While surfing today i came across an article i was fascinated by this quote of Dave Thomas

Scratching your own itch

The Open Source world embraced this mantra a long time ago — they call it “scratching your own itch.” For the open source developers, it means they get the tools they want, delivered the way they want them. But the benefit goes much deeper.

As the designer or developer of a new application, you’re faced with hundreds of micro-decisions each and every day: blue or green? One table or two? Static or dynamic? Abort or recover? How do we make these decisions? If it’s something we recognize as being important, we might ask. The rest, we guess. And all that guessing builds up a kind of debt in our applications — an interconnected web of assumptions.

As a developer, I hate this. The knowledge of all these small-scale timebombs in the applications I write adds to my stress. Open Source developers, scratching their own itches, don’t suffer this. Because they are their own users, they know the correct answers to 90% of the decisions they have to make. I think this is one of the reasons folks come home after a hard day of coding and then work on open source: It’s relaxing.

Truly it says the spirit of being open…

Spread the light, avoid crackers

Wishing all the most happy and prosperous diwali. Let’s pray the lord to help us realise the pure, eternal and infinite soul deep in ourself and may grant us the all our wishes and also come forward to help those who need our love and care.

Enjoy the diwali …

Well it’s more than a month since my last post. I wasn’t well meanwhile but ‘am back with “Creative” updates…

Last week i got the chance to dwell into some designing stuff. I started with searching for some good photoshop tutorials. Plenty of sites showcased and i picked a nicer one . A very fabulous site i must say. I continued with this tutorial and arrived at following result.

Compass made using photoshop

I made this compass from scratch. It took great amount of effort and time but it was pleasure making it. Did you liked it? Please suggest the improvements. Comments (Improvements and critics too ) are awaited….

I would like to discuss today what according to you are web standards?

• Is is all about validation? If W3C validator validates your page then is your coding proper and correct?
• Is it all about use of proper syntax and semantics?
• Is it all about separating the structure ([X]HTML), presentation(CSS) and behavior(JavaScript) ?
• What it is all about?

Mike Davidson answers like this :

It’s just a reminder that web standards are about a lot more than validation. Web standards are about all the processes involved in publishing information over IP. If you have a big red button at your company that employees press to make their pages live, that’s a standard. It’s your own strange and puzzling standard, but it’s a standard. If someone is going to work at your company, they need to learn how to push the big red button to publish their pages.

So how do we pick what standards to follow when we’re publishing on the web? If we pick standards that nobody else practices or recognizes, the benefit of the standard is limited to our own little world.

Who can we look to for guidance?

First we look to the W3C. We don’t look to them because they have any authority. We don’t look to them because we have to. We look to them because their very charge is to help us and their existence is for our benefit. They are not owned by Microsoft and they are not paid by the NRA.

W3C specifications are usually (but not always) detailed and well-thought out. They give us sets of tags with which to classify our data. They give us proper syntax with which to use these tags. They give us methods of styling our information with external stylesheets. And finally, they give us the ability to add intelligent behavior to our content using the document object model.
After a several days of studying, some people could get a rough handle on the above methods. After several weeks, the same people could probably claim they have intermediate web skills. And after several months, these individuals might have more web skills than anyone in their neighborhood.

So what have these people learned sitting in the closet with their laptop and their O’Reilly book? How to deal with deadlines and workplace personalities? How to integrate art, editorial, and marketing? What web publishing is all about?
Not at all.

They’ve merely learned the building blocks of deploying 0’s and 1’s on the web. That may sound insignificant, but it’s not. It’s more than 99% of the world knows, and probably a good amount of the entire code-writing profession.

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