Fer cryin’ out loud!
The IEEE has failed again… this time it’s the newly redesigned IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology Web site.
Clearly the IEEE’s on a mission to update all of their Web content. Assuming they’re using the same (lack of) standards for all of their projects, we’ll probably see more of these failed redesign posts in the future. Which, in my opinion, is really sad… I just can’t understand how a standards body could choose to ignore Web standards.
In the case of SSIT, it looks like Macromedia Dreamweaver was used to generate code (hello MM JavaScript functions!). However someone clearly updated the HTML 4.01 Transitional template by hand, to add the various META elements (all closed, à la XHTML) in the document header. (The IEEE site, on the other hand, appears to be entirely hand-coded and does use some CSS, yet still lacks semantic markup, uses nested tables for layout, and lacks a DOCTYPE.)
Why am I so upset by this? The IEEE is a technical society and standards body. Its members brand themselves as professionals, seeking to advance technology by fostering technological innovation. (Does this look like technology advancement or technological innovation to you?) The IEEE mission states:
The IEEE promotes the engineering process of creating, developing, integrating, sharing, and applying knowledge about electro and information technologies and sciences for the benefit of humanity and the profession.
These recent IEEE Web site redesign fail to live up to the IEEE mission. In light of this, how can any IEEE member be proud of their membership in such an organization? I’m sure as heck not… and that’s why I’m speaking up. Answers and code changes are what I want to see.
2 comments
JD on [TBD] stopped by on January 26, 2006 at 7:37 PM EST and had this to say:
More links…
More links: Abandoned robotic dogs, Pixar history, massively multiplayer dancing, and more… lots of links I found this week while searching technology-related discussions, that are just too interesting to close out of my browser windows……….
Shaun Shull stopped by on January 30, 2006 at 11:27 PM EST and had this to say:
Nice catch Kimberly, that is pretty bad. I mean the doctype is standards 101; have doctype to even check for validation