"The international community should work with the Cuban people to begin to build institutions that are necessary for democracy," he said. "Eventually, this transition ought to lead to free and fair elections -- and I mean free, and I mean fair -- not these kind of staged elections that the Castro brothers try to foist off as true democracy."

I wish I could take him seriously. Yes, of course Cuba should have free and fair elections. But of all the people to be calling for them...

Read more: Fidel Castro Resigns As Cuba's President

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I was standing at the time, but the man sitting in front of me reached down and grabbed the coin. Then he looked up at me and, from a mouth subtly outlined with almost gelatinous saliva, said what turned out to be the most entertaining thing I'd heard all day:

"It's my lucky travel coin," he epxlained. He paused for a second or two before continuing. "I'm having trouble recovering the disk drive because, well, you know, we're like in it."

I couldn't really disagree. As I nodded back he added, "So, you know, I don't really want to reformat it or reboot."

So very true.

Ours is a perilous time, apparently: since the group's inception, members have posted nearly 4,000 photos of "warning signs showing stick figures in dangerous, often life-threatening, situations" (as the group's original description puts it). Here's the awesome photo that started it all:

View the photo on Flickr and you'll see the comment from my brother Jeff that inspired me to name the group as I did. He's a witty one, that Jeff.

"The Funeral" is one of the best of the songs. It's got this great line, belted out over and over: "At every occasion, I'll be ready for a funeral." Amazingly, this doesn't come across as corny; in fact, it's incredible and powerful and -- I want to be careful to not be corny here myself, but -- almost majestic. Majesty: it's the word the Pitchfork review uses, which puts it better than I can: "Turning despondency into indie majesty is a major talent of Band of Horses; their music is carefully balanced to evoke specific emotional responses while allowing space for personal projection."

Ok, so I think all this talk has gotten a little corny. Just go listen to this great record. And listen closely.

It's a pretty simple document structure, really. Though not quite as simple as Google's home page, of course.

Weird. I'd never heard of that. I asked him why on earth the city would do such a thing.

"Well," he said, "I think they're trying to make up for the fact that they don't have enough police out on the streets."

Huh?

Oh, wait: does it cause people to pay a little closer attention while driving or something like that? Sure, the idea seemed far-fetched, but it's all that came to mind at the time.

"No, no" my driver explained," actually, it makes people sleepy."

Oh.

Right.

That's when I realized I was engaged in one incredibly interesting conversation.

He reiterated: "Yep, they don't have enough cops out here, so they dim the lights to make us tired, keep us in line."

And yes, at this point, maybe part of me thought I should say something along the lines of "Oh, you know what? Actually, I want to get out here. Yeah, right here. Here's my stop! Thanks!"

But I didn't.

Whenever I start a new project -- and from time to time during ongoing ones -- I take a step back to review the web development basics. What priorities should guide my work? Given the landscape of ways the web is accessed today, what core design and development requirements should I meet? What advice would I give to others in the same situation?

Well then, here are a few recommendations, for myself and those like me. This discussion will be mostly about front-end technical priorities, so the main back-end/infrastructural recommendation I'd make is to use systems (like Drupal for content management, say) that don't unnecessarily get in the way of realizing your front-end goals. For example: don't use a CMS that inserts invalid code into your documents!

Above all else, make sure that your site declares a document type (preferably at least XHTML 1.0 Strict) and that its HTML and CSS validate against the W3C's validators. As I've discussed before, this is simply the best way to keep your code lean and maintainable, and it sets an essential foundation for everything else I'm about to describe.

Beyond that core of valid markup and CSS, your site should also meet web accessibility guidelines and standards, such as the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and the federal government's Section 508 standards. You can use various tests to check your site's compliance to these guidelines and standards.

But what's actually far more important than letter-of-the-law adherence to those guideline checklists is that your site really is designed and developed, from the beginning, with accessibility in mind. Keep the interface simple; organize and order content logically and meaningfully; and make sure the site makes sense in alternate browsing devices, like screen readers. On a markup level, this would mean direct, uncluttered code that's structured into semantically meaningful elements like headings, paragraphs, and lists rather than lots of meaningless divs and spans -- or worse, presentational elements like nested layout tables, hr tags, and images that contain text. Plus, if you use markup correctly, the site will not only be more accessible, but it will tend to rank higher in search engine results as well. I've found that Dive into Accessibility among others can help keep you on track when it comes to these sorts of common sense, real-world accessibility strategies. Example: a "skip to main content" link is important if your site includes a list of navigational links at the top of each page. Many major sites still don't have one.

As for browsers, you basically want to support them all. This doesn't mean that every hi-fi detail of your site has to work in, say, Netscape 3, of course. It just means that, ideally, browsers that don't support the latest standards will still be presented with a usable site -- perhaps unstyled, if they don't support css-based layouts, and perhaps not Ajax-enabled, if their Javascript support is lacking -- but informative and usable nevertheless. So the advanced features of your site should either look and function their best, or be stripped down. And the thing is, you can still end up providing the best experience to most of your site's visitors: just be sure to test advanced features in at least IE6, Firefox/Mozilla, Safari, and Opera 8, and you'll be covering most people. Ideally, you'll also test in Windows IE5/5.5 and IE 5.2 Mac, though there's been some debate as to whether accommodating the quirks of these browsers, especially Win IE5/5.2, is worth the all the hacks and extra effort necessary.

And that about sums it up. Yes, of course there's so much more beyond this. But I've found that resisting compromise on these basic guidelines helps keep projects sane and sites usable, even as the web continues to evolve in newer, more exciting directions.