The Bitter Pill

What do you do when you feel you’ve reached a plateau?

After a few years of learning and trying a ton of new things, there comes a day when you look around and there just don’t seem to be any nearby mountains to climb. So what then?

My particular plateau is one of professional development. I’ve spent the past four years or so really digging into standards-complaint, CSS-based design, but I’m really running out of steam on learning new CSS tricks or the finer points of accessibility. I think the problem is three-fold:

• Lackadaisical attitudes among my peers toward web standards have worn me down. Too many people aren’t interested in a better way, and I’m tired of trying to explain it to them. In other words, I’m tired of dragging stubborn horses to the water trough
• Browser support puts the brakes on a lot of things I’d like to do. I’ll avoid going off on another rant on why exactly Internet Explorer is a sorry excuse for a browser, and only the ignorant or terminally clueless would use it. While true, that’s not the point. Even great, modern and full-featured browsers such as Opera andFirefox lack support for CSS’s more interesting and advanced techniques, or the support is spotty. I’m just not really interested in learning something I might be able to use in a few years.
• And there’s the 95/5 rule. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know everything about standards-based design. But learning the last 5 percent may not be the worth the expenditure of time.

So what does one do to get off La Mesa Grande*? I think I’m going to hunt for a new mountain to climb. Right now, it looks like modern javascript and DOM scripting will be it, and so far it seems very interesting — and a far cry from the DHTML-mess of a few years ago.

So that’s the new goal. Time to lace up the hiking boots.

* I know, I know. I failed Spanish.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 14th, 2006 at 12:14 pm and is filed under General, Geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.