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Regularly, marketers want more out of what they have bargained for. And because of numerous demands, they end up in a pile of questions that need quick solutions. Marketing and branding has never been easy but because of our fast growing technology, affiliate marketing software has been made possible.
What is affiliate marketing software? It is one type of software that enables the integration of a seamless tracking system for affiliates embarking on a full pledged solution. Talking about networking, marketing software is made to suffice the struggling effects of branding affiliates and marketing them. This is because every affiliate has the pure capability to market themselves individually and sell the company's products, earning very high commissions.
How can Affiliate Marketing Software support success?
1. Traffic? No problem.
Affiliates can bring as many traffic as they possibly can and not worry if they've got their name stamped on that deal. What's worse than not having someone to visit your site is not being marked as that person who is responsible for large numbers of customers. It's an affiliate's worst nightmare. But because of the affiliate marketing software present these days, affiliates need not worry. And companies or marketers should make it a point to install such software to ensure the security of every affiliate's account.
2. Commission reports made easy.
Whenever affiliates make a huge commission, it is the company's obligation to run commission reports and confirm that the visitor really came from its true source. Affiliate marketing software made it easier for companies to run down the program and see the amount of money they owe to every affiliate.
3. Pay your affiliates right on time, all the time.
If you're having a hard time tracking down your affiliate's basis, it would be harder to pay them on time. That is why affiliate marketing software is probably the most useful software in terms of affiliate marketing business. Now you don't need to worry about paying your affiliates on time because when using such software, it is efficiently possible.
4. Summary? No worries.
If you keep on worrying about summarizing different areas of sales, affiliate marketing software is just about everything. This is very efficient most especially in the field of organizing and keeping track of those important records. This will also minimize committing mistakes that you wouldn't dream of happening. Summarizing through affiliate marketing software ranges from sales to commission to clicks, leads and impressions summary, name it.
What does affiliate marketing software spell out? T-R-U-S-T. How can a person trust your company or whatever it is that you're offering them if in the first place you don't have evident proof of supporting it? Trust is a very important word especially in doing business. You can never give your support to anyone without gathering enough amount of trust in them. In vice versa, the affiliate can trust you and you can do the same.
Now remember, every software has its own use. It will depend on the kind of report you need to fulfill. There are no cons in installing such software in your hard drive. It can do more good than evil. What's amazing about affiliate marketing software is that you can easily and efficiently determine exactly how much you owe an affiliate and the moment you realize it, the easier it is for you to show them the money.


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You are here
Oops-Proof Your Workout
Laura Doss
Mistake #1: You Rely on Cardio to Peel Off Pounds
For most women, sweaty aerobic exercise alone isn't enough. "Research shows that weight loss is minimal if it isn't accompanied by dieting," says Amy Luke, PhD, a nutritional epidemiologist at the Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola University Chicago. "We may compensate for the extra energy we're burning during physical activity by doing less the rest of the day, or more commonly, we feel famished after working out, so we eat more."
The Solution: Keep your diet in check. To drop a pound, which is 3,500 calories, in one week, aim to eat 300 fewer calories every day (300 x 7 = 2,100) while burning 300 calories from exercise five times a week (300 x 5 = 1,500). Follow our "Slimmer in 7 Days!" plan, not only to burn 1,500 calories a week but also to firm up from head to toe. Plus, to beat the post-workout hunger attack, pack a low-cal snack like a piece of fruit. "You plan for exercise. You need to plan what you're going to eat afterward," says John Porcari, PhD, a professor of exercise physiology at the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse and a FITNESS advisory board member. Drinking lots of water helps too.
Jay Sullivan
Mistake #2: You Race Through Your Reps
Two things could be going on here: Either your weights are too light, which is often the case for women, or they're too heavy, and you're letting momentum or gravity take over. Either way, your muscles aren't being sufficiently challenged, which is why they're not getting more toned. "To see an improvement in definition, you need to have an increase in the protein content of muscle fibers, and that happens when the muscles are stressed and being called on to exert more force," Bushman explains.
The Solution: If you don't believe you've done just about all you can do by the end of a set, pick a heavier weight. "You want there to be a bit of strain on the second-to-last and last reps," Bushman says. Reach for a lighter dumbbell when you aren't moving the weight with steady control as you lift and lower.
Chris Fanning
Mistake #3: You Stick to the Bike for All Your Sweat Sessions
If you feel as though your thighs are getting bigger than you'd like, you may be overdoing the cycling. "On an exercise bike, you're working a very specific group of muscles, and if you're hitting it hard four or five times a week, you will see development there," says Gary Sforzo, PhD, a professor of exercise and sport sciences at Ithaca College in New York.
The Solution: Unless cycling is your competitive event, cut it to once or twice a week and fill the gap with a variety of on-your-feet activities, from using the elliptical trainer to taking a dance class. "Every exercise affects your legs in different ways," Sforzo says. When you do cycle, lower the resistance level and increase the speed, Bushman suggests. "It's the overload on the muscles that causes the increase in muscle mass," she adds.
Jay Sullivan
Mistake #4: You Aim to Stay in the Fat-Burning Zone
It's no wonder you think you need to do this to lose weight: Many cardio machines tell you when you're above and below the zone. But this reason for sticking to low-intensity exercise has been completely debunked. "Because fat takes longer than carbs to be converted to energy, you burn a higher percentage of it when you're sitting or walking than when you're running. So the old thinking was that with low-intensity exercise you could torch body fat and lose weight," Porcari explains. But the theory didn't work in practice. "In one study, we had people walk or run for half an hour. On average, the walkers burned 240 calories, 44 percent of which were fat, so they burned 108 fat calories. The runners burned 450 calories, 24 percent of which were fat, so they burned 120 fat calories. Whether you look at total calories or fat calories, the runners clearly came out ahead," Porcari says.
The Solution: There's nothing wrong with low-intensity exercise, particularly if you have joint problems. "But to lose weight, you'll probably need to do it for longer than half an hour. Just for general health, the recommendation is 30 minutes five days a week," Porcari says.
Sarah Kehoe
Mistake #5: You Skip the Warm-Up
You may think you're saving time, but you're actually just compromising the first 5 to 10 minutes of your workout. "Your body literally needs to warm up so that blood flow increases, the nervous system wakes up, and the body starts to use energy and oxygen more efficiently," says Michael Bracko, a sports physiologist and director at the Institute for Hockey Research in Calgary. The upshot: Every step feels like less of a slog, and calorie burn kicks into high gear.
The Solution: Bracko says that the best warm-up is to do your chosen exercise at a low intensity. Runners, for example, should walk, then jog. "Keep at it until you break a sweat," Bracko says. Alternately, you can try "dynamic" stretches, which are moves that take your body through the range of motions you're about to do. For a runner, that can mean high knees, butt kicks, and forward, reverse, and side lunges. "Avoid static stretching, where you're holding poses for several counts. That actually calms the system down and can impair performance," Bracko adds.
Dorit Thies
Mistake #6: You Overcrunch Your Abs
If you're doing more than three sets of 15, you're wasting your time. "Extra crunches aren't going to cinch your waistline," says Michele Olson, PhD, a professor of exercise science at Auburn University in Montgomery, Alabama, and a FITNESS advisory board member. "You're working the rectus abdominus, which is only one of four muscles in the abdominal wall. But it's the other three deeper muscles [internal obliques, external obliques, transverse abdominis] that give you a leaner look by helping you with your posture."
The Solution: Take a temporary break from your usual crunches and target your obliques and transverse abdominis with our waist-cinching express ab workout, "Firm, Flat Abs Fast!" Olson suggests trying these Pilates-based moves as well: (1) the plank (balance on floor on forearms and toes and hold for 30 seconds), (2) double-leg stretch (lie on your back, knees bent 90 degrees with feet in air and shins parallel to the floor, shoulders off the floor with arms loosely hugging knees; extend your legs and arms out in a wide V, then return to start), (3) the side plank (lie on the floor on your right side, propped up on right elbow, feet stacked; lift your hips up, using your left hand on floor in front of you for support. Hold for 5 counts, then lower. Do 10 reps; switch sides and repeat). Do 10 reps of each move, three or four times a week.
Alexa Miller
Mistake #7: You've Been Doing the Same Weight Circuit Since Forever
The reason it seems easy isn't because you're getting stronger and stronger. It's because your muscles, having adapted to the program, are utterly bored. "You need to continually challenge them," Bushman says. "Muscles improve only when they're doing something they're unaccustomed to."
The Solution: There are myriad ways to change things up. "Use the machines, free weights, resistance bands. You can manipulate the number of reps, amount of weight, length of rest periods between sets, number of sets, and the overall number of exercises," Bushman says. Try doing 12 to 15 reps of light weights one session, 8 to 10 reps of moderate weights the next, then 4 to 6 reps of heavy weights. "Ideally, you want to do something different every time you go to the weight room, or at least once every two weeks," Sforzo adds.
Laura Doss
Mistake #8: You Only Do Yoga
While it's great for flexibility and helps improve strength, the typical yoga session is not going to incinerate calories. A recent study found that it takes 90 minutes of hatha yoga to burn 200 calories — about the same as window-shopping or a casual stroll.
The Solution: If you're doing an hour of yoga five days a week, you need to shift three of those days to aerobic activity, says Kara Mohr, PhD, an exercise physiologist and founder of MohrResults.com, a fitness and nutrition consulting company. "I always encourage my clients to do yoga because it's excellent for raising the mind-body connection, which helps stop overeating," she adds. But you need to think of it as a supplemental activity if your goal is weight loss.
Mistake #9: You Always Run at a Steady Pace
If you want to increase your speed, you won't improve your time without interval training. "It teaches your muscles to burn energy more efficiently, so you can go faster," Porcari says. "You're also training your legs to move quicker and getting mentally used to the idea."
The Solution: Porcari recommends starting out with a one-mile warm-up, then doing four to six rounds of running at slightly faster than your regular pace for a quarter mile and slightly slower than your regular pace for a quarter mile. (If you're outside, try going from telephone pole to telephone pole.) "The goal is gradually to lengthen the faster-paced intervals and increase the tempo," Porcari explains. He adds that to prevent injuries, it's best to keep such speed work to once or twice a week.
Jay Sullivan
Mistake #10: Your Workout Is the Sole Activity You Get
Sit all day and you're missing out on burning an easy 900 extra calories. That's the difference between what people who aren't sedentary melt in non-exercise activity during a day versus what couch potatoes burn, says James Levine, MD, PhD, an obesity expert at the Mayo Clinic and author of Move a Little, Lose a Lot. "Humans are basically built to be moving. The mechanisms that drive metabolism switch on when a person stands and they switch off as soon as she sits," Dr. Levine says.
The Solution: The more active you are, the better. At the very least, you should get up every hour and walk or march in place. One easy change Dr. Levine recommends: Pace the floor when you're on the phone. Make it a habit and weight loss will be just several calls away!
Originally published in FITNESS magazine, May 2009.

