Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com

à http://www.alistapart.com/stories/tohell/helltest.html

It’s an slightly older article, but it touches on things that we may take for granted (or forget all together) as we create our sites:

• There’s more to the web than just HTML
• CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is one of the most powerful, widely supported and totally underused technologies on the net
• Pretty Printing of Web Pages is possible, and included in CSS.  (Check out the link above and do a Print Preview to see the menu disappear!)
• Writing browser-specific javascript or server side sniffing code is adding complexity to an already complicated project

Some good quotes:

• “This is not about graphic design. It's about the separation of style from content, which will allow us to do amazing things. Like redesign an entire site in hours instead of months. Stop authoring and debugging stupid, browser-specific markup. And support non-traditional browsers, from Palm Pilots™ to Braille readers, without building multiple versions of every page. All pretty good stuff.”
• “But My company has ‘standardized’ on a 4.0 browser. - We realize that many of you are stuck in that predicament. Consider this an opportunity to alert your boss or your IT department to the fact that 1997 browsers are holding back the web. Make them think upgrading was their own idea. That often helps.”

And for those who insist on 4.0 browsers, there’s a movement to start redirecting people to this page if they are running a non-compliant (<=1997) browser:

http://webstandards.org/act/campaign/buc/ (also worth your time)

DevHawk PageLayout Control. Descripion of PageLayout controls used to enforce DevHawk's look and feel [Harry Pierson's DevHawk Weblog]

This notion of ASP.NET Templated User Controls is pretty interesting to me.  What Harry has used them for reminds me what the IBuySpyPortal tried to do with UserControls, except Harry's approach seems cleaner and better separates UI and Logic.

With Yukon on the horizon, I'm thinking about the "unmanaged Yukon equivalent" we have now - Extended Stored Procedures.  I've used them in the past for such cleverness as calling out to Ws Services from within SQL Server and calling back to other boxes in an asychronous Observer-Observable pattern to let folks know about Data Changing for cache clearing events.

Now, no doubt Yukon will be much more robust even hosting in-proc componentry via Application Domains or out of proc via an ASP_WP style worker process, but until then, are Extended Stored Procedures (in VB6 and C++) evil? See http://tinyurl.com/4er4 (Google Groups Post)

It's a special feeling you get when you look at your Referrer Log and see that someone found your Blog by searching for "shmuck"
http://www.davidjanes.com/blogosphere/tools/search?frame=l&search=schmuck