The Hubspot Inbound Marketing blog just posted an article titled Easy HTML Tricks for the Non-Technical Marketer. It starts off just like you’d expect, with a helpful introduction:

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: knowing HTML is an extremely helpful skill that every internet marketer should know and can easily learn. This doesn’t mean you need to become a web developer; being comfortable with just the basics will make you invaluable.

Yes! Yes, absolutely true.

Your web developer doesn’t need you to be a guru or wizard or ninja or whatever the buzzword du jour is. Marketers who have anything to do with the website should just know the basics of web technology. Just as a movie producer doesn’t need to know the details of how CG effects are created, they need to know the essential limitations and possibilities so that they don’t foster unrealistic expectations.

So we’re in agreement so far that internet marketers should at least understand the fundamentals of the cornerstone of the web: HTML.

However, it then goes on to list several “HTML tricks” that take us right back to the pre-web standards days that so many of us have worked hard to correct: inline styles. Adding

Here is a way you can combine multiple elements in your content:

Code:

1	<b>&lt;font face="comic sans ms" size="2" color="green"&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;u&gt;</b>This font is Comic Sans MS, Size 2, Bold, Underlined and is the color Green<b>&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/font&gt;</b>

If that doesn’t make you cringe, please go read Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman and come back. I’ll wait.

Okay, back? Now go read this article from the BBC on why Comic Sans is a terrible awful no-good font: What’s so wrong with Comic Sans?. Okay. Good. Now we can have a reasonable conversation.

I do appreciate the sentiment that this article is going for. I appreciate that it recognizes that many web developers’ lives would be made a little easier if their marketing overlords made an attempt to understand what it is they do all day, typing all that code stuff. But teaching people “easy HTML tricks” like inline styles and using Comic Sans? You’re not making anyone’s lives easier. You’re making it more likely someone’s going to get punched.

Instead, let’s focus on teaching easy tricks like “use meaningful markup” and “less is more” and “for the love of Zeus don’t use Comic Sans”. We can keep the web moving forward, if we try to focus on keeping people using current standards rather than looking back to 1993.