Another interesting article caught my eye over at Roger's blog (456 Berea Street) - this one on web professionals and the need to stay on top of current best practices. He says "Web professionals who refuse to update their skills and insist on using outdated methods can no longer be called web professionals." And I couldn't agree more.

If this argument sounds familiar, it certainly is. Back in the heady days of the latter half of the 90's, web professionals were lamenting the flood of newcomers creating tricky nested table layout websites with Front Page (no offense - it's what was used then), while the others were hand coding on Notepad or textedit or some such.

You had then -and still have now- on the one hand a group of individuals who have the desire to gain deep technical knowledge in their craft, and on the other hand a group of individuals who, for whatever reason, do not wish to invest the time in building a better skillset.

In September of 2004 I wrote an article called "licensed to design" discussing an piece by Michael Nuttley that I had just finished reading. My article was basically continuing the exploration he starts on whether our industry should be regulated. I didn't feel that regulation would be the answer, however, I did feel that certification would be beneficial, more so if there were a continuing education requirement to maintain your certification (similar to what project management professionals must do to remain certified). I'm not saying that every web professional needs to be a deep technical expert, but I do believe they should need to be technically proficient in the best practices of our craft. And today, that means aesthetically pleasing css based semantically correct accessible designs.