Paul Thurrott Needs To Stop Writing Opinion Columns

This post refers to the article “IE 7.0 Technical Changes Leave Web Developers, Users in the Lurch” by Paul Thurrott.  Be sure to read it, otherwise the following will make little to no sense .

In the tech journalism world, there are three types of people:  journalists who writes about tech, nerds who write about tech, and nerds who are journalists.  Often, you’ll get the best and most reliable information from nerds who write about tech, you’ll get above average information from nerds who are journalists, and you’ll often get inaccurate or poor information from journalists who write about tech.

Guess which category Paul Thurrott falls under?  Yeah, he’s a journalist who writes about tech.  That’s his job: to write stories which will sell subscriptions, and generate ad revenue.  I’m not saying he’s completely sold out and only writes for the green, but I am saying that he isn’t always in search of the whole truth and he definitely isn’t worried about giving you the entire story.

But we’re not done here.  If Paul Thurrott isn’t a nerd, he is surely no expert web designer.  He is no hardcore “I coded my site in notepad!” zealot.  In fact, I am willing to surmise that Paul’s web development experience doesn’t exceed Word’s “Save as HTML” feature or simple testing of FrontPage 2003 for some review on Office.  Would you listen to a shoe salesman when you were buying a brand new Aston Martin?  Sure, the salesman has probably seen Aston Martin cars in some James Bond movies, maybe even saw one of the company’s cars up close on the highway once, but there is no way that he would ever be considered an expert.  Why trust a person who does no web development.. a person who isn’t even a nerd… about information that only a real web developer could provide.

Let’s get into standards now.  Guess what, Paul?  Your site, WinSuperSite.com currently has 124 validation errors, according to the W3C’s Markup Validation Service.  Even worse, the page which contains your “Boycott IE” story currently has 207 validation errors.  Both pages don’t even define the page’s doctype, which is almost always the first line of the web page.

Despite what everyone who is saying anything about IE and standards says, I will tell you that web standards (HTML, CSS, etc) are not the most important thing in the world.  Face it: most people write web pages to look good in IE, and most non-IE web browsers tend to lax on the standards to render things the IE way.  I’m not saying stop supporting any standards, I’m just saying not having 100% compliance isn’t as big of a deal as you think.

There are a few crappy bugs that most web developers hate about IE6.  It’s lack of support for transparent PNGs, and a few CSS display bugs (the Peakaboo bug, the Guillotine bug, etc) that totally annoy web developers the most.  Guess what?  These will be fixed in IE7.

Just to let everyone know, we have all lost sight of one issue.  The number of people who visit websites greatly outnumbers the amount of web developers in the world.  Those people couldn’t care less which browser is standards compliant.  They care about browser features, ease of use, and the browsers ability to display existing web pages well.  Guess what?  IE has some great features (and is getting some great new ones in IE7), IE is easy to use, and IE displays almost all existing web pages well (not just a stupid test page).

Update: Check out this follow up blog entry for more.