webdesign as poetry

from “Does anyone else who doesn’t work with CSS on a regular basis feel like a champ whenever they get it to work?”:

No, I just feel disappointment and dissatisfaction with the compromises in design and elegance I had to make in order to get it to work. Then I feel annoyed at the misguided people who designed it, and move on to feeling powerless because being annoyed at the CSS working group is mostly futile.

After a moment I return to my work. I scroll down the page, and see some background images in my beautiful CSS design get corrupted by a graphics driver bug. While pointlessly complaining about it on a social networking site, a poorly designed browser interface causes me to accidentally lose my comment and have to type it again. I become unhappy with the fact that one of the world’s major application platforms is a messy hack based on a hypertext publishing system which is doing something it was never designed for.

By the end of the day I’ve hated Firefox, GTK, X11, OpenGL, my graphics driver, Linux, open source software in general, proprietary software in general, Intel, IBM, my motherboard, Toshiba, Microsoft, some anonymous Chinese hardware manufacturers, ACPI, PCI, x86, and basically everything else down to the smallest detail of silicon.

Then I stop and observe with some satisfaction that, somewhere deep inside my excessively complex CPU, there exists an electron. Its wavefunction spreads out, evolves over time, and interacts with others in a mathematically well-defined way. No matter how much humans screw things up on top of it, that electron I’m contemplating is perfect and incorruptible.

Sometimes I think we should just start again and fix all our mistakes. Then I realise we’d probably screw things up at least as badly the second time. I give up on humanity, leave my computer, and lie on my bed getting nothing done.

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