So called web standards-compliant coding using XHTML and CSS is being touted as the way of the future for web design and more and more people adopt the new methods and practices by the day. However CSS introduces a less than intuitive way to think about page layout which makes it hard to adopt and is also why web designers still use tables for layout. In this article I will cover some recent web design history, discuss why designers think with tables and why the CSS formatting model is not as intuitive as it should be.

The first video recordings of the talks held at the KVIT2006 symposium are now available online. KVIT is a cognitive science symposium held here in Link�ping every year in May. The symposium is entirely in English and the speakers come from several European countries. Having been involved in organizing the symposium I am very proud that we are now able to let everyone interested watch the video recorded talks online.

Update: I have been forced to reconsider this decision, please see this post for more information.

I have been very busy recently as work and personal commitments have taken precedence which is why updates have been lacking. However due to the recent announcement about the first phpBB3 beta release I thought I should issue some kind of statement regarding what I'll do about my styles. They will all be upgraded, and it will be done in order of popularity, meaning Solaris will be the first style to be upgraded.

If you're wondering about the lack of updates it is because I'm abroad, in the southwest of France near the border to Spain. I haven't been able to get online until today and now that I happen to sit in front of a PC the French keyboard layout drives me nuts! Despite the near unusable keyboards, it is truly great here. I love the everything about this part of France and the Mediterranean, the lifestyle, the food, the wine, the culture and the landscape and have had the chance to see a lot of it in this relatively short period of time.

I've been posting earlier about spam, and the measures taken to stop it, as well as the counter-measures taken by spammers. It's a war that has civilian casualties just like any other war, and in this case the users are the civilians. The measures to prevent spam introduce captchas and other methods which are making websites less and less usable and accessible, methods that make using many sites become a challenge for many.

I've been in the Netherlands since Saturday and it has been a blast. I'm here to visit our fellow cog sci student friends from our friend-program in Nijmegen. Yesterday and today were spent in Amsterdam, a beautiful though somewhat strangely bizarre city which I couldn't help falling in love with.

My Internet connection is down and has been down since Tuesday which is why I haven't posted in three days. I'm quite annoyed with the way my ISP handles it, it seems their tech support is taking the holiday and weekend off, so nothing will be done until Monday when I'll be in the Netherlands.