Journal of CmdrTaco (1): If you visit Slashcode.com you will notice that it is now running a brand spanking new CSS template ... I expect that soon after [implementing it for slashdot] we'll actually be ready to give the tired old design a facelift. Slashdot is one of those sites that evangelists have frequently recreated in CSS/XHTML as a proof of concept, along with Google, Amazon, etc. For a geek website, it's been slightly surprising that they never actually accepted any of those designs for use; or at least did it themselves.

But then, it's not really that surprising. It seems that the /. crew are mostly coder types and not designers or web developers (or journos, for that matter). Coders are not web developers and rarely produce best-practice markup since their attention is on the application. The markup their applications spit out is generally an afterthought so that the plebs who can't just read the source code can actually see something.

There is nothing actually wrong with that so long as there is a web developer working alongside the coder. But, sadly, most of the world's management is yet to understand that they need to pay someone to do the interface.

So anyway, well done to Slashdot for coming around the CSS way of life. I hope they reduce page weight, save bandwidth and get better search ranking; not to mention all the other benefits :)