Day: January 26, 2003

Trendy

Mark Pilgrim and Jeffrey Zeldman have put big round things on their home pages. Eric Meyer provides two choices of round thing. Jason Kottke has a square thing. Combined, are all of these perhaps a nod to simpler web design?

Probably not. But maybe. After all, two points form a line; five points are a trend. As Kottke says, If someone else is doing something that works, why change it?

And who am I to buck a trend? Here’s a bunch of round things (in rectangular things), some writing about other round things, and Rosalita Whyte of The Third Floor demonstrating the correct use of even more round things. At least I’m not inflicting this round thing on you on every visit:

A photo of my shiny bald noggin.

Wide World of Words

I’ve updated the code behind the pages to a more modern and flexible system and at the same time amended the design to make pages quicker to load and less fussy in appearance. An additional benefit is that the site is now more accessible to visitors with disabilities.

Michael Quinion, World Wide Words

In other words, WWW is now–almost–a valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional site. (Those darned character entity references in URLs… happens to the best of us.)

Mark Pilgrim and Ian Hickson might not be overjoyed. There’s lots of semantic information in the classes, what appears (to me, at least) to be appropriate use of the meta element, and even Dublin Core metadata; he even uses curly apostrophes. However, there are two things I think Mark and Ian would recommend: respectively, using the cite tag to mark up words and phrases quoted for themselves (particularly instead of <em class="citedform">), and using heading tags (h1, h2, etc.) in place of structures like <p class="heading"> and <p class="sectiontag" style="margin-top:0.5em">.

But you know what? (That’s you as in all y’all, of course.) It’s still a cool site, and I go back again and again. Content is king, and Michael Quinion has some 1250 pages that say he da man.