A belated Happy New Year to you and a hope that 2005 brings all that you could possibly want from it – I’m expecting a busy and rewarding year ahead.

News

Heather Powazek Champ and Derek Powazek have just released the first issue of JPG Magazine.

Scientific progress goes ‘boink’

The start of the new year has seen me wanting to wave a new broom through wasabicube and through the on-line tools and sites I’ve developed at work.

Keeping my eye on the Web Standards Group mailing list, I’ve become acutely aware of the burgeoning skill levels, in both CSS and markup, being displayed by the web development community. With an increased uptake of the web standards message and the associated discussion that engenders, a lot of techniques are becoming well known and well understood.

It turns out that a great wodge of the methods I used in the “old days” of standards-based layout have become dated and some would say we were naïve to have used them in the first place. I’ve cast a critical eye over my code and have been shocked to find a high level of <div>itis and class bloom. To paraphrase someone on the list, the other day, using divs and spans with CSS styling is just so 2001!

So, the year so far has been dedicated to pulling the markup and CSS from the primordial standards soup, cleaning it up and paring it down. This is time-consuming but ultimately rewarding stuff.

I intend to write about these exploits in the near future as I’m sure they’ll provide amusement if not a little education.