Cave in

Let me share a short story please.

Once upon a time there was this guy. He decided he wanted to be a web
developer because it looked like a cool thing to do and it definitely
looked better than a real job (he was a commercial diver and boat captain
by trade). Even though his first exposure to source code resulted in a
reaction of: What was *is* this stuff . . . Martian?

Anyway, not to be put off, he was walking along the isles of a local book
store one day and ran across a book called "HTML for Netscape". VIOLA ! The
holy grail. He had heard about these new browsers that showed pictures, and
it seemed like Netscape was the one he had heard the most about (sure he
knew there was atleast one other graphical browser out there - Mosaic).

He bought the book and loaded the browser from the included CD-ROM (VERY
hi-tech at the time!). WOW. there really were pictures out there !!!!!!

He was hooked.

He read that book until the pages started falling out. Not only could he
recite code strings orally, but he could tell you what page and what
chapter it could be found on in that book.

When he was confident he knew all there was to know about HTML, he started
soliciting customers. Oh, he got his butt kicked financially. He solicited
many many sites completely free of charge to build his portfolio. He did
really enjoy writing the code, but at that point the pay really stunk. 

In an effort to "make things easier" he bought a ' canned ' editor. It was
called "Hot Dog Pro". Man, was that cool. No more switching back and forth
from text editor to browser, no more typing and typing, just drag and drop
(more or less).

Things went ok for a month or two. Then the phone started ringing. Holy
COW. People he built sites ~for free~ for, were calling to bitch about
"this" or "that" not working. Being supremely confident in his knowledge
and ability, he told them without hesitation there *must* be a problem on
their machine, because the work displayed perfectly on his computer!

For some reason, he didn't get much paying work. 

One day curiosity get the best of him and he:

1) Upgraded his Netscape browser

2) Downloaded this browser he had started hearing about: MSIE (I think the
version was .9 or something).

All of a sudden his whole world caved in around him.

A ~lot~ of stuff he had written was screwed up. Text was out of place or
missing, pictures were out of place or surrounded by these weird blue boxes
- or missing completely, just all kinds of stuff.  

He was soooo sure of his knowledge/ability he actually started calling
ISP's hosting his work to raise hell about "some server problem screwing up
his pages".

He didn't get very far with them. :-)

In an effort to figure out what was wrong, he started doing research on the
web. He heard about this "new" guild of HTML writers. They were
established, but he understood most of them to still be pretty new to this
stuff too.

He joined one of the mailing list. There he met two people by the name of
Duif Calvin and Harold Driscoll. The first thing he did was address Duif in
the masculine (he is still making that mistake from time to time with some
names - unfortunately) These two were unique, it was obvious pretty
quickly. They knew this HTML stuff and a lot more - inside and out. Over
the next few weeks they managed to get across the fact that he had been
seriously mislead by a couple of authors, the person who wrote "HTML for
Netscape" and those fine Australian folks who wrote Hot Dog Pro, for starters.

He started learning again from scratch. This time he only used three tools:
http://www.w3.org ,  http://ugweb.cs.ualberta.ca/~gerald/validate/ and a
plain old ASCII text editor.

The real down side was that he had built ~commercial~ sites that did not
work. Because he was completely serious, and completely new, trying to
build a business and a reputation, he _paid_ someone else to fix the sites
he had built for free. It literally cost him thousands of dollars he didn't
have to spare.

Lesson learned? Yes.

Can he still recite code strings? Yes. He can tell you what page, what
chapter, what section of http://www.w3.org you can find that code at.

Has he -ever- had another customer call him and substantiate that his code
is "broken"? No. 

He heads that off by putting a link to the validator on each and every page
he gets paid for, and makes a point of not only showing it to the customer,
but takes the time to explain why that is SO important to them. If it's a
potentially big customer, he challenges them to find ~anyone~ offering the
same guarantee in writing he does: NO crashes or anomalies or your money
back and you KEEP the code (after he fixes it to their satisfaction).

He doesn't do outside sales. He doesn't do cold calling. He doesn't do
_any_ paid advertising. He is, and has been for a few years now, swamped by
businesses (gladly) waiting months for his services. On those very rare
occasions when things slow down around his shop, he has to do nothing but
validate a couple of "random" URL's and write a couple of professional and
polite letters, and wham, he's busy again.


It seems one cave in was enough for him. Has the dirt started trickling
down *your* neck from above yet?

<Epilogue>
I hope that this message didn't make anyone mad, it WAS NOT aimed at any
one individual. The ~only~ intent was to provide food for thought. *Your*
actual mileage may vary.
</Epilogue>

HTH,
Fuzzy
__________________________________________________________________
Captain F.M. O'Lary
webmaster(at)canopy.net
sysop(at)mail.ruediger.leon.k12.fl.us
sysop(at)mail.woodville.leon.k12.fl.us
Member of the HTML Writers Guild and 
International Webmasters Association
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