I dislike using lorem ipsum or other non-sensical text for mockups, but I admit that it fills a very real need for designing content-centric websites when the content isn't ready yet.

I've encountered just too many cases where the design looks great as a mock-up but when you start plugging in real data the layout start breaking apart, either because the content is too short, too long, or the designer didn't consider long usernames.

My dream for a filler content generator would be a large database of real content types, so you would have a list of real twitter handles, facebook names, blog post titles, world news articles and so on. You could then do stuff like h1 class="fixie worldnews title" or class="fixie twitter username".

Designers often argue that the purpose of Lorem Ipsum is to help the client focus on the look and not the content. I think this posture is wrong because you need the client thinking about content as early as posible.

Front-end developers also need the randomness of real world data to test the sturdiness of their layouts and account for edge cases as early as posible.