Alan Coleman

It may sound like a bold claim, but in a small way this book changed my life for the better. Over the last year or so I’ve been trying to implement as much standardised CSS and XHTML code into my web development work as possible. This has been an enjoyable and enlightening experience that has been complemented by a gradual move to PHP / MySQL for my personal stuff. In the early days of the web it was like everyone was building their own car for the very first time, now people like me are waking up to standards compliant code as if we would the idea of tuning up the carburettor to make the machine cleaner and more efficient.

In Web Standards Solutions Dan Cederholm succeeds in bringing a sense of order to some of the paths towards standards compliant and lighter code that have been well documented over the past year or so. The book is broken down into 16 easily digestible chapters that each focus on a different aspect of design, there are workable approaches to each solution that are appraised and documented for their individual merits.

Personally I like the way that the chapters remain autonomous, many markup / scripting / code related books tend to revolve around a large project so you can’t turn to the bits you want to without having to relate back to the start. In that respect the examples can seem very simplistic, but that is where the power lies. Chapter 2 for instance, I’ve always used headings (h1, h2…) but have never really had their importance laid bare in a simple manner – now it all makes sense and I can implement accordingly. The same goes for lists, “Evil” tables and other elements.

Essentially what we’re dealing with here is a book that champions the merits of CSS, it does this by not trying to achieve to much and by leaving the real work to the reader, which I think is clever. It also demonstrates that there’s still life left in the book for this sort of thing, whilst all this information is available online this is a neat package that has a beginning and an end. And most importantly, you can put a bookmark in and read it on the train.

I managed two minutes of Channel 4s Best and Worst Places to Live in the UK before switching to the refuge of the Champions League.

Middle class murmurings of chav culture have been gathering pace and acceptability over the past year. This program marks a point at which the prejudice seems to break free from its liberal ties, enabling it to flower into a phenomenon for the smug amongst us to smile openly at.

Self satisfied property experts Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer happily list the ten worst places to live in the country, they do so knowing that the people watching who call these places home can have no answer to their humiliating tone. Easington in County Durham is a prime example coming in at number 10 as one of the 88 most deprived areas in the country. While Phil Spencer happily lists the terrible education as a bad point, he neglects to mention the closure of the local colliery in 1993 as the cause of the deprivation.

It’s almost as if Channel 4 are championing the causes of Conservatism and New Labour as the providers of this clear cut divide. Enabling their target audience to make a failsafe and informed decision about their next greed inspired purchase.

It’s not just a bad concept either, the programming itself is shockingly bad in its makeup and production. For the ten worst, the viewer is bombarded with images of council estates, football shirts, graffiti and satellite dishes as the epitome of bad living. All accompanied by laughably bad hip-hop, as if black music and culture is somehow synonymous with bad house prices and those all important GCSE results. For the ten best it’s hanging baskets, leafy streets and pleasant white indie music. The embodiment of good fortune and everything to which we are supposed to aspire.

This exercise transforms a couple of fairly average TV presenters into a pair of opportunistic fucking superior students. It serves no purpose other than to reaffirm the educated classes of their privileged birth right at the expense of those less fortunate. As simplistic as it is justifiable.

This is not the self deprecating and witty middle classes that we love to mock at the Guardian. This is the reactionary brand showing their selfish and repugnant colours. Horrible. Horrible. Horrible.

On a more positive note, for their most recent album Some Cities, Doves recorded a song about one of the ten worst called, Shadows of Salford. There is a reason that people don’t write songs about the commuter hell that is Guilford, or the tedious boredom of Stratford upon Avon.

I’ve been listening to the quality sound of Martha Reeves and the Vandellas recently. Some of these tracks have to be amongst the best recordings ever made and it must have been fantastic to have been around when this stuff was released. The optimism involved in the way these records sound is almost overwhelming, as is the dignified look of fun and style of the many posed pictures available.

For me, favourite tracks are Heatwave, Quicksand, and Honey Love, in no particular order. All of these tracks were released like pop music is today and must have improved so much with time. You also get the feeling that their confidence in what they were doing was such that they didn’t need to take themselves too seriously.

Right now there is a certain sound missing from pop music that is needed to mark a point in history, there’s nothing good enough to separate ‘now’ from the previous or next several years. We’re definitely in the trough of a wave, we know that because all the old music is sounding so good.

There are some songs that Virgin play incessantly, one of those is a track that I’ve hated for as long as I can remember. It’s called Mr Blue Sky and it’s by a band called ELO, you’ve probably had the misfortune of hearing it recently on Virgin, or in the past being played by twats like Dave Lee Travis or Mike Reed.

For me it sums up everything that is endemically evil about modern, western and popular music. Firstly there is that disgusting saccharine melody that sounds as though it’s been written by that head waggling git Paul McCartney and a team of gay accountants from Buckinghamshire. Truly awful. It’s so bad that it makes the Frog chorus at Sunday school sound like a night on the piss with The Clash.

It doesn’t end there either, the truly revolting tune and chorus somehow redeem themselves when one considers the production involved. Beatlesque strings a decade out of date with what can only be described as the local parish choir singing their own rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody (Which is actually the worst song ever recorded to tape and can wait for another day).

It’s listened to exclusively by men who think Jeremy Clarkson is cool, who play air guitar at the traffic lights and say, “They don’t write them like this anymore kids!”. No they don’t, thank fuck.

The mere existence of Mr Blue Sky is damning evidence of how far Rock and Roll, or Pop music in general, can disappear up the human arse.

A genuinely stomach churning experience.