Joe Clark recently wrote about several Failed Redesigns. His post has such a classic WaSP tone, that I hope he doesn’t mind that I quote a couple of paragraphs here.
A failed redesign is a Web page created from scratch, or substantially updated, during the era of Web standards that nonetheless ignores or misuses those standards. A failed redesign pretends that valid code and accessibility guidelines do not exist; it pretends that the 21st century is frozen in the amber of the year 1999. It indicates not merely unprofessional Web-development practices but outright incompetence. For if you are producing tag-soup code and using tables for layout in the 21st century, that’s what you are: Incompetent.
When teenagers’ hobbyist blogs (short for “Web logs”) have better code than brand-new Web sites, somebody’s doing something wrong. And that somebody is you, the developer. In a just society you would simply be fired; in an Orwellian society you would be sent to a reëducation camp. Failing either of those, you could at least read a fucking book and upgrade your skills to a point where you are no longer a total laughingstock.
Classic. Read on for Joe’s list of failed redesigns. What in particular set me off was some of the recent crop of self-hyped “Web 2.0” startups. Joe zings TagWorld in particular. My advice: next time you get pitched or hyped to check out a self-proclaimed “Web 2.0″ site, pop the hood, view the source, and see if all they’ve done is put some lipstick on a Web 1.0 pig of a site. And then call them on it … on your blog of course.