A good friend of mine has been attending an evening class at the local higher education centre in Southampton. He’s been learning web design. More accurately, he’s been learning Dreamweaver. He’s been learning to layout pages using frames and tables. He’s been learning to use the ‘properties’ box to set the font size, colour and type. Can he now call himself a web designer? Of course not. This isn’t his fault though, he hasn’t been taught any different.
Speaking to him last night I was shocked that, at the end of his course, he has been taught nothing about HTML, the W3C or web standards. He knows nothing of alt tags, longdesc or CSS and can’t understand why I don’t use frames. Web design is being taught at evening classes all over the country by people who taught themselves to use Dreamweaver. This makes me feel a little uneasy that more and more students will learn the bad hacks and techniques of the WYSIWYG applications without every really knowing what they’re doing.
This is the web site of his tutor: http://www.graphicstutor.co.uk/. I feel a massive urge to start my own web design class to stop the madness!