Isn't that the cutest thing ever.

I'm not going to say that I love only pointing out how dumb people are, but let's face it, the standards nuts might have flipped. Having failed to convince the working world to arbitrarily drop useful tools for reasons they can't even agree on (semantics? open source? accessibility?), they now think wearing colored hats is a good idea?

Jesus Christ on a Pogo Stick, people. If you have time to think of this stuff, you should actually be working and making sites that actually amaze people. Then again, the ever popular Zeldman actually thinks that Google is a paragon of good design.

No.

Sure, Google is easy to use. After all, it's just a list. It's not particularly attractive though. How about the rest of Google? Analytics? Neither. Gmail? Usable. Google Checkout? Neither. The only thing Google has actually made that is worth using is a damned list. Zeldman and the other standards nuts like to pretend that design doesn't matter. It's all about the architecture. It's all about open source. It's all about some vague notion of semantics. It's all about generic usability.

Not innovation. Not design.