Why “yet another blog” when there are already so many good blogs about web standards, accessibility, usability, CSS, and DOM scripting? Basically because we needed a place where we could keep and share our knowledge. I have been in the business on a full-time basis since 1998, have come from table layout through CSS 2 to WCAG, and found myself writing increasingly often in other people’s comment sections or discussing ideas by email. It was about time for a blog.

“Learning the world” was a natural choice for the title. First it is a novel by one of my favorite authors, Ken MacLeod. MacLeod worked as a software developer in Glasgow before he quit his day job and became a full-time writer. His novels are full of detail, but usually his technical equipment has some quirks or is rotten in a way, something I can relate to from my professional background — after all, we deal with browsers, the most complex (and often buggy) environment for application development. As a Trotskyist MacLeod also has a decent political background to envision alternate societies.

Some of his novels are set on a colony called “New Mars,” so the choice is was appropriate for my previous employer BlueMars. Although you might have spotted another relation to science fiction there, the company’s founders were unaware of Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy at that time. Finally a central role in MacLeod’s naming novel plays the “biolog” of a space colonist. And when her crew discovers aliens, nothing is like it has been before …

In our world of web standards, alienating things usually come with names like IE, Opera, or Safari. Because of them we have to keep learning new things every day, and sometimes learn everything all over again. Or on the positive side: when a new concept is introduced, like CSS in 1998, or accessibiliy / Design for All in 1999, we have to keep the pace, which makes ours jobs so exciting.

I hope you will be a companion on my journey to new worlds, and be ready to learn some aspects of the old world all over again, every day.