Hi, my name is Chris (which in this case is the name of a male if it matters) and I'm from New Zealand. For a job I do.... uh... i do have one but I'm not telling you right now

and it's not going to make me rich this week if you know what I mean.
I'm ... twenty one years old? Not very old anyway, I'm just a baby.
I have been doing web design stuff for a VERY short time; only really put my feet in the water in 2006. I never went anywhere near it in school because it was far too nerdy for a cool guy like me

BUT
Once I got started I acquired a taste for it like a fish with water.
I like to put together projects now with PHP, Javascript, CSS and XHTML. I like to serve it as XHTML+XML. Usually I don't bother to do any content negotiation (Sorry, Tim), it's just not worth the effort. Sure, I miss out on a lot of visitors, but most of them are not people I'm going to like anyway.
Apart from (or maybe as part of) Web Design I'm interested in learning Python and/or C++ as well at some point in the future.
I know a couple of names here. Anne Van Kesteren, Ian Hixie. I draw a lot from what you guys say. I don't have your pictures on my wall or anything, but what you say is gospel

mostly.
In my spare time I mostly like to leave offensive messages on Microsoft blogs. I always feel guilty about it later, it's a guilty pleasure. I need counselling from all the pages I used to try to make work in Internet Explorer. I know, it was stupid of me, I should concentrate on coding for web browsers and ignore everything else. Opera Mini is quite nice and it would be nice if IE10 or IE15 could display my page so nicely maybe in the year 2202.
I'm interested in HTML5 because:
- I can serve it under two distinct doctypes, thus reaping the benefits of the XHTML which I use and love
without kicking out those poor, unenlightened souls using archaic browsers with blue alphabetic logos.
- I need a large throbber for my Ajax stuff. I'd rather not have to learn to use the GIMP Animation Package thing, when I can just use canvas. It's so easy and it looks so great!
- The Flash Player crashes pretty much every ten minutes. Actionscript 3 is a great language and I love it to bits but the player is a hunk of junk. I'm confident that audio and video elements will greatly improve my browsing experience five years from now when people stop embedding horrible, nasty plugins in their pages to play horrible, nasty music.
- getElementsByClassName() ... Yay, it's about time!
- It's got a 5 in it, the 5th version of anything is always worth sitting up and paying attention to.
- because.... because it's there! Where was it in 2004!?
XHTML 2 had a lot of bad points, but if I don't get scolded out of this forum then I would like to very gently push for some of the more innovative and clever parts to be included in HTML 5. I hope that more of XHTML2 can be brought into HTML5 without breaking the web, such as any-element-links and any-element-images.
And, finally.. I'm here just to hang around the cool kids.