Cleaned up the CSS a bunch, to the point where I almost understand the spacing algorithm I'm using. Not that I actually felt like taking the risk of tampering with it to try and regularize some of the inconsistencies, but I was able to sweep away a lot of the unreferenced detritus. In the process, I caught a couple of bugs, including one in the display of BLOCKQUOTEs that I suspect may have had a hand in various Netscape crashes recently reported to me. I also pulled all of the color-control properties into one section of the stylesheet, to make it easier to manipulate that aspect of the page. Didn't abuse this power, though, other than to nudge the date color into something a bit more obtrusive and to add a bit of a greenish kick to links.
Hmmm. Abstruse, obtrusive. So, by analogy: abstract, obtractive. I like this one. I think I'm going to start using it in everyday conversation. Once, that is, I figure out what it sounds like it means. Came across a truly horrific coinage today: "ideate." I'm not sure precisely what the intended usage is, although I suspect that it's the mutant offspring of "idea" and "iterate." If it is, then I'd claim it's linguistically repulsive for at least two distinct reasons, one etymological and one phonetic. Dave and I were having a conversation about the language of Internet startups and industry players. After talking about how ridiculously easy it would be to create venture capital mad libs, Dave started rattling off a list of words companies use to describe their working environments, concluding with "oxygenated," a word that's not really in heavy rotation in the Internet corporate world, but really, by all rights, could be. That's what the tech industry is about, fundamentally: the conversion of meaningful technical terms into meaningless buzzwords. The process is exothermic, and by trapping the released heat, San Francisco plans to solve its power-generation problems well into the middle of the next century.
Of course, both ideate.com and oxygenate.com are taken, both by firms specializing in "communications strategies." Shrug shrug question mark.
My other thought for the day was the slogan for Mad Max: Beyond Wireless: "One hundred companies enter! One company leaves!"