Not good enough
It’s easy to say how somebody isn’t living up to your expectations. I fail to live up to my own expectations of myself on a nearly daily basis.
When it comes to web development, it’s easy to pick apart a site and complain about how it could’ve been done better.
“Your site isn’t accessible enough.”
“Your site isn’t fast enough.”
“Your site isn’t designed well enough.”
People sometimes take shortcuts, due to temporary laziness or time constraints. People sometimes do the best job they know how to. There are often constraints that we’re simply unaware of.
We start somewhere and then we work on getting better. It’s easy to discount how far we’ve come by constantly being focused on how much further we have to go.
One web site that I enjoy is Accessibility Wins, curated by Marcy Sutton. She chose to focus on the positives instead of the negatives.
In looking over how I’ve behaved in the past, I recognize my own behaviour as tinged with negativity. It’s something that I’m working on to improve, to be more positive. I’ll fail repeatedly. And tomorrow, I’ll work on failing less often.
There’s no such thing as a perfect web site. There’s no such thing as the perfect person. And that’s okay. Tomorrow will be a little bit better.
Conversation
Do your best until you know better.
Then when you know better, do better - maya Angelou
I used to be like that ... I used to point others mistake till I found that I am not better ... I think as we mature we learn to embrace the fact that we are vulnerable too. I started to encourage those that I used to criticize. I started to learn to be better.
+1, I've made the same experience and completely agree. We should more often focus on the good parts instead of the imperfect ones.
I've also learned, that the more I'm bothered with a website/webapp and how it was created, I understand the reasons why this or that was done in a certain way (legacy data, which needed to be shown in a certain way, late design changes, etc.)
Well you know what Bill Gates said about lazy people didn't you ;)
I think about it quite a bit. What do you say to auditors, testers? from #a11y to performance - they are there to point out errors, improve a condition - by definition.
But I hear you. Tone is the key... gawd knows I make my own mistakes, and hell - Zeldman personally reminded me one day in a podcast. Made me think...