It’s probably long overdue, but Bart asked me at the beginning of my summer internship to write up a small review of working at Netlash. So here I go.

I consider myself pretty lucky when it comes to having cool summer jobs. Since I am 16 — the legal age for working during the holidays in Belgium — I have always been able to work as a web developer and not as some kind of plantation worker. But after 2 summers at Vision, I wanted something different and I tried my luck at Netlash.

A few e-mails and an interview later, Bart told me he got a job for me in August. Awesome!

On my first day at the Netlash office — which has a really cool location, right in the center of Ghent — I was introduced to Fork CMS and I must admit, it’s one of the better CMS’s I have seen so far. After I got up to speed with the Netlash workflow and project management, I got started on my first assignment: slicing and dicing be-organized.be. (Dicing, a word I was unfamiliar with first, apparently meant integrating the slice with the CMS, which is not that hard)

Now this wasn’t just a slice, because Johan was going to review my work, which was a first time for me. I’m glad he did that though because it’s something I learnt a lot from because he knows way too much about css and browser bugs too be healthy for a normal person, so he was an incredible source of tips and tricks. In the end, I was happy I didn’t have too much big mistakes in my slice.

Not only the designers at Netlash are awesome, the developers also seem to live only to kick ass, code wise then. The quality of their code is of really high standards and they expected the same of me. So before I could get started on writing code, I had to read the coding standards and swear an oath to follow them. If you want to see some of that code yourself, check out the library they’ve open-sourced.

In the following weeks, I did everything from newsletter-slicing to creating structure documents, with a great deal of variation every day and with the great finale of helping to launch the new Ancienne Belgique-website.

What I really liked at Netlash was the cool atmosphere, the always-present motivation to push yourself further, the gaming over lunch break but most of all the passion all these people had for their jobs. They’re not code monkeys, they all want to help building the best websites on the web.

I’d like to thank Bart and Dirk for letting me work in their wonderful company over summer. I sure hope I can come back for more

Now, if you’ve ever developed a website using standards before, you will probably feel my pain. So I wrote down a couple of things that I would like to see taught and discussed in these lessons.

Focus on A-grade browsers

Teaching about compatibility with Netscape Navigator is going to keep us in the dark ages of web development for a long time. Develop with standards and even the oldest browsers will make something decent of your page, a principle called graceful degradation.

Separation of content and style.

Keeping your content and your styling separated is a principle already taught in the lessons about LaTeX and something which will help you with the graceful degradation. Try to bring meaning to your HTML by using semantically correct tags as much as possible.

For example, use <em> to put emphasis on your words, not <b> to make them look bold. If you’d ever want to make emphasized words italicized later on, you can easily do so site-wide with CSS, while the HTML still conveys the same meaning.

CSS should be the one and only way to style your page, every other way is deprecated. Teach the basics of CSS and provide links to advanced examples for those who want to learn more. Keep in mind though that we are not designers and shouldn’t know everything about designing a page.

“Bad” technologies

Keep technologies such as imagemaps and framesets out of the classroom. These are of course not bad per se, but are more often abused then well-used. There are more important things to be taught.

There are a few things still to think about here, and I would be glad to hear your opinion on them:

• How do you handle deprecated tags and attributes?

  If you do not mention them, students will find them themselves via Google in any outdated tutorial. But to what extent should you mention them then so they won’t use them by mistake?

• What will the effect of a standardista-introduction to web development be on a fresh mind?

  If you give a technical introduction to HTML and no immediate way to do any of the flashy stuff people see out there, you are certainly not promoting HTML as a way of publishing to beginners. On the other hand, I believe that it will bring respect for the people who are able to create amazing things with these set of technologies.