subset: commoncrawl


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In the wake of the recent Mobile World Congress exhibition and conference in Spain last month, the (positive) onslaught of Android appears to be continuing apace for the foreseeable future. The appetite for applications is growing and developers have, for the most part, warmly embraced the opportunity to program within an ecosystem that engenders rapid and creative code commits.
New research by market intelligence company ComScore suggests that one out of every three new phones sold in the US is an Android-based device. The dilemma facing developers now is whether to focus their efforts on developing for Android or Apple OS X, or split their time between the two environments.
For one British software development company, the answer seems to be: Do both. RunRev, an Edinburgh, Scotland-based company, is holding its annual developer conference in San Jose this week. The US represents a growing opportunity for RunRev, and not one to miss an opportunity, it has used the conference this week to unveil the latest addition to its LiveCode development platform — an Android package.
With its roots in Hypercard, the offering is an English-syntax development platform that is geared towards seasoned developers as well as those looking to tap into the lucrative apps market. RunRev claims that the development platform means that you only need to write once and deploy anywhere. This suggests that developers can create apps for Android and then port them to the iOS platform without recoding. RunRev also suggests development time can be dramatically shortened.
Coincidently, a Forrester analyst is giving the keynote at the conference on the subject of the "3 Mega Trends Facing Application Development". One hopes that the subject of cross-platform software application development will feature on the list.


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CIUDAD DE MEXICO , Mexico, April 17 (UPI) -- Nobel Prize winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez died of cancer Thursday in Mexico City. He was 87.
News of the Colombian author's death comes a day after his family said in a statement that his health was "very fragile" following a nine-day hospitalization over a lung and urinary tract infections.
Last week it was revealed that García Márquez's lymphatic cancer returned. He was diagnosed with the disease in 1999 and by now it had spread to his lungs, liver and lymph nodes. He was not eligible for treatment given his age and the advanced condition of the cancer.
García Márquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia on March 6, 1927. He began his writing career as a journalist and went by the name Gabo. He won a Nobel Prize in 1982 for his short stories "in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts."
The Colombian author is best known for his novels One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera and Autumn of the Patriarch.
García Márquez is survived by his wife Mercedes Barcha, and two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.
[El Universal] [USA Today]


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Skolnick's Scoop / Coming up with the down payment
It's the ultimate American dream to own your own home, but many don't think it's an option because they lack the resources for the down payment and closing costs.
Yet there are many different ways to come up with the money. Here are tips for securing that down payment.
1. Borrow from your retirement account: Many people have been investing in a 401(k) plan or traditional IRA for years and first-time homebuyers may borrow up to $10,000 for their down payment without incurring a penalty. For those self-employed or if your employer allows it, you also can borrow up to $50,000 from your current 401(k) and pay yourself back over five years at a low interest rate.
2. Ask family: Sure, you may be too proud to ask for money, but if relatives can help you and your family move into that dream home, isn't it worth it? If you do get help from a family member, the lender will ask you to sign a gift-letter form, attesting to the relationship. The lender may also require your relatives to explain where they got the money and prove that they are financially able to make such a gift.
3. Look for down payment assistance grants: Down payment assistance and community redevelopment programs offer affordable housing opportunities to first-time homebuyers, low-income and moderate-income individuals and families who wish to own a home.
4. Come to a lease/purchase agreement: Homeowners who can't sell their homes in this market may consider a lease/purchase agreement, where you rent the home you want to buy and a percentage of your rent is applied toward the down payment. If you go this route, make sure you get a contract outlining all the details so both parties are protected.
5. Add it to the wedding registry: Several mortgage companies allow those getting married to set up a down payment registry. This is a great way to celebrate the joining of two people in holy matrimony.
6. Cut back and save: If none of the other ways will work for you, there's always the old fashioned "saving for a rainy day." Try putting aside 10 percent of each paycheck and make your meals instead of going out for them. If you're married, save the money you would spend on birthday, anniversary and Christmas presents and put it toward your house down-payment. You also may need to forgo that vacation this year.
Although some of these sacrifices may seem significant, they will be worth it once you're inside your own home. There are tremendous tax benefits when owning versus renting which will help lighten the load on your expenses. Plan well and homeownership may be closer than you think.
Linda Skolnick's "Skolnick's Scoop" appears every other Friday. She is a Realtor with Coldwell Banker Riverside in Westport and can be reached by calling 203-246-0088 or by through her website, www.GoAskLinda.com.


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Baked Chili-Cheese Fries
Quick Facts
Servings: 8
Prep Time: 15 min.
Cook Time: 24 min.
Total: 39 min.
Spicy baked fries covered in a gooey cheese blend.
- 6 russet potatoes (or potato of your choice)
- 3 tsp chili powder
- 2 tsp cilantro
- 2 tsp onion powder
- 2 tsp garlic powder
- 2 tsp ground cumin
- 1 1/2 cup reduced-fat shredded Mexican cheese blend
- Preheat the oven to 450°F.
- Place whole potatoes (do not poke) into microwave-safe covered dish.
- Microwave on high for 3 to 4 minutes. Let cool.
- Cut each potato lengthwise into eight, even wedges.
- In a mixing bowl, stir together the chili powder, chopped cilantro, onion powder, garlic power, and ground cumin; set aside.
- Arrange the potatoes in a single layer on a baking sheet.
- Sprinkle spice mixture onto potatoes and toss to coat.
- Bake for 10 minutes until the potatoes are crisp, rotate and cook an additional 10 minutes until dark golden brown on all sides.
- Sprinkle shredded cheese onto cooked fries and bake for another minute or two to melt cheese. Transfer to a plate and serve.
Nutrition Facts
Calories 184
Calories from Fat 36 (20%)
(6%)Total Fat 4g
(12%)Saturated Fat 2g
Polyunsaturated Fat 0g
Monounsaturated Fat 1g
(4%)Cholesterol 11mg
(7%)Sodium 157mg
(21%)Potassium 727mg
Total Carbohydrate 30g
(16%)Dietary Fiber 4g
Sugars 2g
Sugar Alcohols 0g
(15%)Protein 8g
* Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet.
Nutrition facts are calculated by a food expert using nutritional values provided by the USDA for common products used as recipe ingredients. Actual nutritional values may differ depending on the amounts or products used and can be affected by cooking methods.
Copyright © 2019 Healthnotes, Inc. All rights reserved. www.healthnotes.com
Read our healthy recipe definitions.
Learn more about Healthnotes, the company.
The information presented here is for informational purposes only and was created by a team of US–registered dietitians and food experts. Consult your doctor, practitioner, and/or pharmacist for any health problem and before using any supplements, making dietary changes, or before making any changes in prescribed medications. Information expires December 2019.


