I just got an email that made me laugh:

Hello there. I just noticed your W3C validation thingy at the bottom of this
page, and I thought “yay, finally someone that takes his work seriously!”. But no…
When I clicked it I noticed that your page hasnt passed the W3C validation at all!
There’s even errors on this contactpage! It’d please me very much if you’d correct
the errors, as it is always nice with well-coded pages, but if you refuse to do so I
must ask you to remove your W3C mark as it is “fake”.

The page is question is onlinetools.org, which hasn’t been updated for almost one and a half years, as I put my energy into writing articles and content editing evolt.org instead.

I wonder now what I should do? Will my girlfriend still love me when he takes away my w3c button? Will I go to hell? Is there any way I can ask for forgiveness?

I am a huge advocate of web standards, and while it is true that you should practise what you preach emails like the one above are just ridiculous. There are thousands of web sites out there that take web standards very seriously indeed, however most of them are blogs and private sites.

If you want to evangelise better web design, then complain to companies when you cannot use their sites or when they totally mess up in a standards compliant browser. Preaching to the converted or going “neener neener” at small mistakes of people who mean well doesn’t help anybody.

Developers understand, CMS vendors and company managers don’t.

The gall of some people is just unbelievable. I am getting spammed in the comments here with faked emails. The messages end in “If you don’t want us to comment here, email us at $fakedemail”.
Why is it that free options just don’t get any respect?

A lot of web designers complain about CSS lacking constants you could define once and reuse throughout the CSS document. CSS was not meant for that and does not support it.
What you can do though is use a server side language to simulate a CSS file by setting the appropriate header. However, this means you need to stick to the language syntax.

Playing with that idea, I came up with a small PHP script that parses any CSS given to it via a variable and reads and replaces the defined constants in the CSS.

This page shows how it can be used. You apply the CSS with the invalid constants syntax by looping it through the PHP script:

$colour1 = '#999';
$colour2 = '#363';
$colour4 = '#696';
$colour3 = '#cfc';

And you can use them throughout the whole CSS document:

#footer{
padding:.2em .5em;
margin:0;
background:$colour1;
}

Any improvements?

I am aware that this is butchering the idea of CSS as presentation only, and means you design invalid CSS in the raw form, but it fills a gap and it might make CSS maintenance a bit easier. You can still validate your CSS by looping it through the script:
http://icant.co.uk/articles/cssconstants/cssconst.php?c=demo.css.

My personal copy of Norton Internet Security arrived. Jesus I hate all that installing and rebooting. Maybe I just switch to linux soon.

It was sunny and nice today, so I decided to buy a bicycle and explore the city. London seems to be 90% uphill, I know that now.

When I came back I got an email from my ISP about a possible Virus infection, although I got AVG Free Edition running. I checked with the Symantec online checker, and suprise surprise, some trojans were there. Now I ordered my suite and feel like asking Microsoft to sponsor it. The only reason I deal with this crap instead of installing linux and get it over with is that my visitors and clients do use windows, and I need to replicate their environment to see where bugs occur. Now, as Microsoft is able to sell the most, partly because the OS is so easy to extend with some programming knowledge, they should also pay for us to keep it secure. Personally I really don’t see why anyone would write a virus for Windows, other than getting money for it or working for an antivirus company. There is no challenge to it…