Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

I got talking to a colleague from work about the philosophical issues of morality and surveillance (does being surveilled make people more moral?) and we ended up discussing the moral and societal framework of the Garden of Eden, as described in the book of Genesis, in the Old Testament of the Bible. He made an interesting point that, being unaware of the existence or nature of evil, Adam and Eve may not have been best equipped to determine whether a statement was a lie, or even know to ask themselves the question of whether something was a lie or not, being unfamiliar with such things. As programmers, one natural way to express ourselves clearly on such important theological questions was to write some software, and sure enough my colleague wrote a PHP implementation of the Human class, and pointed out the inherent flaw in the design, which was, he claimed, an imperfection in the system that Genesis describes. I was not so convinced that he had implemented the Genesis specification correctly, however, which perhaps shows that Intelligent Design should be left up to God (and even God might want to implement it via an evolutionary algorithm instead), but I decided to give it a go myself, confident that, whatever language God used, I would stand a better chance using Java than I would PHP.

This month I attended an enjoyable party which happened to have some A-list celebrities (of the Free Software world) present. I did feel slightly out of my depth when the topic of conversation turned to compiler optimisation bugs, but as luck would have it, I found myself listening to a conversation about web design. “I know this!” I thought, as the conversation developed into a good-humoured flame war about the semantic validity and practicality of using the table tag for presentation. Fortunately I was not the only one to believe that using the table tag like this should be avoided at all costs, and that meant I didn’t have to argue the point. I did end up, however, talking to someone who was in favour of presentational tables and I tried to understand the precise use case they had in mind that encouraged them to use tables in a non-semantic way. It turns out they weren’t happy with the result even when they used tables, but I couldn’t quite articulate or convince them of the alternate page structure which came to my mind. I knew then that it was my duty to actually write the code and prove to myself and others that a div-based design was the answer.