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Disasters are a fact of life but their impact should not be.
Port-au-Prince, Haiti (PRWEB) April 22, 2013
Three years after the 2010 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince, the Political Champions for Disaster Resilience is calling on the international community and the Haitian Government to take action to make Haiti more resilient to disasters.
With the upcoming rainy season only weeks away and the hurricane season approaching, the informal group is stressing the urgency of integrating disaster risk reduction into better coordinated and locally driven initiatives to prepare and recover from disasters.
"Haiti is overexposed to natural hazards," says Haitian Prime Minister Laurent Salvador Lamothe. "The Government is fully committed to put all necessary efforts to find sustainable solutions. A lot has been accomplished and the Government hopes that the Political Champions initiative will help channel the necessary resources and energies to strengthen national capacities to prevent and manage the impact of disasters."
Established in 2012 and consisting of high-ranking officials from leading international and national institutions (including CARICOM, UNDP, OCHA, the UK, USAID, the World Bank, and the European Commission), the Political Champions Group for Disaster Resilience aims to leverage their collective political capital for increased attention and resources towards disaster resilience in at-risk countries.
"Disasters are a fact of life but their impact should not be," said UN Humanitarian Chief Valerie Amos. "Helping the Haitian people and their Government build back stronger, safer and more resilient to disasters must be at the heart of our thinking."
Visiting Haiti for the first time, International Development Secretary Justine Greening said it was vital to disaster-proof assistance so that it lasts and can be effective in the long term.
On Sunday, the group visited Jean Baptiste in Port-au-Prince, one of the precarious neighborhoods of origin of earthquake-displaced families, now undergoing strategic rehabilitation. Here, the Government of Haiti is leading efforts by the international community to relocate displaced residents back into their rehabilitated homes and neighborhoods.
"This retaining wall was prioritized by the community when carrying out the community planning exercise. I myself participated in the construction of the gabion, gaining ownership and experience," said Gay Borgela, standing beside a protective retaining wall built by the project to protect the community. Gay Borgela is a member of the Community Platform, an official group of local representatives set up by the community and trained by the Government-led project to help identify risks and define rehabilitation priorities.
International Development Secretary Justine Greening commented: "If we are to help the Haitian people in the long term it is crucial that we and our partners disaster-proof our assistance so that Haiti, and countries like it, can hold on to the physical, financial and government infrastructure that is so important for real development and growth."
Mitigation projects such as the wall are an integral component of the '16/6 project', a reference to the 16-neighbourhoods and 6-camps originally targeted. The project focuses on improving living conditions of affected communities by creating jobs, improving basic services and rehabilitating affected neighborhoods to better enable them to withstand disasters, such as earthquakes, hurricanes and heavy rains.
"Responsibility for disaster risk management does not lie with disaster managers alone. It is rather a concern for everyone - from citizens to political leaders, to the private sector and civil society. Whole-of-society approaches to disaster risk reduction will become increasingly important as climate change alters hazard patterns," UNDP Administrator Helen Clark said.
As a practical gender-based violence prevention measure, solar lightings systems have also been installed in consultations with women and girls of the communities.
"These solar lamps have a huge impact in our communities. We have decided to place them here to make the neighbourhoods safer for us and to allow our kids to have a place to study and gather after the sunset," said Thermelus Guerline, member of the Community Platform.
The visit to Jean Baptiste was one aspect of the two-day visit to Haiti by the group, meant to highlight the positive steps that Haiti has taken over the last three years while calling for more action to engrain resilience into development investments.
Recognized as one of the countries most affected by disasters in the world, Haiti was devastated by an earthquake in January 2010, which killed over 220,000. Poor planning, population density, environmental degradation and poverty are all factors which expose the population to disaster risk. Haiti has been repeatedly battered by earthquakes, cyclones, floods, drought and epidemics. An estimated 1.5 million people still require life-saving humanitarian assistance as a result of these multiple shocks; while thousands of families may lose their livelihoods every year during the hurricane season.
Haiti will continue to require continuous and cyclic humanitarian assistance unless the root causes of fragility are addressed. In light of these threats, the Political Champions selected Haiti as a priority country to advocate for increased resilience to prepare for and recover from disasters.
On Monday, following round table discussions with the Government, donors and civil society, the Political Champions advocated for the Government to build resilience into national development plans and programmes as a crosscutting issue. The Champions further emphasized the need for the international community, donors and agencies on the ground, to be more effective at coordinating and integrating resilience.
The delegation comprises: Helen Clark, UNDP Administrator; Justine Greening, UK Secretary of State for International Development; Valerie Amos, Under-Secretary-General and Emergency Relief Coordinator, OCHA; Ambassador Irwin LaRocque, Secretary General of CARICOM; Elizabeth Hogan, Deputy Assistant Administrator from the Latin America and Caribbean Bureau for USAID; Rachel Kyte, Vice President for Sustainable Development, World Bank; and Jean Louis de Brouwer, Director of Operations of the European Community Humanitarian Office (ECHO).


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If you ladies are anything like me, you have spent half of your life savings on mascara. No kidding, I have tried everything from $6.99 mascaras from CVS to the $40.00 mascaras found in Sephora. A couple of weeks back, I was in Sephora checking out the new summer releases and came upon Dior's Diorshow Black Out Mascara. To my disappointment, they were all sold out. Well, you know that tweaked my curiousity that much more! A mascara that's so good that its flying off the shelves? I had to try it.
Last weekend while checking out MAC's Moonbathe collection, I thought I'd stop over to see if the mascara had been restocked and lucky for me, they did. Just when I thought Dior couldn't get better than the Diorshow.. short of putting on falsies, there is nothing else that has made my lashes look like this. I have the worst of all worlds….short, skimpy and straight lashes. I'm not really sure what the difference between the regular Diorshow and the Blackout really is, but having used both, the Blackout is definitely a darker black that elongates and curls my lashes. For a product which needs to be replaced every 3 months, the price is a bit steep, but just do what I did… 3 months divided by $23.00 = $7.60. I feel better already!


