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Grids. They're powerful. They're helpful. They can make design work much easier. (And occasionally harder.) They can be used for good or ill. And they can trap the designer in a cage of vertical and horizontal bars. The question as to the use grids is not settled among designers, especially on the web. The arguments seem to fall into these three categories: Grids are useless. Design has to be organic to come alive. Grids spell the death of design by imposing mechanical structure onto what is inherently intuitive. Grids are everything. If you stray from grids (or ignore them altogether), your design will end up being off, often in ways you don't readily see when just looking at it. Grids can be useful as design aids, just like compasses and protractors, but you have to decide on a case by case basis which grid, or whether to grid at all, is appropriate.

We're entering a new era of the web. To the ignorant masses, this transition will go largely unnoticed; they'll enjoy increased usability and convenience, with more robust functionality and more relevant data at hand. And they'll mostly just take it for granted. However, for web designers, front-end developers and data system programmers, we have a lot of work to do. Why HTML5? Why indeed? As someone who's worked almost exclusively with Drupal since 2004, my nose has been pretty much in xhtml 1.1. Back then, moving to xhtml took some learning and patience on my part, having played with basic HTML since 1995. Now xhtml feels like the familiar friend and HTML the ugly cousin. But then I started really looking at HTML5. And the more I am learning about it, the more I am appreciating how HTML5 looks to be a real game-changer.

In The Rhetoric of Fiction, the late Wayne C. Booth discusses a concept of the "implied author."

The implied author, according to Booth, is a "second self" from the actual historical person who wrote the work in question, not the flesh-and-blood being but a hypothetical entity that includes "not only the extractable meanings [of the text] but also the moral and emotional content of each bit of action and suffering of all the characters" (73). To rely solely on extratextual sources that will verify an author’s "intention" is at least problematic, if not a "fallacy." The implied author, though, is a construct prompted by the text itself. The implied author, Booth asserts, is responsible for the "norms" and "values" that seem to be expressed in the work but cannot necessarily be attributed to a narrator and should not be attributed to the historical author.