In early February I wrote about losing my sense of fun in web development. Basically, from mid November until the writing of this entry I was in a kind of extended haze. I worked as little as possible, and when clients old or new came knocking on my door for yet another HTML/CSS template or yet another small, unexciting script, I did everything in my power to turn them away. In fact, there was a short time in December when I seriously considered quitting web development altogether.

February was a normal month. I did a lot of work and sent out a lot of invoices, but I wasn't what you'd call happy about it. In this respect, my visit to SxSW was an excellent chance to take some distance from my everyday life, and when I returned home I knew I wanted to change a lot of things. I realised that I didn't want to code for a living any more.

Which begs the question: if I would quit coding, what would I do for a living?

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Back in February I wrote an opinion piece for the British .NET Magazine. I considered it a dress rehearsal for my SxSW presentation, and as such it allowed me to focus my thoughts.

Meanwhile the opinion piece has been published in .NET's latest issue (162; confusingly called the May issue, even though it will remain April for 20 more days). It will allow people who weren't at SxSW to read a summary of my presentation.

This reminds me of a question I wanted to ask anyway: which good, standards-aware web development magazines are there? .NET is definitely one. Unfortunately its Dutch counterpart NetProfessional, for which I occansionally wrote a piece, folded back in 2003. I don't know of any others, though I suppose they exist out there.

If you know of another standards-aware web development magazine, please leave a comment.

Well, the new W3C HTML Working Group is slowly getting into gear. It seems as if W3C has learned from past mistakes, since right now the openness surrounding the new WG is commendable. There's a blog for sharing information, anyone can join the mailing list as an Invited Expert, and even if you don't you can still read the list. Good!

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In a stunning reversal of its stated policy, Dutch government last Friday decided to abolish the Web Guidelines and revert to tabled-based layouts. A government spokeswoman declared:

If the stated policy [ie. the Web Guidelines] were to be implemented, thousands of deserving web developers would have been robbed of their daily bread. For a government dedicated to creating more jobs, this is unacceptable.

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