The devil’s in the minutia

Zeldman recently opined that, since the mainstreaming of web standards, there should be more talk in design circles of content, design and usability. I wholeheartedly agree with him on this point, but then Jeffrey lays into the recent round table discussions on placement and use of headings, implying that such arguments are harmful to Web standards uptake because they are geeky, petty and off putting.

With greatest respect to those involved (after all I was one), I feel Zeldman overplays the reach and influence such forums will have. Clearly the designers and developers engaged in the discussions felt the arguments worth spending time on – these folks thrive on attention to detail and there are still questions remaining unanswered.

So yes, I’d like to see more stuff written about web design as a whole, but discussing the finer points of coding (or raging about minutia) still has its place and is not going to turn off the uncommitted or uninformed because these things are rarely discussed on mainstream blogs anyway.