When I look around the web, I'm astonished at the number of web sites that make little or no effort to comply with web standards or accessibility guidelines. And some of these folks...well, you can't help but think they ought to know better. For instance, this week it was announced that Target is being sued for violating the California Disabled Persons Act because its web site isn't accessible to visually impaired customers. You've got to wonder if this was much of a surprise to them. Is there anyone familiar with the web who didn't think lawsuits weren't coming? I'm just amazed it took this long.

After several weeks of false starts and deadends, I've finally come up with what seems to be the best solution for displaying video on a web page. You can use a streaming server, but I had so many problems getting it to work that I finally gave up and decided to use http.

One of the most difficult things I've encountered in CSS layouts is footers. They're hard to understand, and even when you do figure them out, that doesn't guarantee you're always going to know how to get them to behave.

Recently I've been in a battle against large, messy, unwieldy style sheets. I always start out so neatly, organizing my rules by selector and carefully keeping track of them. Then sometime around 3 a.m. one morning, the neatness wears off. I can't remember if I've already written a rule similar to what I need, and frankly I've stopped caring. The heck with it, I grumble, let's just write a new rule and toss it in there.

The other day my 5 year old showed me a picture of a totem pole she'd colored. She pointed out various things, then hesitantly confessed she'd copied one part from her older brother's totem pole. She was pretty surprised when I explained this was perfectly all right--that, in fact, I copy bits and pieces from other people all the time in my work. It's the way we learn.