There is a right way.. and a wrong way

Wednesday, October the twenty eighth, two thousand and nine.

We can learn a lot from the scientific community. There can be no doubt that without a complete understanding a problem entirely conflicting solutions can present themselves.

Take the public perception of climate change: Due to any, and all, crackpot theories being heavily publicised people have started to form opinions based on only a subset of the available data. Widespread ignorance ensues.

As geeks we know to question what we’re told and, if we’re not happy with the answer, we’ll attempt to find a new solution. However - unlike the scientific community - we’re too proud to accept a valid negative result as we do a positive. This is all the more pertinent as, in the field of web development, unlike many scientific disciplines, there is a definitive right answer.

Example time.

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=642149&page=2#36

This is a problem that is constantly rearing its damn ugly head. We all hate the solution which ticks the majority of boxes but we all know it meets the most important criteria:

• It works with images disabled
• It works with css disabled
• It works with javascript disabled
• It works with plugins disabled
• It works with any combination of the above
• It works in all browsers (yes, IE6 is still important, live with it)

The only downside is that it does not work with images that require transparent backgrounds (due to complex parent backgrounds) and it will not render an image when printed.

In the first case I suggest that using a img tag with a semantic alt attribute is a perfectly valid and acceptable fall-back solution. In the second I’d argue that if you need a text-replaced image to be printed then the design aspects of this image, the very thing that sets it apart from plain text, is content in itself and should be rendered to all media.

End example.

I’m ranting about this now, but it’s a lesson I learned not a year ago: We need to learn to stand on the shoulders of giants. We need to recognise when a problem has been debated, solved and the solution honed by the best minds in our field. Then we need to just fucking accept it.

Sure, strive to understand the solution, but please; don’t waste your time publishing your brilliant new find when it has already been considered, and subsequently rejected through years of testing.

There are still problems out there that don’t have answers. Work on these, and stop trying to best one another.