Obsolescence is a relative term.
[ Posted by Dan on September 12, 2002 | 0 Comments ]

No doubt that you, my three or four readers, have heard about Zeldman's Neilsonian like decree that 99.9 percent of web sites are obsolete. I'm guessing that in Zeldman's view of the world, this is true (and that view may be clouded by efforts to sell books), but that's not my view. If it was, this site would be obsolete with it's tables based layout and gratuitous use of spacer.gif's.

The folks I work with often write their own little screen scrapers when data isn't exposed to them in any other way. Is the horribly coded website that they are scraping obsolete? Anything but. But, don't get me wrong, I like code that validates against it's DTD, and I love standards (because I hate double coding) because it all becomes more reusable and portable as requirements inevitably change. But this doesn't make old crappy code obselete, it just makes it more expensive to work with, and that is what's important in the real world, MONEY/COST. Don't forget that.

 

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).