so not Hitler, but a Nazi rocket scientist of some sort then

http://www.my.yahoo.com/ - although I doubt it'll have a gmail interface, just a ymail one.

so if my company operates internationally (which it does), do I have to have .com.au just because that's where the head office is based? It has the unfortunate effect of making my business look geographically specific, which it isn't. I think a non-country specific TLD range is still required. What's so great about political borders anyway?

well done you! No-one ever believes me when I tell 'em about those. Had no idea the expiry was so long, my dad's was tatty as back when I was a nipper - no way would he still have it in a usable condition now.

browsing on my Android phone, the maindevice.com site gave a javascript-style alert claiming I'm the 1st Android visitor and prize-winner or some such nonsense, giving me only an OK button - which redirected me to some awful probably malware-infested Android-specific website. Which also means I couldn't read TFA. Way to go guys.

I don't actually play facebook games, but I'll definitely be signing up for this. DS9 has always been to me the one series most obviously suited to becoming an MMO - I can't wait to see what you guys come up with, and knowing that you guys are genuine fans is unexpected but awesome news.

Director Stuart Baird was a self-claimed Star Trek virgin who had never even watched a single episode of "The Next Generation".

From an interview with Stuart Baird himself:

Q. Did it cause any problems on set that you were such a Star Trek virgin?

A. I'm not an aficionado. There were little hiccups here and there when some people were offended I didn't quite understand the back story. It's incredibly important to them, so some of them would think directing this one, you surely should know it all. But god almighty, I wasn't going to look at 178 episodes. Ultimately, it wasn't a problem. My intention was since I was a virgin to it all, I wanted to make a movie that stands alone and doesn't rest on all the past history.

How ironic that "Accessibility is the major topic of chapter 14" and "it is somewhat hard to read".

No power? Australia, 1975: Prime Minister Gough Whitlam is dismissed by Governor-General Sir John Kerr. Kerr then appoints the *Leader of the Opposition* Malcolm Fraser as temporary Prime Minister. Malcolm Fraser retains the position of Prime Minister for nearly 8 years.

I find twitter unusable - seemingly every account I'm interested in reading - say for service announcements from my hosting provider - is filled with replies to other users, conversations I'm not a part of. Every single line is

@ someuser - Some text totally out of context
@ someuser - Some text totally out of context
@ someuser - Some text totally out of context

It's like being in a room with someone whose supposed to be making an announcement but are actually on their mobile phone - not interesting and terribly annoying.
Maybe I'm missing some option to turn that irrelevant waste off, but they've already lost me because of it.

Seriously, what kind of reaction was expected?

We should be able to mark the original article as "Troll" or "Flamebait"... I can never remember which means what, but then what do I know? I just do HTML.

Wow - never before have I seen this community turn on it's own so quickly and with such contempt.

It's a despicable attitude I've sadly experienced most of my professional life - because yes, we who code HTML, CSS and Javascript ARE professionals. I do not design. I do not use dreamweaver or frontpage to generate code for me, I hand code with a text editor. I've been in full time well paid employment in this career since 1997, and I'm sick of Engineers vowing that, although we're in the engineering department, we are not in fact worthy of the title or anything approaching it. Lumping us in with the User Interface Design people is an insult to both parties: we code and have an analytical mindset, they design and have an artistic mindset. Some people try to do both jobs at once, rarely with excellence in both fields.

I'm sure many of you started off doing a little HTML markup, got bored and moved on, but that doesn't mean it should be beneath your contempt - frankly most engineers I've worked with do pretty piss-poor HTML/CSS/Javascript with no regards for standards, semantic markup, cross-browser compatibility, accessibility, gracefully degradation... nor do they see the value when you try and explain, as it's "just html".

Consider this for a moment. Most programmers, engineers, what have you, only have to code at any one time on any one platform, most often on a server they have built themselves. Those who do HTML/CSS/Javascript have no such luxury, the platform is completely out of our control and yet we must make our code run on anything.

At the very, very least our code has to run on OSX Safari, OSX Opera, OSX Firefox, Windows XP IE6, Windows XP IE7, Windows XP IE8, Windows XP Opera, Windows XP Firefox, Windows XP Chrome, Windows Vista IE7, Windows Vista IE8, Windows Vista Opera, Windows Vista Firefox, Windows Vista Chrome... that's 14 platforms, totally ignoring many Windows platforms, Linux, the upcoming Windows 7, all mobile devices, and the many blind readers on all platforms for the vision impaired who rely on our professional attitude to allow them to access the internet at all.

This aside we also have to ensure our code is as small as possible - dialup and slow satellite connections is a reality for a large amount of the browsing population (rural Australia for instance), and they rely on us not to bloat our code by using Dreamweaver and other web-for-idiots programs.

If a new browser came out tomorrow unannounced and captured the popular imagination if only briefly, we have to support that too (hello Chrome, no-one told us you were coming). We are totally at the mercy of the whims of those who build browsers (we stick to standards, but will they?) and the general public who choose which browser to use (hello all you IE6 users). So don't sneer at me, my job is hard, my job is stimulating, my job is rewarding and most of all my job is necessary.

The slashdot communities abuse aside, my job title has varied between Web Developer and Front-End Engineer, and admittedly there is some trouble formulating a 100% accurate title for the job I do - that's because the job is complex and wide-ranging, often encompassing QA and SEO as well.

Personally I prefer Front-End Engineer. Sure you can pick it to death and prove me wrong, but there are very few job titles that are immune from such obsessive scrutiny. Funny how it's always the HTML/CSS/Javascript crowd who come up for such harsh analysis.