A collection of stuff

• Can’t sleep. Might as well wake up now and start the day. #
• What’s the problem with breaking badly developed sites? If a car is not road worthy it should be kept out of the road. #
• @mollydotcom The best solution for MS would have been to ditch the "Don’t break the web" mantra. It’s already broken, try to fix it instead #
• @meyerweb What about haikus instead? #

After being asleep for 5 hours or so I couldn’t sleep anymore and woke up at 4:00 AM. That’s a good time to review the good ol’ rss feeds and found that there had been a few very interesting, although not related, articles on web development, technique and the future of web design.

First, Steven Clark wrote an excellent article on The Three Pillars of Good Web Design, and I couldn’t agree more with what he has to say. A web site is not a poster, or a magazine, it has its own needs and uses and we can’t forget about it.

Second, Eric Meyer went and created what looks like very complicated css that surely implied many hours of testing at retesting but ultimately achieves a very straightforward, standards compliant and very cool Structured Timeline purely using html and css. I love it!!!

And, finally, on A List Apart, Aaron Gustafson reveals a complement that would take us Beyond the Doctype Switch to see if that will stop new browser releases from breaking the code of lazy ass developers who still use Frontpage 98 to make their sites. Personally, I couldn’t care less if some developer harebrainedly makes a site without consideration for standards or proper design and it then breaks on IE 8 or whatever comes later. That should teach them or their clients (you know who, the ones that insisted that it had to work ‘just so’ on IE5.5 and to hell with everything else). Still, we’ll have to see if there are any advantages in using a new switch or if it will add a new layer of complexity and uncertainty to the mix.

I’m still undecided but I think that harebrained designers will keep breaking the web. That’s right, it’s not new browser versions but bad web designers who break the web. There, I said it.

• Head… feeling… heavy, … need inspiration to write. #
• Ditched my DVD player for an Asus Eee, a monitor and an external DVD. #

• @boagworld Give my condolences to Marcus. Don’t worry too much about the podcast, we’ll understand. #

Marcus Lillington is one of the co-hosts of the Boagworld podcast for web developers, designers, owners and other people involved in the creation of web sites. Although I’ve never met either in person, I’ve been listening to them for so long that I think I know them a little. So it was very saddening to find out about the passing of Marcus’ father. I hope he’s doing well.

• We threw Liz a surprise get-together. It was surprising. She liked it, seems like. #

She conveniently was born right in the middle of the Holidays break, when no one in the office is here, and she always insists that that’s ok. In fact, she insists so much that she was practically daring us to do it. So, Loreli finally took the challenge to organize a little get-together after work and got Liz to go to a bar under false pretenses (well, it actually isn’t that difficult) where we all were waiting.

The bar, by the way, is on the rooftop of the Park Hyatt Hotel in Toronto and it has a great view of Queen’s Park and Downtown Toronto.