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This is the Anime T.V. Schedule for Nova Scotia. It includes all the anime shows that are shown on basic cable and Me-TV. However, just to warn you, this schedule will never be totally accurate since T.V stations always change their shows' timeslots without notice. I'll try to keep it as up-to-date as possible, but I only can do a regular update once a month. Therefore, this schedule is just a guide to help. Make sure you check your local listings because that's still the best.
Contents - Schedules - Shows & Stations - News - Petition - Outlooks - Free Stuff
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"We must stop expecting those who have great power and official eminence to carry out our democratic will, and look to our neighbors who are as poor and as worried as we are ourselves….Only the mass can get America out of the mess."
In the last two parts, we've seen how the American novelist Theodore Dreiser poured scorn on the 1% — whether it was the American 1% oppressing less fortunate Americans or joining hands with the British 1% to oppress the world. Here, in the final essay of this series, we'll look at Dreiser's even more timely criticism of double standards for the rich and poor, the press, and race relations, as well as his own "radically American" proposals for creating "peace and plenty" for everyone.
If there was anything truly shameful in the midst of America's post-Depression poverty, Dreiser wrote, it was "the cries to the effect that the incompetent should be allowed to die — not the rich incompetent but the poor incompetent"; obviously, "there is a distinction to be made here, as you should know." Why was it that those who ridiculed the so-called "lazy WPA worker who leans on his shovel" never had anything to say "about the wealthy with their breakfasts served in bed every morning and their maids and butlers and valets to wait on them and wash and dress them and comb their hair and their resorts and smart districts such as Park Avenue, Newport, East Long Island?"
Of course, as we know today, that would have been a tall order for a conservative of Dreiser's days — a bit like asking our Republicans and corporate Democrats to distinguish between the unemployed mother on EBT juggling two part-time jobs and the Hamptons lady of leisure who spends her time lunching, shopping, primping and prepping at Bergdorf's for that all-important charity ball or opening night at the museum.
Nor can our various party apparatchiks discern any hypocrisy in Rick Santorum's rant against college education or Rahm Emanuel's shutting down of Chicago's public schools: the one denying to others an education he had and the other denying to impoverished children the education his children enjoy. Not to mention the glaring lack of concern for undergraduates about to struggle with a 6.8% student loan rate. This tolerance, if not admiration of inequality, goes a long way in explaining why our 5% gushes over "Downton Abbey." It is doubly ironic that as they do so, we suffer higher child poverty rates, higher college tuition, and less social mobility than any other developed nation — including Finland, France, Denmark, and yes: even Dreiser's much despised Britain.
For all that, Dreiser growls, Americans don't seem to complain about their nation's gross inequities. Perhaps it comes down to our deeply instilled Horatio Alger belief — that anyone can rise to the top even if this possibility is shrinking before our very eyes. Yet even so, why are they so clueless about those "on top of the heap" and their attempts to "stop the world from moving" by accusing those beneath them of "trying to interfere with 'order'" — when the real truth was "just the other way about?"
Well before Warren Buffett's famous statement to the effect that class warfare is waged from above — namely those of his class — Dreiser had already emphatically claimed that "It is the defenders of things as they are who interfere with order, because the natural order of things is movement." That's because Americans have been "lied to by the press, the radio, the pulpit" and taught to deflect their criticism of "billionaire thieves who are robbing them by means of a complicated and unnatural system" to "other poor persons or slightly richer ones nearer home" — despite the palpable fact that "they are so near the need of it themselves" If Americans had any sense, "they would favor more of it, not less."
But, of course, they didn't. They preferred to wail, "Big business is being driven out of the US by just such tactics! The American Constitution is being undermined! The country is being ruined!" Yes, back then they had their Tea Party tools too. And not least, cultural elites were hardly more advanced despite whatever claims to liberalism. Hence, the shunning of John Steinbeck after his publication of Grapes of Wrath (1939) — not to mention the virulent criticism of Dreiser himself particularly when he was nearly shoved off a train.
It is equally telling that unlike many other whites living in a period of Jim Crow laws and KKK popularity, Dreiser drew attention to issues of race inequality: perhaps not altogether unexpected given his criticism of British imperialism and the "Nazi regime." Yes, there were signs of progress as blacks "are now succeeding to a remarkable degree" — with so many "artists and writers and musicians of importance." Dreiser probably had in mind the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s or perhaps Richard Wright whose bestselling Native Son (1940) he praised.
But overall, despite emancipation in 1865, blacks continued to suffer great inequities: their "living conditions are the worst in the country" as the vast majority remained "without clothing and food, without a vote, without civil liberties, living in pigsties." Having already mentioned in Tragic America that blacks were not only hired last, but paid far less than whites, Dreiser would express consternation at the markedly shorter "life expectancy of Negroes… 47 years compared with 59 for all white persons."
Again, it is interesting — and disturbing — to discover parallels today, nearly 50 years after the passing of the Civil Rights Act and the recent reelection of our first African-American president. Many commentators have already noted the increased wealth gap between blacks and whites during the post-2008 recession with blacks earning about 57% as much as whites. Even when they share very similar credentials (e.g., same caliber of education and experience), blacks are more likely to be underemployed or unemployed.
Similarly, despite the improvement of life expectancy, the white male lives 5.4 years longer than the black male, and the white female 3.7 years longer than her black counterpart. Not least, in light of the recent Supreme Court decision to strike down section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, it is worth pointing out that voting for blacks still remains only slightly less problematic: we are reminded of discriminatory laws aimed at black voters in Jim Crow America — especially as states like Texas attempting to restore voter ID laws.
In light of growing anti-Nazi sentiment, Dreiser observed, wasn't it curious that nothing was being done about American racism, or as he put it, "Americans who have shown themselves slavish in their admiration of Hitlerism?" Seriously, "What word do you hear….against the anti-Semite Father Coughlin" who used "word-for-word excerpts from Goebbels' propaganda?" And what is being "done about the Ku Klux Klan which advocates and carries out a terror in no way differing from the Hitler terror in Germany?" Funny, indeed, "how our British patriots in Washington" are trying to "get us into a war to save British Hitlerism but are doing everything they can to put Hilterism into operation right here."
Yet, there is still hope. Our greatest people have always risen from the 99%. Let's remember that "We in America have no time to waste arguing about Russia's plan," Dreiser reminds us. Rather, "We need an American plan" as found in our "Constitution and Declaration of Independence." These are the "anchors of our democracy and welfare." We don't need empire; we need a democracy — something that "cannot be advanced by war or 'fighting 'isms.'" The questions we need to ask are "Does it or doesn't it add to the general wealth of the whole community?"
For the simple fact, Dreiser believed, is that we need to take matters into our own hands and "stop expecting those who have great power and official eminence to carry out our democratic will." No more futile wars for profits: let's set an example for the world by renewing our own democracy.
Let's begin by "look[ing] to our neighbors who are as poor and as worried as we are ourselves — combine with them to make various of such ordinary mortals our representatives and support those who do something practical in the matters immediately concerning us." Let's fix our "street car fares, taxes, sewerage system" — or our highways, bridges, and power grids. Because that's "where democracy must start — at the bottom." Again, let's be "radically American." (And we all know that radical means from the roots, right?) We are the ones who know that America is worth saving because "the greatest democratic tradition of America" is, after all, "the tradition of Labor." For centuries, "our people," undaunted and undeterred, have engaged in "spontaneous mass movements." That means "nothing less than our radical tradition" — one that proceeds from John Brown through Coxey's Army and "the Bonus army of more recent years" [1932] — to Occupy Wall Street, with its blogpost of July 13, 2011, promising a "radical democracy of the future" and announcing in a Dreiser-style shout, DEMOCRACY NOT CORPORATOCRACY": a theme in Occupy's own Declaration of Independence. Or to quote Bruce Springsteen, "We are alive," his Occupy-inspired paean to our national mass movements, "Our souls and spirits rise/To carry the fire and light the spark/To fight shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart."
At the end of the day, Dreiser recognized that "only the mass can get America out of the mess." It was true in 1941 and arguably even truer today in 2013. Because when we finally reclaim the values in our Constitution and Declaration of Independence, Dreiser tells us, "the un-American monopolists will see them and will say: 'That's America.'


