Letter to CECS

To All Members of the CECS Administration:

I have just found out that CECS.online will be using HTML résumés with a stripped down version of HTML. I am, quite simply, appalled by the decision to use HTML.

I spent considerable time to create my résumé because it is my only opportunity to convince a potential employer that I am worth their time. I put an enormous amount of effort into, not only the content of my résumé, but also the presentation of my résumé in terms of page layout and white space. The CECS department led me to believe that this was a very important use of my time during my 1B term when I first prepared my résumé. In fact, the CECS-based résumé critiquer spent sometime talking about white space and text density; advice which I heeded. Now, with an HTML résumé, I have no way to present my résumé with any control. I have no idea what browser or operating system a potential employer will use and thus no way to control the presentation.

What is worse than choosing HTML as a standard, is not choosing "real" HTML. The World Wide Web Consortium has official standards as to what HTML actually is (confer http://www.w3.org/ ). The "limited" HTML standard presented is a mutilated from of HTML 3.2 with some additional tags (specifically, the FONT tag does not have a "FACE" attribute). The "FONT" tag is considered a poor way to control type faces and sizes and has been marked as deprecated in the HTML 4.01 Specification[1] and has been omitted from the newer XHTML 1.0 Specification[2]. The "FACE" attribute was not included in the HTML 3.2[3] Specification and is a tag introduced by Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. The CECS.online Student Help[4] indicates that the HTML will be run through some kind of "parser". I would like to know more about this parser and the guarantees that it does not distort or change my document. As the sole copyright holder of my résumé[5], distributing and altered version of my literary work would be in violation of my ownership of said work. I would consider allowing a "mutilated copy" of my literary work (that is, my résumé passed through your parsing software) to be distributed if all students of the University of Waterloo and all employers participating in the University of Waterloo's co-op programme were given a complete and functional copy of the source code (that is, the un-compiled form) of the program in machine readable format at no cost.

There also seems to be a great lack of foresight to choose HTML as this will create problems. The first question to my mind when present with the concept of HTML résumés was: How long are two pages (the standard résumé length) in an HTML résumé? The number of pages when printing the document will vary from browser, to browser, across different versions of that browser, across different operating systems and operating system versions. It will also vary depending on the fonts installed on the machine and the fonts selected by the author and user. This will be even less precise on screen.

I am mortified that the CECS department would make such a decision. It shows, in my opinion, either a gross lack of understanding of the technologies involved or a disregard for the presentation of student information to employers.

Sincerely,
Andre Masella
2B Computer Engineering
Student of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
Faculty of Engineering
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

[1] HTML 4.01 Specification, World Wide Web Consortium, section 15.2.2, http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/present/graphics.html#h-15.2.2
[2] XHTML 1.0 The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (Second Edition): A Reformulation of HTML 4 in XML 1.0, World Wide Web Consortium, http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/
[3] HTML 3.2 Specification, World Wide Web Consortium, http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32-19970114
[4] CECS.online Student Help, Co-operative Education and Career Services, University of Waterloo, http://www.adm.uwaterloo.ca/infocprg/Student/resumes.html
[5] Copyright Act, Department of Justice Canada, http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/C-42/