On a lighter note

  • He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.

    Abraham Lincoln

Dumb Things I Wonder About

< The IT Crowd
Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke >

  • Why do I back up my computer, rather than back it down (or even copy or duplicate it)?
  • Why are hexadecimal colors written with both numbers and letters—did they realize when they got to 9, "Oops, gotta' go to letters... We forgot forest green!"
  • How can anything not be Beta on the web?
  • Why is "front-end" hyphenated and "backend" isn't?
  • Why don't Apple notebooks have a forward delete button?
  • Why does an HTML page have a head, header and headings—couldn't they come up with another root word?
  • Why is an <a> called an anchor instead of, say, a link or target?
  • While I appreciate the gesture, why didn't Microsoft spend those man-hours on compatability instead of conditional comments?
  • Is the person who came up with the terms "selector," "declaration" and "attribute" still chuckling malevolently to himself?

What do you wonder about?

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Noted on 8 April 2007 in

Comments

Noted by barbex on April 10, 2007

I recently wondered if the guys who did the original css spec were actually joking.
You know like the "throwaway" design that you show the customer to have him pick your "good" design. And then the client looks at the "bad" design and says something like: "I like this, it's different!" and you are left quietly wheeping.

With all the inconsistency and the confusing wording (relative means absolute and absolute means more relative....) I wonder if there was actually a better spec in the making but noone got around to it....

And I'm only half kidding...

By the way, something is wrong with your comment verification. Once I made a mistake, like not putting the http in front of the URL, I can not change it, it keeps going back to my first entry and then complaining about it and so on and so forth. I have to uncheck the "Save my comment...." to get past it.