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2000-2011 Al Giordano
April 29, 2004
Despite two Colombian court rulings during 2003 ordering the suspension of US-sponsored Plan Colombia aerial fumigation of coca and poppy crops until environmental and human impact studies can be carried out, Colombia continues to spray Monsanto's Roundup-Ultra on fields and US officials continue to maintain an eerie and criminal silence on the issue.
The most recent ruling came 10 months ago, on June 13, 2003, when Colombia's Administrative Tribunal of Cundinamarca, the second highest court in the country, responded to a class action lawsuit brought by concerned citizens arguing that Plan Colombian spraying violates Colombian citizens' right to a healthy environment. The court agreed and ordered the immediate suspension of all narco-crop fumigation nationwide. The verdict supplemented two earlier court decisions ordering the suspension of spraying on indigenous land and compliance with the Environmental Management Plan put in place for Plan Colombia fumigation.
Colombia itself cheered the court victory when Yamile Salinas, then-of the Ombudsman's Office, in a statement released shortly after the verdict, noted: "This court order formally adopts many of the requirements for environmental and human protection that the Colombian Ombudsman and Comptroller General, along with both national and international non-government organizations have been demanding for years."
"That was a legally binding decision," says Astrid Puentes, a Colombian human rights attorney with Earthjustice, the legal branch of the Sierra Club. "It should have put an immediate end to the spraying until those tests were done or a legal appeal in favor of continued spraying overturned that order."
In fact, Uribe, on the day after the court order, announced that he would continue the spraying as long as he was president.
"He is in clear violation of Colombian law," says Puentes, "but no one can stop the president in this. So while that decision should have been enough to protect the health and human rights of the environment and people of Colombia, it continues anyway. The Administrative Court recognized the harm to health and biodiversity, soil and water bodies that the aerial fumigation is doing, but those with vested interests choose to ignore that."
Among those with vested interests beyond the Colombian and US governments are Texas' Bell Helicopter Textron – which provides Huey helicopters used to move troops and supplies, and Connecticut's Sikorsky Helicopter, which supplies Blackhawk choppers used to protect spray planes, as well as Kansas' Monsanto, which provides the Round-up Ultra used in the spraying. DynCorp, of Reston, VA, is the most vested of all: As the State Department's primary outsourcing company in Colombia it has a roughly $600 million dollar contract to actually do the spraying and maintain the spray planes and helicopters utilized in the fumigation operation. Each of those companies maintains high-level lobbying firms in Washington.
At issue is the core of the supposed US assault on cocaine and heroin trafficking in the Western Hemisphere. When Plan Colombia was initiated by former president Bill Clinton in 2000, its stated aim was to eliminate the coca and poppy plants in Colombia used to make cocaine and heroin. If they were eliminated, the thinking went, not only would much of drug traffic in the US disappear, but the funds generated by that traffic in Colombia, which support both paramilitary and rebel groups involved in that country's brutal civil war would dry up as well.
But while the plan as envisioned by Clinton and expanded into The Andean Initiative by President Bush looks good on paper (at least to the naive, who actually believe the US has a real interest in stopping the drug trade in Colombia or anywhere else), there been an enormous amount of collateral damage from the spraying. Moreover, the US, which entered into the plan with the stated intention of improving human rights in Colombia, has lost all pretense of credibility toward that end and is clearly active in contributing to worsening the human rights situation there. And by continuing to back Uribe and spray herbicide since the Cundinamarca court order to stop the spraying, we are breaking the law in both Colombia and here at home in doing so.
The class action lawsuit hinged on the fact that in 2001, a legally binding Federal Environmental Management Plan was put into effect in Colombia by the minister of the environment. One of the stipulations of that plan was that a battery of impact studies would be conducted to determine whether or not the fumigation was harmful to the environment and humans.
Those studies have never been done, and so the Colombian Administrative Tribunal's decision was made in favor of the plaintiffs. But Colombia's president, Alvaro Uribe Velez – who was the mayor of Medellín during the Medellín cocaine cartel's heyday and whose campaign manager looks to be one up to his eyes in the cocaine trade – disregarded the order and announced he would continue to spray while his administration's National Directorate of Narcotics appeals the decision to Colombia's highest court.
In the US, there were also laws connected with the monies being utilized to pay for the spraying. One of them states that all fumigation is done in compliance with Colombian law. What had covered the US legally – if bare-assed naked counts as covered – prior to the court order, was a March, 2002 letter from the Colombian minister of exterior relations to the US State Department, which reads in part: "the Government of Colombia hereby certifies that the aerial spraying program supported by the United States is being carried out in accordance with each and every applicable Colombian law on the matter."
But where that might have been close enough for government work a year ago, continued spraying in light of last June's court decision clearly makes it illegal for the US to continue to support the spraying before impact studies are done. The US State Department has not returned several phone calls or answered several emails asking for the justification for such illegal action.
In addition to the continued illegal spraying of herbicide in Colombia, there have been a number of other recent developments related to Plan Colombia – largely ignored by the US media – that hint at Uribe tossing out democracy in favor of dictatorship.
On September 30, Colombian Minister of the Environment Cecilia Rodriguez modified the Environmental Management Plan. Among the changes was the height at which spray-planes could fly. Where the legal height had been 100 feet – absurd for crop dusting as spraying at that altitude can create drifts that extend for miles, according to several Texas crop dusters – the ceiling was raised even higher. Also changed was the prohibition against spraying in Colombia's national parks – "something," says Earthjustice's Puentes, "which had been going on illegally but which overnight became legal."
According to Puentes, the Environmental Management Plan changes were made under direct pressure from Uribe, and shortly after them, Rodriguez quit her post. Uribe replaced Rodriguez as environmental minister with Sandra Suarez in early November, 2003. Suarez formerly headed the office in charge of Plan Colombia – the office in charge of the aerial spraying. "Uribe's administration weakened the environmental conditions of the management plan," says Puentes, "then stacked the deck by appointing Suarez."
Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), ranking member of the Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Foreign Operations who has long questioned the Plan Colombian fumigation, bristled at the thought of in-park spraying, and attached an amendment to the Fiscal 2004 Foreign Operations Bill, which would prohibit the use of US funding in the fumigation of Colombia's 24 million acres of national parks, but didn't have the political clout to make it stick. It is estimated that about 15,000 acres of illegal cultivation is ongoing in the parks.
Colombia's national parks are among the world's most biodiverse areas, and environmentalists worldwide have fought their fumigation on the grounds that it will wreak havoc on their fragile ecosystems. Several Colombian politicians have also fought the park spraying on the grounds that it is constitutionally illegal, as the Colombian Constitution makes the parks completely off limits to both development and modification. They plan to challenge it in court on both that issue and the ground that the spraying will contravene several international treaties, including the Biodiversity Covenant, ratified in 1994, as well as the Rio De Janiero Summit Treaty of 1992. Moreover, Colombia's national treaties protect the lands of indigenous peoples, many of who live within Colombia's national parks and whose lands are expected to be among the first areas to be sprayed there. Thousands of indigenous are expected to be forced to move if park spraying occurs on a large scale.
But Suarez – clearly on Uribe's party line, if not payroll – has defended herbicide spraying in the parks on several occasions, noting that the chemicals used to process coca are already damaging the parks, and that allowing Roundup Ultra to be sprayed by DynCorp contractors will not increase the damage already being done. Camilo Gonzalez Posso, a former minister of health in Colombia agrees that the chemicals used to process coca on national park and indigenous lands are having a "tremendously harmful" impact but adds "that is not an argument that justifies throwing gasoline on the fire."
Fortunately, Uribe has bowed to public pressure, and in March 2004 announced that though he has the legal right to spray in national parks, he will hold off for the time being.
The Bush administration, however, has noted that spraying the parks is the only way to save them, and that not fumigating the parks will be "an invitation to the growers to destroy the forests and their natural resources," according to Time magazine. Uribe upped the ante on fumigation-protesting when he recently, and on several occasions, announced that anyone objecting to fumigation in any part of Colombia or "working to protect human rights and the environment" would be viewed as a sympathizer with terrorists, according to Anna Cedarstav, a staff scientist with Earthjustice.
Perhaps the Uribe administration's most publicly astounding assault on the human rights community's sensibilities in connection with the Plan Colombia spraying – as purposeful spraying of Indigenous lands, overt spraying onto farmland and so forth are not publicized – occurred last November 2. An international environmental commission studying the effects of recent fumigation in the Colombian province of Arauca was stopped by a US-trained Colombian anti-narcotics battalion and had their film, cameras and notes confiscated. The commission, which included Colombians and representatives of France, the US, England and Spain, had previously met with Colombian Vice President Carlos Frank about their work.
That the Bush administration has not commented on any of these recent developments – and that the State Department has ignored repeated requests both by phone and in writing to address them – is par for the course and absolutely shameful. And the continued backing of the fumigation while Uribe flaunts Colombian law is flat out illegal.
Every study but the two carried out by the US and Colombia has shown that the fumigation is having a major impact on both human life and the environment. (The sham U.S. study, carried out by the Environmental Protection Administration, not only evaluated an incomplete chemical mix – it didn't have the full complement of chemicals as mixed being used to evaluate – but relied exclusively on data provided by the State Department. No member of the EPA spent one hour of time on the ground in Colombia, as they have no standing there. And even then the EPA had major questions about the fumigation.) One recent study carried out by the respected Dr. Adolfo Mondonaldo of Ecological Action, shows the "presence of genetic damage in a population" of people exposed to the Plan Colombia fumigation. American toxicologist Mark Cherniak recently presented a paper to the Council of State of Colombia stating "the exposure to glyphosate (the active ingredient in Round-up) represents a risk in expectant mothers."
The problems don't end there. Food crops have been destroyed, rainforest ravaged, tens of thousands of peasants have been displaced because their crops, livestock and water sources have been poisoned.
The most humane solution would be a permanent cessation of the fumigation. Given that is not going to happen in this political climate, there minimally needs to happen what was ordered by the Colombian courts: a temporary suspension of the fumigation until environmental and human impact studies can be made and safety guidelines put into place. Yet even that is not happening and is not going to happen. What would be thhe harm in a temporary suspension of the fumigation until environmental and human impact studies can be made? Nothing. Which suggests that both the US and Colombia know that if impact studies were made the fumigation would be permanently stopped. But if that turned out to be the case, since all the fumigation thus far – for all the alleged success it's had in eliminating Colombia's coca crop – hasn't actually lessened the supply of coca in the US one iota, what would be the harm in stopping it permanently?
Politically it would be embarrassing for the Bush Administration, of course, but Bush's out would be that the whole plan was former president Clinton's cockeyed idea. So it must be more than that that's preventing those studies.
To many, it continues to look like the spraying is meant more to clear the land of people so that oil exploration can get going full steam in the region than it is to eliminate coca crops.
"We know at least one element of Plan Colombia" says Astrid Puentes, "is the US-training of Colombian soldiers to protect the Occidental Oil pipeline in Canon Limon from rebel attacks. Some people think the fumigation will clear the land for exploration as well."
And if that were the case, it would explain why those pesky studies aren't being carried out.
Lea Ud. el Artículo en Español
- The Fund for Authentic Journalism


