Are you doing laundry?

Fess up, you probably are. I was in Starbucks today (right next to a laundromat) and heard a woman joking that it's Must Launder Klothes day today. The amusing thing? I was keeping an eye on my watch too, because I had stuff in the washer, at home a few blocks away.

A guy walked up to me in the gym yesterday. "You take this stuff pretty seriously!" says he. "I saw you doing these (miming a front squat)... those hurt!" I basically laughed and said yeah. But I wonder why people say that, and I wonder if it's true. I don't think of myself as taking weightlifting seriously at all -- I don't compete, I don't carefully calculate sets and reps and rest periods for maximum hypertrophy (or maximum anything else), it's all just for pleasure. I happen to have been doing it regularly for 10 years... I figure over that span of time even the most casual person will get stronger and learn a few tricks. On the other hand, I do plan to keep doing it for the rest of my life.

So, what is it to take something seriously? Is it when you feel a lot depends on it? (Note: I am serious about making my mortgage payments.) Is it when you're willing to stake something like your income on it? Is it just when you do it a lot and would be grouchy if you didn't get to do it? Is it when you have goals?

Hey, this is different from the stuff I learned in 1997.

I've spent a bunch of this weekend reading about web standards and CSS... Jeffrey Zeldman's book, which is a little less about the how and more about the why, but pretty educational in both respects for a non-CSS person. All I really have to say is, last time I learned a bit about CSS I completely missed the point. I thought it was about applying a similar look to a lot of web pages at once, something I don't want to do on my site... and it's often used that way. But the other thing it's about, really about, is entirely separating the structure of the content from the presentation. If you don't know what I mean and don't want to think too hard, click over to the CSS Zen Garden for a moment. Pretty impressive, huh?

Of course, with knowledge comes embarrassment. My site... well, it's an okay site, and it gets better every couple of years. Last time around it even got a CSS rule, a little inline tweak for a visual effect. However, it's not exactly the site you'd expect from a professional web developer, and for better or worse that's what I am now. I should be living up to it. So, I played a bit today with getting my front page to validate according to W3C, and I r-e-a-l-l-y want to clean up the rest. Of course, this will wind up meaning that a lot gets a rewrite, because I won't be able to tweak the presentation without noticing that some of the content is old enough to be attending first or second grade.

I've also, overnight, become a lot more sensitive to the idea of people viewing pages with CSS and/or JavaScript and/or images turned off. (It's not just for the visually impaired -- mobile readers often want to see the bare bones of a page too.)

This for instance:



Nothing really seems to have changed since the days of basic HTML, in terms of automated tools churning out dreck. Look at that alt text (lots of browsers will give you this in a tooltip if you hover your mouse over the image). It's clearly generated by some tool or other, taking what's meant to be an accessibility aid and filling it with... um... the file name of the image. Mhc2Ts1701! Thanks, tool, that's so helpful that I'm half tempted to take the Yarn Harlot to task for using you. (And by the way, you non-knitters, look at that piece of knitting on top. Aren't you the tiniest bit curious to know how those braids and textures and diamonds are all emerging simultaneously from that innocent row of loops on the knitting needle? Don't you think I'm even a little bit cool for knowing?)

Anyway, I'm rather happy to be getting back into web development now instead of being in it continuously for the last 10 years. It seems like I missed out on a really crappy time to be in the field, and it's all getting better again now. Next up: at some point I'll have to look at JavaScript, and someday maybe I'll even figure out how webrat's Macromedia stuff fits into all this. :)