We were talking about form design at the accessibility meeting at the Cleveland Sight Center this morning, and one of the regular Web Dev SIG attendees made a comment about how it depends on the age of designer as to whether labels or notes were put before or after an input field. Of course, I had to chime in “Oh come on now! Not all of us whippersnappers are bad form devs!” The original comment really irked me, inspiring this soapbox post.

If you are using the age of the developer or designer as a metric for web design, you’re doing something wrong.

Maybe there’s that stereotype that young developers will focus on new technologies as being the best way no matter what. Maybe there’s a stereotype that boring HTML pages were written by older developers. And if those stereotypes are there, I’m calling you out now.

Plain and simple - poor web development doesn’t discriminate. You can be of any gender, any race, any creed, any age… it doesn’t matter who you are. The only way a developer can get away from poor design/development is by hearing that their design doesn’t work because of {insert reason here} and then receiving constructive feedback on how to improve their design.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve heard someone make a general remark about how the “younger” generation doesn’t know how to design web forms. But I’m tired of hearing that. People enter the web development arena at various ages, and honestly, age should not even be considered when looking at a poorly written app. Prior experience, possibly… but age, no….