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A Roadmap to StandardsApril 30, 2004
This afternoon I was asked by a friend what I would recommend to an old designer who wants to learn more about web standards, CSS, XML, and XHTML.
This is a perfect example of when an email response is better posted here for a wider audience (and Google). So here's my answer: this is a comprehensive, informal, and somewhat long-winded roadmap for anyone who has heard about web standards, thinks they might want web standards, but doesn't know where to start.
Stop! Before you do anything, the most important thing you can do for your learning process is accept that a) it's going to take time, and b) you will be frustrated along the way.
But you're not alone. Plenty of us who have taken the plunge into standards went through the same, and there is a growing body of work devoted to helping make your life easier. The old-timers had to figure out the hard way all the tricks and techniques we now take for granted; lucky folks who came in later (myself included) can benefit from their sweat and tears.
In the end, when your skill using standard-based design eclipses your skill using old-school table-based methods, you'll look back and marvel at how much more sense it makes to layout a page with CSS. Oh sure, the actual methods used might not make much sense (considering there are better options in the CSS2 spec than what we currently use) but we have a major browser manufacturer to blame for their lack of support.
Uh, I seem to have wandered. Sorry, that's another thing you'll have to get used to: unbridled hostility against Internet Explorer. It'll take some experience to understand why, but you'll know exactly what we mean in short order.
So. On to the practical information you can start using immediately. First, run and buy Designing With Web Standards. Don't even think about it, just do it. Got it? Good, now don't let it collect dust — read it. Everything I'm about to cover is detailed in DWWS. It's equal parts manifesto (WHY would you want to do this?) and tutorial (HOW do you do this?). You need it.
Now. The first thing to do is get into an XHTML mindset. Whether you choose HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 Strict (there are reasons to go with either; ignore them for now, and then ignore them even more, until you're ready for some mind-numbing drudgery), it all begins with a DOCTYPE. Telling a browser which language your document is marked up with isn't only a good idea, it prevents unwanted rendering glitches that will otherwise drive you crazy. Think of it like this: if I want to fly to Chicago, I have to tell my travel agent of choice where I want to go. Sure, it might be fun to take my chances and see where I end up, but it's not exactly practical. Setting a DOCTYPE ensures I get to my destination of choice without unintended side-trips to Vienna.
Next goal: well-formed markup. This is pretty easy to grasp, actually. Always quote your attributes (ie.
, and
<input type="text" />). Don't improperly nest tags; close them in the order you opened them. And if you open a tag, close it again; every tag, or element, requires an opening and a closing correspondent.
A quick diversion here: somewhere along the way, tags became 'elements'. Same syntax, different theory. Call them what you will, the proper label is now element; maybe it always has been. I don't know. No one ever explained this to me.
So anyway, each element needs to be closed properly. If you're using HTML 4.01, this doesn't include stand-alones like

, and
<input>. With XHTML, it does. There's a hack-ish, but practical syntax that degrades gracefully in older browsers: just add a space and a slash to the end.

 becomes

, for example.
Now there's one more little confusing thing about XHTML attributes: they always need to have a value, even when that value doesn't make sense. Example:
<input type="radio" checked="checked" />. You can get away with just
checked in HTML 4.01, but XHTML needs the redundancy.
Finally, XHTML requires all your code to be in lowercase. HTML doesn't differentiate, but XHTML uses XML syntax, which is case-sensitive. And the case ends up being lower.
That's it for markup! You're done! Take a breather, grab a cerveza, and chill out for the afternoon. Because that's only step number one.
Now that we've got you writing proper HTML/XHTML, try running it through the W3's validator. If you've crossed your i's and dotted your t's (or in this case, quoted your attributes and nested your elements) you'll achieve a nice yellow-on-blue success message. Learn to love this colour/text combination, it can be your best friend.
Why is validating important, or even relevant? Because poorly-written markup is completely unpredictable; you end up relying on a browser's error-handling, and even though most browsers are very good about this, it's a bad practice to rely on it. Hey, it's what got us into the non-standard, proprietary browser wars in the first place. (Microsoft was able to compete with Netscape in the Netscape-dominated world of 1995 because IE was built to handle errors exactly the same as Netscape.)
The single point is, validating helps you spot errors in your code, which in turn ensures more consistent rendering of your page. The very first technique I try when debugging problematic layouts is validating my code. You should too.
Yeah, okay, it's tough when you first validate your first site and get back a list of 78 arcane errors. Unfortunately, though the validator helps, it's not perfect. It's run by volunteers who are doing their best, but sometimes the error messages are as helpful as Vogon poetry. The good news is that problems cascade, and if you can find one missing

 tag, for example, a lot of the time you bump that number down to 24 errors without doing anything else. The short of it: it looks bad, but it's often not.
Now that you're validating, you're following the letter of the law. But as with many real-world laws, at this point you're adhering to only the rigid guidelines of the rules and missing the bigger picture about why those guidelines are there in the first place.
The next step is to take this well-formed markup structure you've built for your document, strip out the presentational attributes that have been deprecated in some of the more recent DOCTYPES, and move the presentation into a completely separate file. This is the infamous separation of structure and presentation, and this is where CSS comes into the picture.
It's like this: your text is content. Content is nice, but without any hints about the content's structure (which includes things like spaces and headers and lists) you end up with a jumbled mess of text. Completely unusable. Structure is an extra layer which breaks down that messy text into logical groupings and organizes them in a way that conveys extra information about individual elements in that document. How that information looks may be implied by the structure (for example, you'll most often find that a primary page heading will be larger than the body text) but it doesn't dictate it any further.
That's where presentation comes in. Presentation is the formatting cue that tells the primary page header to be red, italicized, and 150% of the body copy's size. Presentation is an extra layer of information on top of a document's structure, that builds up the (non-visual) structure into something far more appealing to the eye. CSS is the presentational layer, and it can take a very simpy marked up document, and turn it into something amazing — view the css Zen Garden for a live demonstration of this in action.
So what's the best way to start separating your presentation out of your structure? Consider any HTML element or attribute that offers a visual cue to be an offending piece of legacy code. It's time to start killing those
bgcolors and
 tags. Here's a pop quiz:
In each of the following examples, which attributes and tags would you remove to eliminate all traces of presentational structure?

This is my first web site.

They're coming to take me away...

Got your answers ready? Great, compare to the list below. These are proper structural elements without a trace of structural formatting:

This is my first web site.

They're coming to take me away...

That's it? That's it.
While it's not explicitly stated in any spec, a further goal of this separation is to use the proper elements for the job. Using a table to layout a page is then, by this definition, an improper use of a table. In the above example, it might have even been prudent to go further and remove the

 and
 elements, but it's hard to say without surrounding context. Tables aren't deprecated; they can still be quite useful. But they should be used properly — to contain data that's structurally tabular.
So we've stripped the formatting from our page. Hooray. What now? Those are some ugly elements, all Times-New-Romaned and linear. Where's the interest? Where's the compelling visuals we were promised?
Head back to the Zen Garden example. See the lovely designs? See how different they are? The key here is that underneath each is the same XHTML, just as bland as your currently-unformatted document. No really, it is.
Having a bland and ugly base is a good thing, in fact. What you may have noticed is that this unformatted HTML looks an awful lot like the web of 1994 (if you were around back then). In fact, with a few notable exceptions, that's what it is. This stuff is as old as the web itself.

's have been around since the days of Mosaic. Which, as you may have guessed by now, will still handle a properly-structured page with surprising fidelity. Try saying that about a late-90's table-fest.
The benefits don't end there of course. Accessibility to those with special needs is almost free, search engine optimization is built-in, bandwidth costs go way down (along with development times), and on and on and on. Jeffrey Veen wrote up the Business Value of Web Standards late last year, and Roger Johansson expanded on the benefits and techniques of standards-based design with his recent Developing With Web Standards.
CSS is well-supported across all the major browsers today, and there are countless resources for learning the syntax, the basics of CSS layout, and the advanced theory behind high-impact CSS-based design. I'll point you to a few of the better ones: WestCiv offers an ongoing, free CSS course that will help you get started and bring you up to speed in a hurry. Andrew Fernandez has indexed a huge listing of CSS resources that should help you no matter where your skill level is. Eric Meyer has written a bunch of books that you should have on your desk, including the project-based Eric Meyer on CSS and its follow-up More Eric Meyer on CSS (no, really, that's what it's called). His O'Reilly-published reference CSS: The Definitive Guide is in its second edition, and should be on your desk. Also check out Molly Holzschlag's CSS: The Designer's Edge, and Chris Schmitt's Designing CSS Web Pages.
Going into the ins and outs of applying CSS and building layouts could take me many times the space I've already used up so far and some financial motivation. We'll cut it short here, considering it's taken a Herculean effort on your part to even get this far…
Getting plugged in is probably the single biggest piece of advice I can give anyone looking to get a start with web standards. Through ongoing reading and sharing of what you know, we all grow as a community. There are many of us active in the development community, and there are bound to be many more times coming on board over the next few years. We have a global communication network at our disposal; make sure to use it.
And if nothing else, we're here to commiserate when you hit the wall. Hey, it happens to all of us.
Reader Comments
I've started designing with XHTML & CSS for about a half year now. Everyone told me XHTML and CSS was so great I would never turn back to tables. I never believed them because tables were great but now I love CSS and havn't used a table for layout in months. Once past the frustrating first months, it gets real easy.
Great article. I'd just add a couple more resources that have been invaluable in getting up to speed and staying current with all of the recent developments.
1. Get yourself a good RSS aggregator (FeedDemon, Shrook, etc.) and start subscribing to all of the various blogs your likely to encounter during your research. I've found this to be the single best way to stay current with the many developments that are taking place in the standards community.
2. Take a look at O'Reilly and Associates Safari service. Many of the books mentioned in Dave's article are available online. It's a great way to affordably sample a large number of books on the various technologies you'll be researching.
Great work, very useful to have this around.
I suggest putting this up on the Essentials page here, so that everyone can easily find this handy-dandy resource / introduction to moving towards proper, standards-aware webdevelopment.
I must say well written article and it contains lots of info. That is exactly what I was looking for. I too want to take the plunge into web standards design and so this was definitely a worthwile read and helpful. Thank you very much.
great little article. thanks. but this tangent caught my attention:
"A quick diversion here: somewhere along the way, tags became 'elements'. Same syntax, different theory. Call them what you will, the proper label is now element; maybe it always has been. I don't know. No one ever explained this to me."
…am i the only one who is concerned about this? the proper way to refer to things just seems to change every now and then, and even though no one seems to know why, or even how, they are quick to make sure everyone else does it.
there almost seems to be a subtle strain leaning towards groupthink in the standards community which could prove to be a liability in the future, not to mention simply unfortunate for all the reasons that groupthink anywhere is unfortunate :)
HTML has used the term "element" since it was first formalised as an SGML application in HTML 2.0, and probably before that. The proper term has been "element" for at least the past nine years:
It seems to me that the proper terms are coming into more widespread use as people actually start paying attention to the specifications. The past few years seem to have started a shift away from the "bung a load of code together, and if it works in Both Browsers™, sell it" attitude.
Great article…
BTW: HTML Tidy is still a good tool, and gives you more feedback than the validator.
Great job! Thanks a lot for summarizing the WS process so well.
This is really well put Dave, an excellent resource for all beginners. I especially like the bit about Vogon poetry, kind of drew it all home for me ;->
Thanks Dave, I've been trying to explain this sort of thing to people for ages, and have always made a bit of a mess of it. What with the Zen Garden, which has always been a fantastic resourse for showing what can be done with CSS, this has just made my life a whole lot easier!
All roads start with Zeldman.
This is a great resource for beginners, I have a few friends that have started this journey this month. They just received an email link.
Thanks Dave, U da man!
Forwarded it to a friend who was asking about this.
That's a really good explanation, Dave. A couple of comments:
Tags vs elements vs element types:

