Have you seen Jamie Oliver‘s shows on the “telly”? Sure you did.
Put the flour on the table, open a hole, pour water, add yeast, oops… spilled on the floor. No problem, let’s put it away and make some more.
…for this dish, let’s put this on a big pan, while we cook that on the small one. Chop this, chop that, use your hands, wonderful!
Have you ever thought how much things have to be cleaned after a show with the naked chef? Certainly enough to make even the bravest chefs think twice before starting. But, if you really want to cook great food, you must dirt some pans and dishes.
I think the web is still very young and browser support is still somewhat lousy. There is particularly one, the major one, you-know-who, that one used by the vast majority of people, that is even worse.
Although you-know-who is believed to be the great villain in this milieu, the truth is that there are incompatibilities and lack of support in other browsers, but designing for any one of them is like starting to cook thinking on cleaning the dishes.
I think Web design must start on standards and then gracefully degrade to whatever capabilities today’s browsers have. If you don’t, maybe you can cook the macaroni and cheese, but you will never reach gourmet cuisine.
6 Comments
I cook, you do the dishes. No software is perfect, but you should pick a nice one. Web design is a good way to tell people a little bit of this.
Isn’t it funny, how often cooking can be used as an analogy for other creative activities? In the case of web design, we aim to create the best possible food in spite of variable browser standards — not only tasty and nutritious (full of good content) but appealing to the eye in its presentation. Put it that way, does every diner’s plate need to look exactly the same?
@Oda –
It would be nice to cook and not clean the dishes at all, it is true. Not always possible, but it one can dream, can’t one?
@Jen / domestika –
Totally agreed, food and web layouts must be beautiful, delicious and nutritious, but doesn’t have to be the same every time.
Is McDonald’s and not Michelin listed restaurants that are worried in ensuring any lame cook can reproduce a recipe with exactitude at the cost of quality.
Love the analogy and the Naked Chef!
@ses5909 – When the analogy came to me, was me cooking dinner and Anna joked with me about all we would have to clean. I joked back saying:
Nice comparison on the Jamie Oliver show with a website. After all, you can’t make a great work of art while worrying on on the consequences, can you?
Another thing, you can always pay for somebody to do the dishes once you’re done cooking, the same way that you can pay for somebody’s services if there’s a certain part of website designing that you can’t or don’t want to do.
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