The lost art of writing HTML

I remember back in grade school, while I got pretty good grades for spelling and English grammar, I continually got bad marks for penmanship. Yes it's true, my handwriting was terrible. It seemed I was destined to print all my life, or maybe become a doctor, a profession where illegible scribblings is typical.

But eventually, with practice my handwriting improved. Then along came the computer age, and almost everything I've "written" was typed. Now if I actually need to write something, it's nearly as bad as it was back in my grade school days.

This is what I see happening now with HTML. The typical "webmaster" has become so dependent on WYSIWYG HTML editors, that when tasked with actually writing HTML themselves, they fail miserably,, but who cares right? as long as it looks ok, who cares how terrible the underlying code is.

In fact malformed HTML code became the accepted norm. Web browsers developers even started compensating for it. Oh, you forgot to close your paragraph tag before opening another...  no problem, the browser just fixed this for you, and unless you actually scrutinized the source code, you'd never know of the mistake.

Many website owners are just like me when I became dependent on the keyboard, and as a result today the typical website is full of what I call bloat code and HTML errors.. but that's OK, because today's web browser just compensate for it.  I'm not convinced this is actual progress.

Just because it has data in it does not make it a database.

I am continually surprised when I find companies using makeshift ways to manage data. Sure, Betty who sells pottery on Ebay is probably fine using her email client as a CRM, but when I see fortune 500 companies rely on outdated copies of Outlook Express to act as a customer database I just sort of sigh and die a little bit inside.

Outlook and Outlook Express are not databases, they are email clients with contact management features.

Excel is not a database, it is a spreadsheet application.

If your company is serious about making your data accessable, secure and reliable use a real database application. I of course have a propensity to suggest MySQL, but even Microsoft's Access is a better choice than Outlook Express