 is an element type.
A particular
…
 section of a particular document is an element.
The tags are the actual delimiters; it's rarely useful to talk about them, people usually mean "element" or "element type" when they talk about "tags".
Think of the relationship between "element type" and "element" being the same as the relationship between "class" and "instance", and "tags" being the equivelent of curly braces.
XHTML attribute redundancy:
I believe you need things like 'checked="checked"', because in HTML, a bare 'checked' is actually the attribute value, not the attribute name. It would make more sense to have something like 'checked="true"', but that would void the HTML compatibility.
Thank you for this entry! I've been working on an outline to teach Standards to my co-workers, and this will definitely help.
I've also found that Paul Scrivens' Resources page on CSS Vault has a bunch of great links, and Roger Johansson has put together ver comprehensive
comprehensive and succinct. not bad at all…
Sorry, I didn't read you'r comment policy before putting in the links. Here they are again:
Roger Johansson "Developing With Web Standards" - http://www.456bereastreet.com/lab/developing_with_web_standards/
CSS Vault Resource page - http://www.cssvault.com/resources.php
'you will be frustrated along the way'
For sure, but it's worth it. In the end, things make sense. Most of the time ;-]
Great write up Dave.
Great standards intro. But if you've crossed your i's and dotted your t's you better look into other, more basic training.
Thanks Dave. I guess at this point I can say that you can teach an old designer new tricks. (Ans you should!)
I appreciate all the info. I have ordered Zeldman's book, and it will be here soon. It's going to be a lot of fun/pain/angush.
I guess I'm a sucker for punishment.
Thanks again!
Isn't the correct answer to #2 to remove the entire tag? ;)
I think this really needed to be written. The best part is that it's in plain english, so that anyone can understand it. Great job.
Tags vs elements:

 and
 are tags.

Some text
 is an element.
In HTML some elements (in some circumstances) may omit their closing tags.
In X(HT)ML, all elements must have closing tags, though empty elements can have abbreviated "short" tags:

