Q. Sup?

A. Hey.

Q. What do you have against Internet Explorer?

A. As a web developer who wants to see the Internet make some progress, a lot. I don't cater to Microsoft's browser because it hasn't had any significant improvements in half a decade, which is forever in Internet terms. It's way outdated and simply doesn't support a lot of the stuff I want to do on this website. Furthermore, it's so buggy, just making the page look okay in Internet Explorer would require adding a heck of a lot more code to my webpages and a ton of hacks. Sorry, but I'm not going to put in that much effort for an ancient browser no one in their right mind should be using anyway.

Q. Why does the navigation menu look kind of screwy in Opera?

A. That's an Opera bug related to positioning inside a table-cell element. It looks better in the Opera 9 preview, although it isn't completely fixed yet. Firefox, Safari, and Konqueror don't have this issue.

Q. What's with that Nazi symbol in the corner?

A. That isn't a Nazi symbol. It's four Ns arranged in an X shape, as in Nanobox. I am not in any way affiliated with the Nazi party, nor do I believe in its philosophies.

Q. I want to lick you.

A. Sorry, no licking allowed.

Q. Seriously, what do you have against Internet Explorer?

A. Sheesh, this is just my personal site. I'm not being too picky; I just don't clutter my code with hacks just to accomodate for a browser that was designed to display pages differently. Internet Explorer 7 will be an improvement. I don't yet know if my site will work in it, but if it supports CSS child selectors and CSS table displays, it should look a lot better than it does now.

Q. I disagree with you.

A. I don't really care.

Q. Does this site have to be so red?

A. Nope. In any modern browser (read: almost anything but Internet Explorer), you can select from multiple available styles on this website. Go to your View menu, and go down to Page Style or Style. From there, you'll have a list of styles to choose from. Firefox and Opera currently don't remember your settings from page to page, unfortunately, but they plan to add that in a later version.

Q. The lighting on your site is screwed up. Design elements that are clearly meant to look raised aren't casting shadows in the right direction.

A. I know. Isn't it neat?

Q. What powers your site?

A. A basic LAMP setup and my own scripts, for the most part. The message boards run on phpBB and the weblog runs on a hybrid of Blogger and my own PHP scripts. The Files section of my site runs on my very own Downy WebFront system, as do all newsfeeds on my site.

Q. What is Downy WebFront?

A. Basically, I had the idea that any information souce should be easily available in any desired format. That's what Downy WebFront attempts to achieve. It consists of dirloaders and viewers that are glued together by the Downy core. Dirloaders are what load up the information from some data source on the website, and they are very easy to add for any type of data source. For example, the Files section of my site uses the filesystem dirloader, the message boards use the phpBB dirloader, my weblog uses the custom-made Nano See, Nano Do dirloader, and so forth. Then, the information is sorted into a standard format and delivered to the viewer. The viewer is what outputs the document the user sees. My Files section uses the custom-made Nanobox viewer, and the RSS 1, RSS 2, and Atom 0.3 viewers are used throughout my website for the newsfeeds. The process isn't quite as simple as that, but that's the gist of it. I started developing Downy WebFront around the middle of 2004 and planned to publicly release it, but I never quite got it finished and packaged up for deployment. Maybe some day.

Q. What does this have to do with a fabric softener?

A. Nothing. I named it after the downy woodpecker, a bird that lives in my hometown.

Q. What does this have to do with a woodpecker?

A. Quiet, you.

Q. What powers your search engine?

A. My own system. It crawls my website on a daily basis, accessing the pages in much the same way that any external web crawler would. This takes longer to crawl, but allows for much more flexibility and comprehensiveness. The search engine uses a PageRank-like system where a document's power is determined by how many pages link to it, and then each page awards a number of points to the documents it links to based on its power. Those points determine the final importance of the document. When a user enters a search query, the results are ordered based on general importance and over a dozen other factors. The search engine takes into account various forms of meta data in the document, text in the links to the document, and position of keywords in the document. And yes, it follows the robots.txt standard. Both the crawler and the search engine itself were made in PHP and MySQL. Since the website was moved to a different server, I haven't gotten around to getting my search engine set up, so I just use Google now.

Q. Why do you develop that standards support page? Is it for the money? It' for the money, isn't it?

A. I haven't made a penny off of that page (although I wouldn't mind a little cash for my troubles). I decided to make it for two reasons: First, all of the other standards support resources out there seem to be either outdated, incomplete, or full of errors. I wanted something I could manage myself and make sure it stays current and correct. Second, and the reason that it looks similar to my Internet Explorer is dangerous page, I wanted something I could easily refer people to to show how the various browsers compare. Competition is good for the growth of technology, but when you're rooting a browser on, it would help if you knew the facts rather than basing your impression of a browser's standards support purely on personal experience.

Q. How would you deal with the issue of gay marriage?

A. I get this a lot. Well not really, but shush. I don't believe the government should recognize same sex marriage. I also don't believe the government should recognize opposite sex marriage. Marriage should remain entirely a religious issue, not a legal issue. The government should pull clear from marriage and anything to do with it. Instead, we should create a separate entity that deals more directly with the issues. What rights do we currently give married couples, and under what general conditions is it logical to give those rights? I think it has more to do with trust and symbiosis than anything else. Can homosexuals not trust each other or live symbiotically? Of course they can. Heck, I can trust and live symbiotically with a few best friends, completely regardless of love or sexual attraction, or lack thereof. I believe that, for the most part, it makes sense to give same sex couples the same rights and benefits as opposite sex couples. All such relationships, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, quantity, etc. should have the right to a civil union under the same terms, and groups should only be singled out with different rules if legitimate scientific studies conclusively determine that the group necessarily has a significant inherent difference that is relevant to the nature of the concerned right or benefit, which no legitimate study thus far has concluded. Also, I don't care if a marriage and a civil union supposedly have all of the same rights and benefits in a given jurisdiction, they are still separate and separate is inherently unequal. And by the way, no I am not homosexual.

Q. Are you homosexual?

A. No.

Q. Have you designed any Kirby-related shirts?

A. Why yes, I have. However, those images were just photoshopped and you can't get them as actual shirts. Perhaps I should get a cafepress account sometime.