Higher Learning and Web Standards.

The Minneapolis College of Art and Design homepage is entirely CSS P and standards compliant! This discovery was the result of curiosity sparked over my weekend there… I was a graduate of the Interactive Media program and in 2000 when I graduated, we had all been taught table-based layout. So I wondered if MCAD had kept up with changing times. I’m relieved that they did. Of course, I can only assume that the homepage is indicative of the curriculum as I was unable to talk to any professors on the subject during my time there.

This discovery led me to search the web for a while looking at other art school sites. I know our local college and other “normal” Universities are not only teaching table-based design, but absolutely atrocious coding practices as well. Using Mozilla to design pages? Frontpage? Surely design schools were doing a better job of preparing people to work in the real world in a productive, web-friendly way.

Out of the 15 pages I visited, from Oregon to Florida, 11 were purely Flash. I have issues with this that I won’t delve into right now, but let’s just stick with accessibility and search engine friendliness for now. We’ll leave poor interface design for another time. The remaining 4 were tables/Flash combinations. This is a terrible indicator of the preparedness of the next generation of web designers. There’s enough lack of knowledge regarding web standards without our institutions of higher learning ignoring best practices and W3C standards. I cannot fathom paying tens of thousands of dollars to be sent out into the real world not knowing how to float a div.

I think any potential student of art and design who plans to design for the web needs to be aware of certain aspects of web design before going into a program. And any program that doesn’t teach current standards and forward looking techniques needs to be deluged with letters from concerned alums and students. I guess that’s a personal opinion coming from a standards zealot, but I’ve spent a few hours cleaning up the code of people who paid money for web design classes and were basically taught how to design for 1998. This is 2006 and not only do we need to teach our next generation about CSS, we need to prepare them for the changes of CSS3 and beyond. We need to teach proper handling of CSS hacks, workarounds, conditional comments and all of the tweaking that is currently necessary to make proper use of CSS. All in preparation for the day when the new browser wars end and peace is restored… 100% compliance with W3C standards across all browsers. And perhaps an end to the tyranny of IE ;-).