Around and about the place, you often see people maligning “new” web technologies such as CSS and XHTML as “harder to learn and use” than hacky, workaround techniques in old style HTML.

It might be true that the new technologies are harder. I don’t think this is because they are being designed by out-of-touch geeks sitting in a room somewhere, disconnected with “real world” design (as some people suggest): it is because the web is coming of age and we are starting to use (and need) more sophisticated techniques to take full advantage of it.

Long brown hair, brown eyes. Kind of cute. Sitting across from me on the train. I’m sat, book in hand, one earphone in. She’s looking out the window; countryside flashes past. She looks over.

“You’re a student?”

“Yeah, you?”

“Yeah. What do you study?”

“Why don’t you guess? Not much else to do.”

She looks out the window for a moment and her hair slips down over her shoulder. She pushes it back, “okay then”, and glances at the book I’m reading. Some reasonably high-brow book.

Bad research, over-protective society and a hoax website conspire to encourage a Californian city to put forward a motion for a ban on dihydrogen monoxide :

And it got worse: dihydrogen monoxide is lethal if inhaled, causes severe burns in its gaseous state, and is the major component in acid rain. Prolonged exposure to solid dihydrogen monoxide can cause severe tissue damage. It can, said the city council report, “threaten human safety and health”.

I was reading through the Gentoo forums for information on ebuilds for Gnome 2.6, which was released a couple of days ago. While I was doing this I came across a post that was complaining that Nautilus (the Gnome file manager) had a certain behavior. The poster was complaining that when you move a folder, if there is a folder with the same name in the way, nautilus overwrites the old folder with the new one. In Windows and KDE (apparently), the new folder’s contents are merged with the old ones. The poster complained that the nautilus method was “wrong” because it didn’t merge the folders.

At this post there is an image of a Windows Longhorn dialog that invites you to:

Type in a word, phrase or question to search for anything: documents, email, […], people, or the internet.

You’ll note that you can search for the internet. Not a site, but the internet as a whole! Hmm, maybe I lost it down the back of the sofa?

The more pedantic amongst you may also notice the curious use of commas in “word, phrase or question” and “people, or the internet”. Tsk, tsk, at least be consistent =)