
Web Design
Mint.com, 3 yrs & $170 million!
Aaron Patzer on how he built his company in three years to exit with $170 million from who else but Intuit. What a great exit, reminds me of iStockPhoto and the $50 million they exited with by creating the field of Micro Stock Photography.
xHTML, HTML5 or back to HTML4.01
There’s an interesting discussion going on about the merits of one over the other, here’s Dave Shea’s view, and here’s Cameron Moll’s take on it…
I’ve been using xHTML for a long time, but these two articles make a very strong case for reverting back to HTML4.01. I’m not quite convinced yet, I like closing my tags dammit! There’s a neatness to it, that’s the obsessive compulsive side of me! But in reality, using WordPress and Drupal as much as I do I don’t see any benefit in moving back at this point, who has the time anyway. I’ll keep my clean code and will go straight to HTML5, when….that comes out.
Active denial of taste & 44 shades of blue
Here’s a great article about the absence of design and taste at google: “The extreme Google brain by Joe Clark“. As an earlier reference here’s Doug Bowman’s post on why he quit and the 44 shades of blue, lol.
Transparency at the new Whitehouse.gov
Kottke made an interesting post about the differences between the old and new Whitehouse.gov websites robots.txt files yesterday. Robots.txt files tell search engines what to include or not to include in their index.
The new one is :
User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes/
an example from the old one:
Disallow: /earmarks/search
Disallow: /earmarks/query.html
2400 lines of disallows, more over on Kottke’s post.
I wonder if it really alludes to transparency on their part or just a hurry from the dev’s to get the website up in time.