Something that occurred to me not too long ago:

Once you start thinking of furniture as a type of computer hardware,it becomes much easier to talk yourself into buying a decent deskchair.

In some sense it is completely absurd how many computer people arewilling to pay several hundred dollars for a good monitor (LCD or CRT),but will balk at spending even a hundred dollars for a comfortablechair. (In another sense, it is very human; we're not exactly entirelyrational creatures.)

On the WHATWG mailing list, Henri Sivonen put together a marvelous andconcise summary of the whole problem with XHTML in today's world, andwhy XHTML advocates usually irritate me. I'm not going to quote anything;just read the whole thing here .

(From Sam Ruby , who linkedto an Ian Hickson WHATWG mailing list message that quoted HenriSivonen's message.)

Something that crystallized in the process of writing the earlierBourne shell quoting entry is that #ifdef abuseleads to bad results for the same fundamental reason that multiplelevels of escaping are bad: after a certain point, people can no longerclearly see what the real code will look like.

When you can't see what the code looks like, it's really hard to makesensible changes; either you make blind stabs or you have to carefullyreconstruct the actual code, usually by hand. Either process is error