Will It Go Round In Circles

Monday, Nov. 27, 2006 - 6:50 a.m.

It's finally really feeling like winter here in San Francisco. There's rain that feels like icy needles, and cold breezes from Alaska.

Thank goodness I can use the Internet to listen to people like Ian Maurice in Brisbane and be reassured that summertime never really quite disappears from the planet.

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Am I the only one out there who doesn't give a tin whistle what else Michael Richards has to say?

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Not sure why this is a big deal...

The teenage star of a film about the Nativity is missing its Vatican premiere because she is expecting a baby with her 19-year-old partner. New Zealander Keisha Castle-Hughes, 16, who was nominated for an Oscar for her role in Whale Rider, plays Mary.

The premiere of The Nativity Story, expected to be attended by 7,000 people, will take place in the Vatican's Paul VI Hall, which is used for Sunday masses when they are not held outside in St Peter's Square. The film was shot partly in Matera, Italy, the same location used for Mel Gibson's The Passion of The Christ.

I have to wonder, though, who advised her to stay away.

I mean, face it, kids -- were there really thousands of young girls who threw away their 'WWKCHD?' bracelets?

Didn't think so.

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Went a couple of rounds Sunday night with Old Buddy Dave.

When he first began his diary, he came to me and asked me if I would oversee the design and help him learn how to maintain his website here on Diaryland, and I agreed to it. I essentially hoisted my own site's design, which I've been repeatedly told is classic and simple and easy on the eye, and I set it up over at Dave's place, and that was that. My logic was that if it's not broken, don't fix it. Mind you, almost no other web designers actually bear this in mind these days, and prefer flashy graphics and glacial load times versus the ease of simplicity, which is mystifying to me. In my eleven years of presence on the World Wide Web, I have found that KISS is pretty much the best way to achieve maximum dispersion for any website.

This has been my design philosophy from pretty much Day One. No excessive template graphics, no animated GIFs, no fonts other than the kind that have been used in books (due to the fact that this is what we are psychologically used to seeing for the last five hundred years or so) and no non-standard HTML By doing that, and keeping it streamlined and classic, the websites I have overseen remained fast, easy to load, and -- in the true tradition of what Tim Berners-Lee was hoping to achieve -- universally accessible.

Once I design a website, I have a policy. And this has also been my policy from Day One: If you are going to link to me and credit me as the designer of your site -- don't change my design. AT ALL. If you change the original design I created, then what that means is, I am no longer the designer of your website -- you are. You guys know I'm a stickler about credit where credit is due. You have the right to do anything you want with your website. It's YOUR website.

But once you make changes to the design I provided for you -- especially changes that depart radically from my design philosophy -- I have the right to have my name removed as designer. No harm, no foul -- since it's not my design anymore, I should not receive the credit for doing the site. (And for whatever this is worth, it's pointless to say 'Original Design By' and include my name, because since it's no longer in its original configuration, nobody can see what I created in the first place.)

Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if some of you out there thought I was too uptight about this.

But this is one of the few areas of my life that is structured in such a 'take it or leave it' format.

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So this is what happened Sunday night with Old Buddy Dave.

Six months ago when he started his own Diary, he approached me and asked me to please design his site, and please help him with his HTML and please be available to fix things if he couldn't figure out how to fix it himself, and just generally all of the usual things a new Web participant usually asks. Of course I said yes. I explained my policy, he understood, and away we went, with me providing design and upkeep, and him providing some of the best writing I've seen in a blog in a very long time.

Over the course of the next six months, he's become more proficient at web work, which is good. He added an animated GIF to his site, and he changed the font. It's his right to do this, because it's his site -- but since the changes he made were a departure from my particular design philosophy, I recently said that I wanted my name taken off of his site as designer. He'd been doing the design and changing it enough so that it was no longer what I'd done. In fact, he'd actually disregarded the design advice he'd asked me for, so I *really* figured it was time to take my name off as designer.

OBDave, however, still wanted to credit me.

So -- we came to an excellent compromise, and if you want to go see what he insisted on for me, creditwise -- go have a look. :-)

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That's it, I think. Have a Monday.

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