I haven't checked, but I think I've probably lost a lot of users over the past few months as I've gone from talking about tech occasionally to pretty much never. If I were to keep talking about tech all the time, it wouldn't be genuine. I'd be Scobeling my way to more inbound links. That mattered to me quite a bit in the past, and I played that you-link-to-me-and-I'll-link-to-you game. I don't play it anymore because it's one of the worst generators of noise on the net - my corner of it, anyway. If I link to you nowadays, it's because I really, really want to. I still usually find out about inbound links through Technorati, so it's not like I'm out there searching every blog in the universe for the things. Without Technorati, I probably wouldn't link out at all. Unless it was to people like Yuvi and Astrid, for example, who are highly creative, utterly bizarre people, both of whom I wish lived in my neighborhood.

I'm linking out today. Oh, yeah. You know it. Here it comes. Uh-huh. Booyah.

Back in March of 2004, I got sick of the voodoo of CSS. It was like this horrible declarative language (if that description is even remotely appropriate) designed with the aesthetics of Perl and implemented by HTML hackers (if "hackers" is even remotely appropriate). I hate it. I really, really, really, really, really hate it. Trying to find the sense of it is like alphabetizing your feces.

What I hated most was the insane lack of reusability. Unless you're a CSS apologist who's managed to find some amazing documentation out there that untangles just what in the hell the "Cascading" part of CSS means, you're going to use only just enough of CSS to get the job done. That's enough by itself to leave you with the QWERTY layout tattooed backwards on your face from all the pounding.

When I got tired of seeing the home row staring back at me when I looked in the mirror, I took it upon myself to commit the unholiest of acts possible in the hardcore, uptight, and pedantic world of the ubergeek.

As the title of the post indicates, I decided that blind adherence to standards, regardless of how vomitous the standardized tech in question might be, is limiting and, oh yeah, stupid.

I wrote a quick and dirty handler that was a rough go at adding variables to CSS. I used a syntax that was in the spirit of CSS. Ultimately, it was a simple find-and-replace job, but that simple find-and-replace job allowed me to use CSS in a way that didn't suck dog balls.

Follow this link to the original post if you're interested.

Since then, I've received one of the nicest geeky compliments I could hope for. When I put the handler together, I'll admit, I was disappointed at how much of a difference it didn't seem to make in other peoples' lives. A few people thought it was interesting, but there was minimal traction for the little guy.

In the past couple months, I've gotten email from a couple guys, both of whom were stoked about that old handler. These two guys - Troy Goode and Gabe Moothart - took the original, pushed it out to Codeplex, made improvements, and then threw in a couple bug fixes (the handler is so simple that there isn't a lot of room for bugs).

'Course, not everybody's so thrilled. Read the DotNetKicks comments on the story to meet the opposition. Not a lot of opposition, mind you, but representative of what I got back in 2004. I think my favorite comment is "This seems like something you shouldn't do." To the point, and well argued. Except, no. That's my argument in return.

On a little tangent, geeks are often so terrified of what they see as tangling with standards. Another comment in the DotNetKicks thread was: "Finding this while maintaining a project would be like finding cobol in an HTML file."

The hell it would. I won't argue with the analogy, as it's so disconnected from the way the handler works that it'd require a point by point explanation of what doesn't map rather than refuting the implicit arguments.

As was pointed out in the same thread, this handler outputs standard CSS. It's about as strange as an ASPX page (wherein, for the ol' record, as Ian could tell you [his top secret MySpace profile], it would be perfectly reasonable to find some Cobol).

If it helps you get the job done, and if it's documented, and if it's not especially complicated, then I don't see what's so bad about it. It's not like anybody else is going to stop CSS from sucking. If you want to see something not get done, then hand it to a committee.

Thassaboutit. Thanks, guys, for resurrecting this little bit of code. I was proud of it back when. It seemed like an easy way to help myself and anybody else with the backward-QWERTY-tattoo :)