Luminous Beings

After collecting one hundred posted comments (and four pings) for the post “Wanted: CSS Luminary“, I closed comment posting and tallied the results.  This involved going through the comments and compiling a list of every name that was mentioned.  Once I filtered out duplicate or followup posts, I was left with a list of fifty-six names. Then I counted up the number of posts in which each name appeared, so any post that mentioned the same name more than once only registered a single vote for that person.  That yielded the top ten most-mentioned names, shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Most-mentioned names

Rank	Name	Mentions
1	Dave Shea	40
2	Doug Bowman	19
3	Jeffrey Zeldman	17
4	Dan Cederholm	14
5	Andy Budd	12
6	John Gallant	11
	Tantek Çelik	11
8	Holly Bergevin	10
9	Molly Holzschlag	8
10	D. Keith Robinson	7

I also decided to do some weighted scoring, like I used to do with the CSS Leader Board back in the day.  For this situation, the first name listed in a post was counted as a ‘primary mention’.  Any name listed second was a ‘secondary mention’, and a name after that a ‘tertiary mention’.  Any names after that were lumped together in a category called ‘hrair mention’, which I guess means I can’t even count as high as rabbits.  I gave five points for every primary mention, three points for every secondary mention, two for a tertiary mention, and one point for each hrair mention.  That yielded the same ten names and the same leaders, but the mid-field order got rearranged, as you can see in Table 2.

Table 2. Highest-scoring names

Rank	Name	Score
1	Dave Shea	162
2	Doug Bowman	53
3	Dan Cederholm	49
	John Gallant	49
5	Jeffrey Zeldman	47
	Tantek Çelik	47
7	Holly Bergevin	40
8	Molly Holzschlag	38
9	Andy Budd	30
10	D. Keith Robinson	23

So there you have it: the results of my wholly unscientific and vaguely subjective poll.  I’ll be passing the results along to the publisher in question, mostly by e-mailing the URL of this entry.  My thanks to everyone who responded, and congratulations to those who made the list!  I for one welcome our stylish new overlords.

For reference, here’s the entire list of names that was collected from the comments, sorted alphabetically by last name.

• Cameron Adams
• John Allsopp
• Holly Bergevin
• Bert Bos
• Doug Bowman
• Owen Briggs
• Andy Budd
• Dan Cederholm
• Tantek Çelik
• Andy Clarke
• Simon Collison
• Eric Costello
• Mike Davidson
• Kevin Davis
• Meryl Evans
• Todd Fahrner
• John Gallant
• Peter Gifford
• Daniel Glazman
• Danny Goodman
• Patrick Griffiths
• Aaron Gustafson
• Jeremy Hedley
• Andrei Herasimchuk
• Jon Hicks
• Ian Hickson
• Didier Hilhorst
• Molly Holzschlag
• Dave Hyatt
• Shaun Inman
• Makiko Itoh
• Jeremy Keith
• Egor Kloos
• Peter-Paul Koch
• Patrick Lauke
• Seamus Leahy
• Håkon Lie
• ‘Literary Moose’
• ‘Meg at Mandarin’
• Cameron Moll
• Stu Nicholls
• Paul O’Brien
• Dunstan Orchard
• Mike Pick
• D. Keith Robinson
• Richard Rutter
• Blake Scarbrough
• Christopher Schmitt
• Dave Shea
• Sue Sims
• Petr Stanicek
• Greg Storey (?)
• Anne van Kesteren
• Russ Weakley
• Simon Willison
• Jeffrey Zeldman

All right, I lied.  There were three suggested names I left off the list: John Kerry, George W. Bush, and Bill Gates.  I omitted them because none of the three men are known to have spent any time writing about or using CSS.  But hey, if either Kerry or Bush mentions CSS positively in a campaign speech, and isn’t talking about the Content Scrambling System, I’ll give him my vote!

Okay, that’s also a lie.

• Luminous Beings was published on Monday, July 12th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been three replies.