Web standards for life

Someone asked me how we can take the lessons we've learned in the field of web standards and apply them to the physical world around us. I decided to investigate. Here are some of my findings:

Separation of content and presentation

I strapped my good-looking friend with a small speaker that carried my voice from the other room, and I told him to stand there and let me do all the talking through the mic. Among the female demographic we were attempting to appeal to, our traffic bounce rate jumped to an all-time high.

CSS Naked Day

I thought my traffic levels were low enough that it wouldn't be too big a deal, but the overwhelming negative response I received indicated that perhaps I should think twice before impairing the user experience in this way. It also appears to be illegal.

Semantic markup

The following is spoken in U.S. English. I, David Hammond — a male born October 3, 1986; who can be found in Chico, California, United States; who works at the CCC Technology Center at Butte College, Oroville, California, United States — attempted from July 28, 2007, at 1:23 PM PST through July 28, 2007, at 3:47 PM PST to verbally communicate with Phil Sharon — a male born 1976 — Carly White — a female born 1982 — Justin Roseland — a male born 1989 — and Mario Woodruff — a male born 1984 — while using the most verbose descriptive sentences I, David Hammond (see above), could provide to the respective recipients (among Phil Sharon [see above], Carly White [see above], Justin Roseland [see above], and Mario Woodruff [see above]). Significant data loss occurred for an unaccounted reason, and traffic quickly fell.

Progressive enhancement

“Hi, I'm David. I'm content with just talking with you and getting to know you. However, if you would agree to make out with me, let's go ahead and do that. If you'll have sex with me as well, I'll take my pants off now. If you're fine with a one-time fling, I can bypass any further conversation and get right on you.”

Unfortunately, I forgot to consider graceful degradation in the event that she refused my most basic option and dumped her drink on me instead.