If you love books and live in or around Edinburgh - or beyond - you may be familiar with the Christian Aid Book Sale held annually at St Andrew's and St George's Church, on George Street.

It's always popular because there's a huge range of books available, at very low prices, most between 50p and £2. Buying books online is all very well but there's nothing like browsing actual books and stumbling on something unexpected. The Sale is rather like beachcombing, each year washing up some unusual specimens.

One curio I came across this year was a little collection of essays by a certain Horatio Greenough, a 19th century American sculptor who had some interesting thoughts about design theory. Greenough's significance is indicated in the title of the book, Form and Function. It's so titled because although he didn't coin the term - the actual phrase was first formulated by the architect Louis Sullivan - Greenough's essays, published in the 1850s, offer the first extensive discussion of the concept of inherent form, a good half century before it became a central component of modern design theory.

Here's something that's been annoying me somewhat of late. Not all that much, but just enough to prompt me to write a little post about it.

Underlined links: what's happened to them? Perhaps I don't get out enough but it seems to me rare indeed these days to encounter a site that abides by the traditional usability principle that links within body copy should be underlined. I'm not talking about links within menus, or in lists, or list item headings, where underlines can safely be jettisoned, but about links enmeshed in content that might otherwise be hard to discern.

It used to be considered a cardinal usability error to remove underlines for links like these or, if one insisted on going against the grain, at least to style them with a border, or make the text bold. Now, however, it seems entirely acceptable, indeed standard practice, simply to rely on colour.

It's rather easy - certainly for someone more on the design than development side of things like me - to think of responsive web design as primarily a matter of screen sizes and media queries. Client side stuff that I can understand.

I'm uncomfortably aware that there's much more too it than that. A comprehensive responsive design strategy requires an understanding of server side techniques that allow the tailoring of content according to device type, not just an ability to adapt layout to screen size. Luke Wroblewski coined the term RESS ('Responsive Web Design plus Server Side Components') to describe this holistic approach.

I had a great time at WordUp Edinburgh 2013 on Saturday: fine speakers, a terrific audience and a very nice venue.

I was grateful to be given the opportunity to give a little presentation that explored the continued relevance of a classic web design article, A Dao of Web Design, published in 2000 by John Allsopp. My talk expanded on a blog post I wrote on the same topic last autumn, Contemporary web design and ‘truth to materials’.

My slides aren't going to be of much use to anyone who wasn't there, consisting primarily of images referencing aspects of 20th century design history, but they're available above or on Speaker Deck. The final slide provides links for the design posts discussed in the talk.

I was again impressed by the intellectual firepower evident in the WordPress community: all of the presentations I saw were excellent, and the questions from the floor sharp and well informed. But, more than that, it's a kind and gracious group of people, keen to help each other find new ways of pushing forward an already great publishing platform.

Special thanks to Martin Young and Taryn Wallis for taking the lead in organising the event.

If you like early photography and the ancient world I recommend the current exhibition at The Queen's Gallery at Holyroodhouse, a collection of images recording an 1862 tour of the Middle East undertaken by the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII).

The Prince visited Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Greece. On the touring party's return to England photographer Francis Bedford's pictures were displayed in what was described as 'the most important photographic exhibition that has hitherto been placed before the public'.