For similar reasons to this post, this post is annoying. And, to make sure my example is all cool and deconstructionist, this very post you’re reading would annoy me were I reading it and not writing it.

Why?

Because I don’t tell you much about what I’m linking to or why it’s interesting enough that you should read it. If you’re going to have a post that merely points out other people’s material on the Web rather than using it as a springboard for your own thoughts or writing your own piece from whole cloth, you should function as a mediating shopper and let me know why I, as a busy reader, should bother to visit the pages to which you link.

There’s nobody I trust well enough to visit every link they give me just on their say so, particularly on a busy day. I don’t want to waste time trying to figure out what a post is talking about–either yours or the one you’re linking to.

Some don’t require much description, and some would be spoiled by too much description: for example, funny links like the a site about the new map of the US.

But in general, tell me what it’s about, something of what it says, and what’s interesting about it and why I should read further.

As someone who writes software for a living, I can tell you that the concept of patents on software needs a serious revision at a minimum and may be completely useless for the purposes the Founders of the USA intended, quite early in the Constitution: Article 1, Section 8–“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”.

The key bit for software patents is the rationale: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” which provided a test for such laws: do they, in fact, help progress? I’m prepared to even accept that non-obvious fundamental algorithms might be patentable, such as the infamous LZW patent.

The problem is that more and more patents look like Amazon.com’s even-more-infamous one-click patent, in which the ability to remember who you are on a Web site and click a single button to order and ship to the address on record was considered non-obvious and something that needed to be protected for 17 years.

Bullshit. Given those requirements, which aren’t exactly genius-level, I could come up with half-a-dozen ways to implement it, all of which would infringe on Amazon.com’s patent–and I’m not going to shatter records with my programming ability any time soon. Fortunately it’s not actually that bad–most people aren’t stupid enough to let strangers who come to the computer behind them commit them to buying anything.

Nonetheless, if you combine the two: the obviousness of the Amazon.com patent with the unenforced-until-the-last-hour nature of the LZW patent, you create a dangerous situation. Say I create a nifty feature for our content management platform that happens to infringe on a patent for, say, making widgets turn green when you click a form button. It’s pretty trivial behavior. Now say there’s some law firm collecting patents out there who are waiting until years into the patent to make sure that as many people as possible are infringing before they announce that anyone using it will have to not pay to continue to use the feature but will also have to pay them back royalties. Microsoft can fight this, as they have deep pockets (and, if the company threatening them actually makes stuff, they can counter-threaten with their own patent horde).

But what about small companies who do most of the innovation in software? We don’t have that choice. Not only will we not be able to fight it, but we don’t have patents of our own (not worth it, and we give our code away anyway, being paid instead for implementation and customization). And if it’s a law firm that has no products, our having patents would be no defense: they don’t make anything so they can’t be infringing.

That has a distinct chilling effect on innovation, and harms the progress of science and useful arts. Remember, lawyers don’t actually make anything, and the service they provide is always a cost.

Until this is all cleared up, it’s best that software patents be eliminated altogether. This is still possible in Europe, and if Europe stops them it will put pressure on the US to reform their ways. So I urge you to support this organization and link to it if you have a blog or Web site:

You can read from better programmers than I why this is a very bad and dangerous idea, from the perspective of your standard of living. Even if you don’t use computers directly, the people you buy from or interact with do.

If I get what I ask for, I will never use another table for layout purposes ever. I swear on your grave (this is to align the incentives properly). I want a CSS 3-column layout that does all of the following:

1. Puts the content div first.
2. Allows the content div to expand.
3. Is fluid (i.e., if the browser window expands, so does the width of the page).
4. Allows me to fix the width of the outside columns.
5. Has a header and footer that expand the width of the content plus two columns.
6. There must be no space among the columns or between the columns and the header or footer.
7. I must be able to specify different background colors for the header, the footer, and each of the three columns.
8. It must not rely on images to make the effect occur (bandwidth, people–plus I need to be able to edit this sucker without Photoshop).
9. It must be pixel-perfect on IE 5.5+, Safari 1.0+, and Mozilla 1.0+ (and associated browsers using that version of Gecko).
10. It must be legible in IE 5.x for Mac.
11. The content of each column must align to the top at least.
12. The column background colors must extend to the bottom of the page.
13. Oh, and one more thing: it must not matter which column is longest.

That’s it. That is trivial to do with a single table (styled, of course, with CSS), but I’ve been searching several resources and I can’t find one that does all of that. Remember, the solution must hit each and every one of those points or I just can’t replicate the designs I get in Photoshop, and asking me to get the designer to change or the project manager to understand or the client to accept limitations does no good–trust me, I’ve tried.

I don’t even require that I be able to vertically center or bottom-align the content. Top-aligned is fine. It doesn’t have to work in Netscape 4.x. It doesn’t have to work in IE 5.0. I can give all that up in return for giving up the necessity of left-to-right ordering of tables plus their misleading semantics.

As a guy who creates Web sites for a living and has occasionally had his chops gently busted about quality control, things like this strangely make me feel better. This is what I saw when I tried to go to Amazon.com just now:

Sometimes even Amazon frickin’ .com has bad days.

block-align: bottom

Just a way to make sure that block-level items are glued to the bottom of their containing element, however high that element may or may not be. That would solve me having to stick in tables with valign="bottom".

All I found during my Google search before deciding that profitability was the better part of discretion and discretion was the better part of standards compliance were a bunch of forums with people asking, “how do I do this?” and other people saying, “it should work this way,” and still other people saying, “Except in $BROWSER.”