i'd like to see a forum more dedicated to talking about how to improve ourselves in the realm of standards compliant front-end development code, (X)HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

This forum seems to be a great resource for people to get quick easy ways to solve small problems, but I'd like to see more discussion on improving code, talking about better ways to write CSS and (X)HTML and serious dicussion on where the DNN core code can be improved and fixed to follow W3C standards.

Link to thread? Sorry, search isn't very reliable usable. Why can't search be one field that searches the body AND subject and all date ranges and forums by default?

Look at this simple search UI from somethingawful.com forums:

Discuss away.  There aren't enough posts in here that it makes sense to split the forum, and your request certainly fits the theme of the forum as it is.  As for code improvements, you might want to get involved with one of the development groups, or at least put together concept code and send it to the core team.  I'm sure they'd love to see a CSS/XHTML base skin they could include with DNN releases.  And most of the teams are open to templates they can incldue with their module.

Jeff