The reason is that it's better to favor composition over inheritance. In any relatively complex website, the scheme you describe would become unwieldy. It is better to assign general characteristics to outer elements, and then get more specific and you get deeper into the DOM (as a general rule). At least that's how I do it. I am really one of that hated breed, the PHP "developer" (although I do real languages as well), and 90% of what I do uses Zend framework, but I make it a point to have my css cascade intelligently instead of defining a bunch of classes with redundancies. Also, blueprint css helps a lot.

I personally don't use them that way either, I was speaking to his specific point of having "variables" to store color values. You wouldn't want to use specific attributes like colors in your class names.

Use Blueprint CSS http://www.blueprintcss.org/ It will make your life much easier. Every website I make has columns. They really aren't that hard.

That doesn't make any sense. You still have to assign the value to the variable. The value is going to be a hex number. You don't have to use hex colors, if you want to limit yourself to the color names that css recognizes, but the point of creating a class like .redHeader is so you can set the color values once and then forget them, using the people friendly class names instead. You can create as many classes as you want and name them things like .redHeader, .darkRedHeader, .reddishOrangeHeader, etc. In the end, you are communicating with a computer. It's not the fault of css that browsers use hex to render colors. But if it helps, just remember that the first two digits are red, the next two are green, and the last two are blue. So #5444BB is mostly blue with some red and slightly less green mixed in.

quote: For example, CSS doesn't have variables... so you can't say something like "headerColor = #5444BB" and just use that wherever you want the header color. What were they thinking!?

That's what css classes are for:
CSS - .blueHeader { color: #5444BB; } .redHeader { color: #BB4445; }

HTML -
I'm Blue
I'm Red

Each INTERPOL member country maintains a National Central Bureau staffed by national law enforcement officers.

Yes, and in the United States, the NCB is staffed by members of the Justice Department www.justice.gov/usncb/

Sorry, fail. Threatening to report illegal activity to the police unless the illegal activity stops is not blackmail by a long stretch.

Some people where I work sit on those exercise balls. While you're not busy, you can do mini crunches, and even while you're just sitting there, you will be using your ab and back muscles much more to support your posture. Also, stand up and stretch for a few minutes every hour. It's better than nothing.

If it were up to him, the www would still be plain text and images. His philosophy boils down to "Lets design all websites to the lowest common denominator", which is fine if your website needs to have the widest possible audience, but most don't, just like most other forms of published content. Just think. No password masking+browser form persistence features means that I just have to be able to go to, say, gmail on your machine, double click the username field, tab once, and I know your google password. Then I can go to the coffee shop, log into your blogger account, create some nice posts in your name, then log into your analytics account do some bad stuff there, etc.

Now you see the advantage of flash and silverlight. They are plugins, so the people who develop the technology control how it is implemented and displayed. With HTML5, each browser will implement features differently. That's why I first started looking at flash, because I was so sick of the CSS incompatibilities back in the day.

The structure of packages, the strong typing of variables, classes and functions, and many of the classes ARE similar to java

For example, I'd love an integrated code editor in Flash with decent editing, syntax highlighting, and intellisense capabilities;

Yes, it's called Flex Builder/Flash Builder

Sometimes you need money for things other than "that 50 inch plasma", like, for example, food for your children.

And yet I don't hear any suggestion that we test people for Ambien at traffic stops. Weird, huh?

Hari Seldon could've warned them about this.