Standards Aware Cutting Edge

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Molly recently proffered a set of web design and development personality indicators. I think I’m a mix of SACE and SASS, which makes me as cool as a Trekkie.

SASS. Standards Aware Structural Semanticist. These personalities are very code-centric, with little interest (or more often, skill) in presentation but lots of interest in the proper structuring of documents, use of meaningful markup, microformats, Semantic Web and the like. At their most compulsive, they can become purists to the point of having unrealistic expectations of the more worldly Web worker. Also a rare breed, SASS personalities are extremely important to the good of the Web but sometimes need to be reminded that smart structure and semantics can happily co-exist with visual design.

SACE. Standards Aware Cutting Edge. Whether visual designers or code-centric or both, these are the folks that design first for Firefox, Safari and Opera and work around IE 6.0 only because they have to. Given their druthers, sites would be built using practically no markup and lots of attribute selectors, just because they like the idea. A rare breed worth watching, but also in need of reminders that the rest of the world just ain??????t there yet, and in fact, really are lagging behind.

I had to look up how to spell Trekkie. That’s probably a good thing. I used wikipedia.org and got a good laugh in the process.

Some Star Trek enthusiasts prefer the term Trekker, while some others hold the latter term to be stupid or pretentious, and, for that reason, self-identify as Trekkies. Some Trekkies even say that a Trekker is a Trekkie who is embarrassed for being Trekkie.

I think that’s awesome: the idea that Trekkies may be too embarrassed to be Trekkies, and thus go by Trekker; or that there are pretentious Trekkies. But of course there are (just like there are pretentious web demigods). I guess it’s just funny to see it written down somewhere.

Yeah, I know. I haven’t written in a while. Biz E.