What Happened To My Internet?
So, My blog has lingered in what could only be called a vat of slimy uselessness for going on 3 years or so.
Heck, I did more ‘blogging’ long before it was called blogging.
Back in 1995 I used to just update my old website using the little crap-tastic text editor built into Windows, (back then it was windows 95), then used a simple FTP application and just did updates that way. We didn’t have WordPress, or any of these other cool fancy blogging tools. And, it worked! I could do it all by hand, and even format everything EXACTLY the way I liked.
Today… fast forward about 13 years.
We now have WordPress, Movable Type, etc. Now EVERYONE has a blog, heck even the corporate CEO at the big company I work for does his own blog for all of us who work for him. I believe that proves that Blogging is now as common as any other activity I can think of.
What bothers me?
It isn’t that blogging is now so popular, that I think is a GREAT thing. What I hate is that someone out there thought performing layout using the HTML standard was all too damn complicated and had to change it all to this new fangled CSS, or now even CSS2 method in website creation. I blame people who aren’t creative for this. I could do pretty much ANYTHING with the old standard HTML that I wanted to. Sure, some of it took some math and a bit of patience, but is was all possible.
Don’t get me totally wrong, I did like the first hint of it with the introduction of the CSS just for type face styles, that made a ton of sense to me. I could define my fonts, sizes and font decor to make it all jive across my site pages. I loved that. But… Who in freaks sake decided that this CSS 2 stuff was anything to be called ‘good’? For the life of me, and I have read EVERYTHING about it, why in all that is good take way any way to ‘center’ text or elements in a page?! That is something that is REQUIRED. Sure, some ass-hat will tell you there are ways to do it, but you shouldn’t HAVE to learn some esoteric method to perform a simple and REQUIRED task in a LAYOUT system such as ‘center this for me’. Don’t even get me started on the whole, “Let us require you to put extra back slashes in everything for no good reason.” Bull-Poop either, that is insane. If you don’t think so, YOU are part of the problem. What happened to my digital world? Sure I went to sleep for about 40 days back in 2005, but when I woke up and re-learned to think and talk, it seemed as if a group of insane people have become the ‘leaders’ who have turned the easy to access, simple to use tools that made the web what it is today into an overly complicated set of tools that most people will never have the time or will to re-learn. Heck, it is even fairly difficult to find a basic tutorial on CSS2 that makes any common sense on the web!
This is the website and blog for the thoughts and ideas of Derek Colanduno. The host, and producer of Skepticality, the Official Audio Program for Skeptic Magazine and the Skeptics Society.