It is pretty easy to preach web standards as a contractor or a freelancer with 10 page web sites as projects. It is also pretty easy to keep our blogs clean and advertise best practise web design and information architecture with them.

It is pretty darn impossible to get the same ideas implemented in huge projects, and the more people involved, the more will be cut on best practice ideas. Many a time I delivered clean, valid and flexible templates to see months later down the line that they have been butchered.

Robert Nyman wonders about this issue in his post Why do we have to fight and in the best manner of remote commenting some good ideas have been expressed about it over at Roger Johansson’s.

Off to yet another round in the ring…

The beep has a nice new test for you to find out what kind of personality you are.

Allegedly I am a big thinker

Philipp Lenssen of google blogoscope has published a while ago truth I had known for a long time now Good programmers are lazy and dumb. I keep telling my developers that you don’t impress me by staying in the office late, you impress me by doing the 8 hour job in 6 hours with proper documentation. Then you can go home for all I care.

Most of my development happens because I don’t want to repeat things. EasyCMS was built to allow me quick changes to a prototype, EasyNav to allow clients using contribute to edit the navigation.

Working with Mint I was missing an option to collapse the different panes when I don’t want to read them.

Some hacking later, I wrote a script that automatically allows you to collapse and expand a table by activating its footer. As a visual indicator, the script adds an image to the footer (this also allows keyboard access).

It is a work in progress and I need your help to fix it for Opera and get rid of a weird Firefox issue.

See the collapsible tables demo

Following a request on the list, where a subscriber had unsuccessfully searched for an online gallery of styled data tables, I came up with the following idea:

http://icant.co.uk/csstablegallery/

It is pretty much like csszengarden, only for a single marked up data table.

What I need now is people participating with an own style for the data table. You can submit it directly on the site and I will check through them when I come back from a training in 3 days, so please don’t expect to see things appearing immediately.