Comments on: The return

By: Lucian

Lucian — Mon, 05 Apr 2004 02:33:33 +0000

An April fool’s joke that comes with an embedded CSS lesson! Absolutely awe-inspiring!

By: Doug

Doug — Sun, 04 Apr 2004 22:33:22 +0000

Duderonomy: no mod_rewrite, just a simple redirect. Since I knew ahead of time what the path and filename would be, I just dropped a new .htaccess file into that directory, with this in it:

Redirect /log/2004/04/01/change.html http://www.stopdesign.com/log/2004/04/01/change2.html

(Ignore the break if you’re seeing one, it was all on one line)

By: Duderonomy

Duderonomy — Sun, 04 Apr 2004 22:15:15 +0000

How did you perform the modification in the .htaccess file (for mapping the filenames). Did you use mod_rewrite for this?

Thx.

By: Brian Warren

Brian Warren — Sat, 03 Apr 2004 07:20:43 +0000

A truly comical trick. Verrry disorienting, which is the best sort of April Fool's trick to pull. As for me, I started to read Dave's post in NetNewsWire, and clicked on the link to Stopdesign from his post. It opened up what looked strikingly like mezzoblue. The rest of the day was full of double-takes. As I mentioned on that other site, it just felt so ..... unnatural.

By: Stephen Blake

Stephen Blake — Sat, 03 Apr 2004 05:01:47 +0000

Beyond the all due appluase for the site switcheroo, and the detailed manner in which it was done, I just wanted to point out to everyone what a great photographer Doug is. Now is that a beautiful picture of a lighthouse or what.

By: Jonathan Stanley

Jonathan Stanley — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 21:53:00 +0000

Nice write ups from both Doug and Dave on how they achieved their day of infamy. Good work in making sure things all worked 99% right.

Incidently, would it have been easier to transformed respective site’s XHTML semantics from one to the other using XSL then applying “vanilla” CSS stylesheets making use of a CSS signature?

By: Lasse

Lasse — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 20:47:19 +0000

At least I had to look for address bar to see what I wrote. I read both sites almost daily and was very confused at first. Then I realised the date.

Well done.

By: France

France — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 16:21:59 +0000

My user behavior was the perfect culprit for this. As part of my regular readings at 1:30am on March 31, I opened up a dozen or so bookmarks in tabs at once. I started reading this one thinking I was reading Dave’s.

I scanned through the post and it didn’t register yet. I skipped over to MezzoBlue and naturally thought I was on StopDesign. It was about 3 seconds in that I started to get disoriented. Two lines into that post and it finally registered.

You so got me.

By: web

web — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 14:24:14 +0000

Great Idea!!

If we all standardize our XHTML then it would make it a lot easier on people that want to steal other people’s CSS/Image designs!

When I dialed in off my feedreader to what I thought was stop design and mezzoblue showed up, I sniffed my morning water to make sure that it wasn’t replaced with vodka.

By: Dave M

Dave M — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 13:43:37 +0000

My only regret is that I was prematurely let in on the joke by reading Eric Meyer first (thanks for giving it away, ya boob!). So my reaction was more like “Oh. Ah. Funny!” rather than the unadulterated mind-f*%# that most others got to enjoy. Nice job nonetheless – a real treat on a day rather lacking in April Fool’s jokes.

Now with all the talk about standardizing one’s CSS we may have the fuel for another holy war… “Let’s call this div ‘nav_bar.’” “NO! We call it ‘menu‘ you idiot!”

By: Paul Michael Smith

Paul Michael Smith — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 12:47:29 +0000

Nice run down of how it came about. I was very impressed after I had checked my pulse and made sure I was not going daft in the head. :-)

By: Subzero Blue

Subzero Blue — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 12:33:29 +0000

It was a great idea and very well implemented. I salute both of you :)

Being a loyal visitor to both blogs, I detected the change at once and burst into laughter, knowing it could only be a joke.
i really loved it.

It’s great to have the stopdesign template back though, yesterday was weird. This way even I am more comfortable :)

By: Martin Lucas-Smith

Martin Lucas-Smith — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 12:18:55 +0000

As I noted in Dave’s comments area, this highlights the need for some degree of standardisation in div and other names.

Personally I use:
container, header, navigation, content, footer

Having better standardisation (how would we agree though?) would make stylesheet/html interoperability much simpler, and mean that tools which generate CSS/HTML, such as the various ‘-omatic’ efforts of late, would result in code requiring less customisation.