 is equivalent to
. Note that this abbreviation, is strictly speaking not legal HTML. In HTML, the closing tag is often optional (and hence can just be omitted), but it can't be abbreviated as above.
"Whether you choose HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 Strict (there are reasons to go with either; ignore them for now, and then ignore them even more, until you're ready for some mind-numbing drudgery)"
Aside from the bit about short tags, your advice holds equally well for both HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0. But once you tell people to write  instead of simply , you'd better tell them to slap an XHTML DOCTYPE on that puppy.
N.b.: I'm not advocating that they *should* use XHTML. Rather, whichever DOCTYPE they choose, they should adhere to the syntax of that specification.
If they're authoring HTML 4, they should write  rather than  and conversely if they are authoring XHTML.
Great write-up. Now we need two more articles from you. 8^)
The first is a clear, concise introductory explanation of the box model for CSS formatting rules. The CSS and XHTML specs do a woeful job here.
The second is a simple introduction in where the main gotchas are with default attribute values. For example, which element types are block and which are inline by default. What elements by default need to be contained within a
 or
 tag to be standards compliant without changing that the display attribute in the CSS for the element. What elements have attributes that you must clear in the CSS in order to get the desired result?
These two things created issues that tripped me up the most when switching to standards compliance.
I would mention Layout-o-Matic, at http://www.inknoise.com/experimental/layoutomatic.php as this gives a good start to CSS layout.
I would also have mentioned List-o-Matic, at http://www.accessify.com/tools-and-wizards/list-o-matic/list-o-matic.asp which is based on Listamatic, at http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic/
These are both really good tools to let people try stuff quickly and have a starting point to play around with CSS.
Dave S. wrote:
"I purposely glossed over the MIME type issue because it's completely moot in 2004. This isn't the time or place to argue the merits of HTML over XHTML."
I just brought it up so that people who want to serve their XHTML with the proper MIME type can go research more themselves. It was meant more as a note than anything else.
Besides, you can use server side magic to serve it as text/html to legacy UAs and application/xhtml+xml to the rest.
It should be noted that as of right now, XHTML should be avoided and you should stick to HTML 4.01 Strict unless you have a real need for XHTML (like MathML). XHTML doesn't provide any advantages over HTML (as far as I've seen) besides aformentioned ability to include other XML namespaces in it.
In addition, XHTML should be sent as application/xhtml+xml, which Everyone's Favorite Browser chokes on.
In short, don't use XHTML unless you grok it.
Re: XHTML vs HTML. According to http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/ XHTML 1.0 MAY be served as text/html, XHTML 1.1 SHOULD NOT, unless you have a very good reason. It isn't MUST NOT, which means something quite different.
I serve my XHTML 1.1 as text/html. My very good reason is that Everybody's Favourite Browser would otherwise choke on it :-)
I prefer XHTML 1.1 as it is the most strict flavour - which helps to keep me on the straight and narrow! When I was converting to a CSS layout, using XHTML 1.1 helped me pick out most of the layout stuff in the HTML so I could put it where it belonged - in the style sheet.
Um, hello?
"(there are reasons to go with either; ignore them for now, and then ignore them even more, until you're ready for some mind-numbing drudgery)"
I purposely glossed over the MIME type issue because it's completely moot in 2004. This isn't the time or place to argue the merits of HTML over XHTML.
Let it go.
"I purposely glossed over the MIME type issue because it's completely moot in 2004. This isn't the time or place to argue the merits of HTML over XHTML."
It's not moot, it's simply irrelevant to what *most* people want to do with (X)HTML. Those who care about the *technical* benefits of using XHTML care about MIME-type issues.
For the other 99% of the web-authoring population, MIME-types are irrelevant and only reason to prefer XHTML over HTML is that the former has a simpler syntax, presumably making it easier to learn to author *correctly*.
However, as Evan Goer discovered,
even that is ridiculously hard for most people.
Hi Dave,
thanks for this. I was about to write a similar article with a slightly different audience in mind. In fact, reading your article, I think it's suitable for both the table-jockey and the web virgin, so I probably won't bother! I'll paste the foreword here though, so you can see what I had in mind. Please don't inerpret any of this as a dig at your fantastic roadmap, which I hadn't read when I wrote this! I'd be interested in any comments.
Imagine this is a school textbook. If you're the kind of person who didn't read prefaces in textbooks, don't read this.
This article is written for an audience free of the emotional baggage of table-jockeys and the histrionics of gurus; a virginal audience that just wants to learn how to design modern web sites. This is me, one year ago.
It neglects to mention that there was ever a way of doing things other than the accessible, usable, semantically-meaningful, valid way striven for today. There are no snide references to broken browsers (except when the extant version is still broken). It doesn't impeach the reader for sins they never committed.
One year ago, all these things elicited from me were, "Huh?"
It avoids these history lessons to provide a well-marked path of least resistance to modern web design for the untainted but computer-literate. If you initially take this path but wander off into the pretty woodland and dangerous swamps then your mileage may vary. But if, like me, you get off on acquiring useless knowledge then you may have more fun.
For me, one year ago, the many references to not doing it like we used to, or to educating clients stuck in 1997, or to doing the Right Thing were strictly *unnecessary*. It is *possible* to teach the Only Thing.
As an example, mentioning that tables were ever used for layout to someone who didn't previously know this serves three purposes, one good, and two bad:
- It's a useful counter-example when explaining semantic design
- It buries a seed that table layout is quick and easy (which is the oft-cited response of the Platonic antagonist the writer is attempting to convert).
- It takes up time that is initially better spent learning the basics.
I'm not suggesting the bad old days should be forgotten or hidden. Security through obscurity does not work. I'm not saying there isn't a very large audience that needs and wants to be *re*-educated.
I'm merely trying to provide a quick and easy route to our way of doing things for web virgins, lest they do it another way, or perhaps even worse, they don't bother at all.
Fantastic intro to web standards. I wish I had read something like this a few years ago; it would have saved me a lot of time and frustration. Thanks for this post.
[offtopic] "Vogon poetry!" I can't get this grin off my face. I wonder how many of your readers have read Douglas Adam's increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's trilogy? [/offtopic]
Point taken, wrong word used. This article is for the 99%, so we'll go with "irrelevant".
So, let me expand on my other point: XHTML is easier for people to learn than HTML.
Consider the following three elements:
a)
b)
c)
Which is valid HTML? Which is valid XHTML? And how can you remember the answer?
In XHTML, the rule is simple: every element has a start tag and an end tag. Empty element can be abbreviated with short tags. So b) and c) are valid XHTML, but a) is invalid.
In HTML, some elements have mandatory start and end tags. Some elements (in some circumstances) have optional start/end tags. For some elements, the end tag is actually *forbidden*.
The image tag is one of the latter. So a) is valid HTML, and b) is invalid. [c) is never valid HTML. That one, at least, is easy.]
I've made this sound a bit worse than it actually is. The elements for which the end tag is FORBIDDEN are, to the best of my knowledge, just those elements declared EMPTY in the HTML Spec.
But, for God's sake, poring over the Spec should not be a prerequisite for learning (X)HTML. The syntax of (X)HTML is complicated enough [The
 element contains block-level content. The <q> element contains inline content. Geez! Which elements are block-level? What's inline content? …] Complicated rules for start and end tags don't help matters.
That was a great intro, and those articles that you linked to will be a great help to sell web standards to others. I've been working with web standards for a couple months now, and it can be frustrating, but once you get the hang of it, and get used to closing tags, quoting attributes etc… it comes pretty quick and easily.
For people who think it is too hard, or takes longer to code… it really isn't once you get the hang of it… plus it looks so much prettier when you view the source of your page and it is all nicely formed as opposed to the blob of text that tables and dynamic sites can generate.
Oh yeah, the other thing that is great about using web standards, is that you get used to not using browser-specific tags, and it is much much easier to create cross-browser compatible sites…. now IE is the real pain in the ***…. it would be nice if Microsoft added some standards support to IE 6 with XP SP2…. but it probably isn't too likely… so I think we'll be dealing with it for a while to come.
Jacques Distler,
The XML flavor of HTML has many benefits over SGML-ized HTML. I'm currently writing some JavaScripts* which fix IE's CSS handling to some extent… but it's necessary to use some XML features in the script**. That's impossible, by definition, in SGML.
Furthermore, XHTML is more portable beyond the web because it is "just XML": XSL (FOoT) style sheets can used to make PDF, Docbook, or other XHTML web pages. Several of the high-quality and cheaper (than SGML) XML editors can be used to edit and store those documents. And there are no document structure ambiguities (unlike HTML which could have no html, head, or closing tags among others), which makes XHTML easier to parse in the future (when you have to deal with legacy document in XHTML 1.0, and transform them to XHTML 10.01A, etcetera).
Jimmy C.
* (Inspired and partially stolen from http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/ Thank you Dean.)
** (If you must know, I have to add custom elements via xml namespaces - it breaks validity, but that's not as important for JavaScript-generated content as it is for human-generated content.)
This is a tremendous article, and addresses some of the issues that I've been debating on a recent project of mine (http://www.practicalcss.com) in which I'm trying to work out a basic standards-compliant "template" of sorts.
Standards should be fundamental to web development. I've been heartened by the noise made in the past couple of years about standards-compliant design. Generally no longer seen as an obscure arguing-point by fringe elitists, standards are becoming an accepted part of the web development scene. CSS-based design has achieved a firm and permanent position alongside table- and graphic-based design – and one is slowly outpacing the other.
"but it's necessary to use some XML features in the script**. That's impossible, by definition, in SGML."
I'm not sure what you mean, as XML is a strict subset of SGML.
Furthermore, unless you serve your document with an XML MIME-Type (application/xhtml+xml), then it will be processed by the browser's SGML parser in *all* current browsers.
"Furthermore, XHTML is more portable beyond the web because it is 'just XML': XSL (FOoT) style sheets can used to make PDF, Docbook, or other XHTML web pages. Several of the high-quality and cheaper (than SGML) XML editors can be used to edit and store those documents."
This is an imortant point. Just because it is *possible* to do everything with SGML that you can do with XML, doesn't mean there will be off-the-shelf tools for doing so.
Just as the simpler syntax of XML makes it easier for humans to learn (IMO), it has also become more popular to write tools for.
Thus there are many more technologies and automated tools for manipulating XML documents than SGML documents. In the long run, that certainly makes it a better platform (unless you are willing to write your own tools, or pay through the nose for someone else to write them).
That's a powerful argument, but not one that is relevant to the "99%" Dave was aiming at. As a rule, the people who care about namespaces and other advanced features of XHTML are the same ones who care about MIME-Types, etc. — the sort of esoterica that Dave explicitly wanted to sidestep.
"And there are no document structure ambiguities (unlike HTML which could have no html, head, or closing tags among others)…"
These are *not* document structure ambiguities. The rules of SGML syntax are more complicated than XML, but they are not ambiguous.
See, eg,
for a discussion inspired by this comment thread.
At last! Something to redirect all those people emailing me for an answer to "How?". You've saved me a lot of time…
Have you seen this post http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/05/02.html#a7338. Robert Scoble will pass comments on to the IE team!!!!
Gotta be worth organising some rational postings there and maybe, just maybe, stuff will happen!
"Robert Scoble will pass comments on to the IE team!!!!"
And what, the IE team is sequestered in a deep underground bunker with no access to the Internet?
I mean, the bugs in IE are well-known. Entire cottage industries are devoted to developing workarounds for IE's broken CSS support, IE's lack of support for PNG transparency, etc.
The IE team is *surely* already aware of the serious bugs in their browser. They'd have to be either brain-dead, or cut off from the Internet to be unaware.
I don't doubt Scoble's sincerity, but this is a little like those non-functioning thermostats they install in individual offices in large office buildings to give the occupants an illusory sense of control over their environment.
Re: Jacques [43]
Personally, I can't even get excited about the IE team "fixing" bugs. So what if they do? Is that going to change our coding habits? Probably not. IE6 is going to be the defacto browser for YEARS. The way I see it, IE7 will just be another browser that needs to be tested (although I don't know *how* I will do that, since I don't plan on upgrading…)
My assumption is that we better get used to the current browsers, because this is the way it is going to be for awhile. Firebird 3 and Opera 15 might be fantastic, but I still fear we will have to deal with IE6 in a decade. Heck, many organizations that should know better still have Netscape 4.7 installed.
Like many other posters (we're all up on a wall somewhere?!), I recently discovered the thrill of standards compliance. Now I wonder, how can we get more web developers to abandon the non-compliant practices that are so prevalent?
Thanks for the summary, Dave. I am now adhering as best i can to standards, using xhtml 1.0 trans and an external stylesheet. my sites validate … for now. but i have only recently begun to see references to MIME types. can someone point me to a reference about what a MIME type is and why it is important? if i don't consider / incorporate MIME types now, am i missing something? thanks in advance.
and references therein. The summary table
tells you the way things SHOULD be done. Ian Hickson's famous, if somewhat misleading, article
explains *why*. (The bottom line is that, if you serve XHTML as text/html, *even* if you validate everything, your site may still break horribly if you were to switch to application/xhtml+xml. The only way to ensure your site will work when served with the correct MIME type is to actually serve it that way.)
Right now, Gecko-based browsers (Mozilla, Firefox, …) and IE6 with the MathPlayer 2.0 plugin installed can handle application/xhtml+xml. Most everyone else should still get text/html.
Great article, I shall be pointing a few colleagues in this direction. I have one little comment to make, I thought this line in parapgraph 9 was a little confusing "close [tags] in the order you opened them".
This should read "close [tags] in the REVERSE order you opened them". If you closed your tags in the order you opened them, you may end with something like this:

Hello World!

thanks, jacques. very helpful.
*how can we get more web developers to abandon the non-compliant practices that are so prevalent?*
Good freakin' question. What do we do with a web designer like my boss who says things like "Don't reinvent the wheel"? You know what? If no one ever reinvented the wheel, we'd all be driving around in Flintstones cars.


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