Acts of Volition

A little over a year ago, I posted an open question to the web development community here on this website: Why should I redesign my site with Cascading Style Sheets? At the time, I was struggling to convert my brain from old-school HTML-quirks-expert mode to new-school XHTML/CSS standards mode. I wondered, given the number and complexity of browser incompatibilities, if it was worth the trouble.

The volume of the response was impressive, but no-one convinced me. Some strong arguments were presented, but none really told me what I didn’t already know. I was directed to Owen Briggs’ now well-known Design Rant. I understood his arguments, but it wasn’t enough.

As I stated at the time, I made the decision to learn more about XHTML, CSS, and web standards in general, mostly out of the feeling that it was inevitable (I also have a well-documented irrational and interminable need to upgrade). Here, a year later, I’m swimming in XHTML. I’m still often confused and frustrated CSS, but I’m pushing the adoption of web standards in all of my web work.

What changed? Not much. Netscape 4 is less of an issue than it once was (fewer and fewer people are using it and I’m now content to have sites look different, as long as their accessible in the old browser). However, when I read Owen Briggs’ Design Rant today, it rings true, whereas it was hollow and distant to me last year.

The most significant change in that time is that I have jumped in with both feet and learned. While I still feel like I only know 10% of what I should about CSS and XHTML, I know an order of magnitude more than I did last year. In learning these technologies, I have come to understand their benefits.

The most significant immediate benefit, for me, is the way in which the structure of XHTML forces you to produce cleaner and more logical code. However, I don’t expect this benefit to convince a naysayer. That’s the whole point. I couldn’t be convinced - I had to try and learn before I could understand.

This realization, that I need to explore and experience in order to understand, dawned on me as I read C.S. Lewis’ classic Mere Christianity. In discussing how the theological differences between the various denominations are relatively insignificant to the core of the religion, Lewis states that “A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourished him.” Lewis goes on to argue that you need not necessarily understand in order to believe. Understanding is beneficial, of course, but not necessary.

I believe this idea can be generalized, however inelegantly (if I haven’t already done so by stretching it from web standards to religion), to something like: you have to try it to get it. You can not wait for understanding to justify experience. Rather, the experience will produce its own justification.

Leo Tolstoy’s A Confession is a powerful account of how Tolstoy found, after painfully and diligently searching for the meaning of life through much of his adulthood that the meaning of life wasn’t something he could learn from a book (read the excerpt with Tolstoy’s account of his dream of a bed over a chasm to hear this in his own words).

I’ve also seen this principle (yeah, it’s a principle now) in practice in other situations. A few simple examples:

• When a co-worker showed me his wireless network connection in his laptop last year, I thought it was cool, but didn’t see the great need (I was at my desk with my computer all day where a wired Ethernet connection is available anyhow). However, when I first tried WiFi for myself I immediately understood that it would change the way I use my computer.
• Having only driven cars with an automatic transmission, I could never understand the appeal of a manual transmission. Friends pointed out the better feel for the car, the improved fuel economy, and most of all that it was “fun”. As with the other examples, I could understand their points, but only in that I knew what they were saying. Until an offer of a free vintage Volvo station-wagon forced me to learn to drive a stick-shift, I didn’t really understand what they meant.
• After occasionally using Apple computers over the years, last month I spent a week working on a Mac in hopes of figuring out what the attraction was. I think I got it.
• Dean Kamen (the Segway guy, among other things) said in a presentation at the WinHEC conference that innovation is like love: “Everybody wants it - everybody feels good when they have it - but nobody knows what it is.”

I’m not sure where this leads me. Perhaps the only true education comes from experience. A friend told me once that no Atheist could read the entire Bible and be unchanged. I believe that is probably true - though it may not be the contents of the book, but the act of reading it that would prove to be the true agent of change.