Dave Shea institutes a form of comment moderation; predictable firestorm ensues. Dave also redesigned his site. switching to black text on a white background, with plenty of whitespace. The default font also looks bigger and clearer to me, although that could be an illusion — I haven’t really looked at the old and new stylesheets side by side. Overall, I think it looks great, but I’m biased towards higher contrast and larger fonts. I’ve been thinking about writing a song about this, actually…

I like big TEXT and I cannot lie
You other designers can’t deny…

Eh, well, it needs some work.

In Other Markup-related News: Peter-Paul Koch has a great article on cleaning up inline JavaScript in favor of using simple DOM hooks instead. Good stuff. Often irascible but always entertaining, Peter-Paul Koch is like the Joe Clark of JavaScript. You have to give PPK credit — if he finds it necessary to add a non-standard replace attribute to his code, he’ll do it, and the hell with validation if it gets in the way of his work. In this day and age, this is quite the bold position. After all, these days the issues seem to revolve around such things as the semantic meaning of the <div> element and how many <h1> elements can dance on the head of a pin are allowed on a single webpage. Heck, you can’t even kinda sorta make the suggestion that maybe simple structure tables might be useful under some circumstances without getting lambasted by markup purists. So you’ve got to respect someone who uses their markup to actually, you know, solve problems. PPK, my hat is off to you.