The days that Web developers dreamed about — seemingly, at the time, against all odds — for about half a decade are nigh upon us with this progression.

Although much work remains to be done before all browsers can be universally relied upon to render HTML in a consistent and relatively uniform manner, the Web development community can at least now begin breathing a sigh of relief about having finally gotten some of the worst of it behind us.

But has anyone ever stopped to think about the folks that actually get off on making other people’s jobs difficult? Clean style sheets? Progressive Enhancement? Semantic Web?

How do you suppose they feel right now? Whether it’s sadism or nostalgia, they’ve got feelings, too.

To them, I say with reassurance: fret not!

For them, I offer here three fabulous pointers for writing CSS like a total douche bag:

1. Use the same IDs for more than one element in an HTML document. The HTML spec is very explicit about not doing this, so you can absolutely bet that — some time down the line — some other developer tasked to add some jQuery or Prototype enhancements to your page will totally get screwed.

2. Sprinkle your IE 6 “hacks” directly into and all throughout your primary CSS files. Do not separate these IE 6 optimizations out from your main.css file into main_ie6.css. Coding your site to standards first will only make it easier to phase out this pollution when IE 6 finally drops off the planet. To ensure you really nail this one, you should be previewing the site in IE 6 from the very beginning of your development efforts. In fact, I could even recommend you develop the site’s HTML and CSS in IE 6 exclusively first, then go back and apply hacks to make it work in the rest of the more standards-compliant browsers… in fact Firefox 3.x and Safari 4.x both include really great developer tools to help you figure out which “standards compliancy hacks” you’ll need to use to keep the site from looking completely fucked in those browsers.

3. Use CSS style and ID names like next_alignright_blue or registration_form_gray. The more you mix styling cues directly into these names, the more you’ll be able to laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh when those “next” links need to be green when the site’s holiday theme feature gets finished after Thanksgiving. Honestly: what’s funnier than knowing that next_alignright_blue will render green links? And, if you’re truly lucky, maybe a usability audit of the site might conclude that the “next” links should not get jammed to the right, but should appear adjacent to their associated “previous” link.

4. Avoid descendant selectors like the plague. The only thing that these will ever afford you is the opportunity to minimize the number of IDs and class names. Where will your opportunity for laughs come when elements can be targeted by JavaScript enhancements using a syntax like this:

       [#!javascript]
       $('#sidebar .panel .description a.more').click( ... );
   

   instead of:

       [#!javascript]
       $('#sidebar_videos_panel a.more').click( ... );
       $('#sidebar_widgets_panel a.more').click( ... );
       $('#sidebar_uploads_panel a.more').click( ... );
       $('#sidebar_archives_panel a.more').click( ... );
   

   The first example allows some other developer to continue to leverage the selector code to enhance the “more” link, should another .panel element with a qualifying like in its .body element, rather than having to explicitly add another line.

And so I hope I’ve demonstrated that there’s simply no reason to mindlessly progress into the hegemony of maintainability, efficiency, and sanity for your colleagues. Not when you can utilize simple little techniques like these.

With your efforts, we can squander much of this hard-earned potential for progress! If you have other douchey ideas you’d like to share, please leave them in comments.

Although he amusingly paints the behavior of folks annoyed with unmet expectations with absurdity, his insights actually led me down a different path of reflection: the importance of the art of managing expectations.

Nearly any undesirable situation can be dealt with more gracefully, with the application of effective expectation management.