Question markIn my recent posts concerning the development of my new blog markup, I’ve deliberately tried to document my thought processes and the decisions I made along the way. It was a conscious decision not to write up the work in the style of “this is how it should be done”, partly because I’m certain that there are improvements which could be made and I’m sure that in a few months time, I’ll look at the code and think “why on earth did I do that?”.

In web design, it doesn’t take a huge amount of time or effort to try things out. We are blessed with an infinite playground in which to let our imaginations run riot, and yet there are still those who would rather crank out the same work time and time again.

It seems to me that doing something in a particular way just because somebody else did it that way is lazy. We can only progress if we question ourselves at every step and then ask ourselves if the question is the right one. At least if we look for alternatives, or at least try and fail to make improvements, we are pushing at the edges of what is possible and one day might find ourselves breaking through into new territory.

Doing things the way Dan Cederholm, Jeffrey Zeldman or Eric Meyer do may work as well as anything, but you can’t be sure that they have discovered the best methods for everything - why else do they continue to innovate and refine their own techniques? I’d be surprised if any of those guys had ever put together a web page and then sat back and earnestly declared it to be the best page that had ever been or ever would be created.

Just as it seems to be something of a sport to pick apart anything said by Jakob Nielsen concerning usability, I refuse to blindly accept any web design technique from somebody else (even a self-appointed emperor guru like Nielsen). I have an in-built need to test and tweak until I’m satisfied that it will do the job - at least for the time being.