to nothing in common with the meaning of design. Let's not get them mixed up.

Patch my hack, please

Another painful post was Dan Cederholm's CSS Patches. Just read the comments as well to see how confusing and inconvenient this suggestion is.

Again, I have a high regard for Dan, let that be clear. I haven't yet had the pleasure to meet him in person, but he seems like a great guy and I know that I've found his site to be one of the most informative and useful sites around for learning CSS and XHTML from, back in the day when I was just getting into it myself.

But patches?

Really, a large number of commentors has already said it: patches are permanent, hacks are temporary. If we are now to consider our CSS hacks as "permanent", then I'm cutting loose from this business right now. It feels like giving up our hope that all major browsers will some day be reliably decent enough for us to develop on without resorting to hacks.

The unappropriate name suggestion aside, why oh why do we need to change a very established name for this? There are thousands of blog posts, tons of articles and by now a great variety of books that discuss CSS hacks, all of them using the term "hack". Imagine we would all switch to using the term "patch" now - new developers (including the many, many thousands who will be switching from table-based methods to CSS over the coming years) will be confronted with two conflicting terms that actually refer to one thing: adding extra CSS rules to make our sites work in certain browsers.

Sure, Dan has a point in saying that the term "hack" might attach a negative connotation to it. It might, mind you. No guarantee that it will, and in fact, of all the CSS designers that I know, I haven't ever heard one of them mention that they found "hack" to be a negative term. If anything, I believe some of us actually much prefer it, as it sounds more elite. Or, as one of the commentors said: No way you'll pick up as many chicks with "I'm a computer patcher."

So please, please, leave the established terminology alone. Don't add more buzzwords, especially not any that make no sense in the first place and only add to the confusion, rather than take away from it.

Something about beating a dead horse...

There's more to Hayo's post than just the above two examples, but some of them are just too ridiculous to dignify with a real response.

It does leave me wondering, though. Before, it was us Standardistas who were "sticking it to The Man" - if we are now becoming The Man, who's going to stick it to us? It certainly won't be the previous "Man": buzzword-happy executives, project managers and so forth.

I welcome your thoughts.

Bookmark: Newsvine del.icio.us Digg