people always tell me that the language i use to talk about Web design is daunting and hard to understand, even though I'm saying words that they know.
e.g., when I try to explain to them white the pretty word documents they give me as basis for a design will not translate precisely to a Web page.
When I try to explain why a web design won't look the same in all browsers -- because of the proliferations of Operating Systems and browsers, and below that, at the individual level, in the way a user has her system set up, what font she uses, what base size, etc. -- they get mad. The television doesn't work that way,w aht the hell is wrong with you people? You must be lying to me, trying to dupe me into thnking you're fucking geniuses to I have to pay you more.
Well, why is this? I would submit that, in addition to the fact that techy language is an insider's language in many way, it's also made more difficult (and why people get hostile), because the language it uses also reflects the instability of the world their language is trying to describe.
By instability I mean that, the way R builds a Web page based on a design I create and the way I build one based on the design I create will be different. Consequently, the glitches or problems with viewing those pages are going to be different.
You have the same thing in software design, where one coder will do something one way and another still another.
the hostility isn't, I would submit, due to the language (which all disciplines have. I didn't fuckin' understand what the hell secular meant in Econ for years but then I didn't try to hard either because it was my own mental block, of knowing the word in one context (religion) and not seeing how it applied at all in another. I understand know because I lazily asked the list).
the hostility is to the underlying thing that postmodernists are trying to describe.
Techies, discuss. :)
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org