Matt Mullenweg has performed a fisting on a scale that I have never seen before on his blog. This one is regarding Lockergnome’s decision to regress back to pre-web-standards-era design techniques for their site. As he closes, Matt says:

What about web standards? Graceful degradation? From a purely business and marketing point of view, is the couple of percent of users on browsers so limited and hardware so old that they can’t appreciate modern web pages (and not just yours, also ESPN, Wired, PGA…) a demographic you want to cater to at the expense of the other 95%?

[...] On one hand I have a lot of faith in the Lockergnome team to do the right thing, but the standards-lover in me is just terrified of the prospect of a site going backward. Not to mention the masses who subscribe to the newsletters that will draw the conclusion that “CSS isn’t ready for big sites yet,” in 2004. I can think of nothing further from the truth or more subversive. [Emphasis added. --- Ed.]

While his post is filled with righteous indignation, he barely touches on something that I find important to point out: those last two emphasized sentences. I think that Lockergnome, a self-proclaimed authority for second-tier techie sheep, is going to injure the web standards movement with a move like this. That, or they’ll lose some street cred among the same community for doing so (for which they need even more sheep).

Digest this sentence very, very slowly: If Lockergnome uses tables, it’s not so bad an idea for me to use them too! Repeat ad nauseam until that sinking feeling touches down deep deep inside of you. Sometimes making everything old out to be new again is the cool thing to do. Sometimes, what is hip — like Ashton Kutcher, his trucker hat, and his relationship with Demi Moore — becomes uncool. And then sometimes, “hip” doesn’t matter when you consider what you believe is right, and I share what Matt believes about the web, semanticity (towards which I work on day by day, though sometimes not as faithfully), and the ability of CSS to make things easier and better for everyone who uses the net.

There are those who insist on nineties-style markup and design techniques. I don’t blame them. I don’t waste my time educating them otherwise either. However, I think they do a disservice to themselves for doing so, as the web marches ever forward. Time will come when they will have to catch up, and when it does, they’re going to be the ones who will be doing a lot more work than I would.

[As a slightly off-topic aside, just as I have done making a new skin, I started contemplating making another one using "mid-nineties design techniques." I found the effort futile, as my markup --- though not worth a million dollars but perhaps markuppitier than your average bear --- just doesn't work well with regression, considering that it remains unchanged across the seven different styles this site can assume. As of press time Lockergnome still uses divs and CSS but for how long, who knows? I did see a "center" attribute to a paragraph despite their use of an XHTML 1.0 Strict Doctype. Technology resource my ass.]