Comments for Thoughts From Eric

Comment on Defining ‘ch’ by Antonio Cavedoni

Antonio Cavedoni — Tue, 22 May 2012 22:34:47 +0000

If you don’t just want to go by Wikipedia, another document that mentions the term “advance width” is the TrueType spec.

Comment on Defining ‘ch’ by John Hudson

John Hudson — Tue, 22 May 2012 22:21:24 +0000

‘Advance measure’ = ‘advance width’ = distance from the left sidebearing of a glyph to the right sidebearing of a glyph.

As Tab notes, this is most useful in dealing with monospaced, ‘fixed width’ fonts, and I presume CSS defines ‘ch’ in terms of the width of the zero glyph arbitrarily so that for any font — at least, any font containing a glyph mapped to the zero character — a ‘ch’ value could be determined. Personally, I can’t see any use for ‘ch’ outside of the context of a monospaced font though, since outside of that context it doesn’t relate to much in the design space.

Comment on Defining ‘ch’ by Joe Clark

Joe Clark — Tue, 22 May 2012 18:24:17 +0000

ch can also be used to produce a standard feature of typography that has been absent by definition all this time: Tab stops. Try laying out a screenplay without them.

Comment on A Precise CSS3 Color Table by Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer — Tue, 22 May 2012 16:47:15 +0000

It’s not a browser quirk. They’re the same color, but not the same keyword. SVG took the X11 colors and internationalized a few of them, which are the ones you’re seeing.

Comment on A Precise CSS3 Color Table by Jim

Jim — Tue, 22 May 2012 12:43:05 +0000

Don’t get me wrong, this table will be very useful. But for some reason I’m seeing doubles of some of the colors.

I viewed the page on FireFox 12 and Opera Mobile 12. I’m assuming its a browser quirk.

Comment on A Precise CSS3 Color Table by Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer — Tue, 22 May 2012 03:54:29 +0000

Look again, Jim. Look closer.

Comment on A Precise CSS3 Color Table by Jim

Jim — Tue, 22 May 2012 00:30:41 +0000

Wow and just wanted to mention I saw two instances for slategrey

Comment on A Precise CSS3 Color Table by Eric A. Meyer

Eric A. Meyer — Sat, 19 May 2012 17:32:51 +0000

That’s definitely on the to-do list, mt. When sorting by hue, would you subsort by lightness then saturation, or the other way around?

Comment on A Precise CSS3 Color Table by Lydia

Lydia — Sat, 19 May 2012 13:15:04 +0000

Super helpful, thanks!

Comment on A Precise CSS3 Color Table by mt

mt — Fri, 18 May 2012 23:58:59 +0000

Brilliant. A suggestion on presentation: options to reorder the list so it’s not only by alphabetical color name but closer to a rainbow or the typical palette view.

Comment on A Precise CSS3 Color Table by Neal G

Neal G — Fri, 18 May 2012 21:01:56 +0000

Ah, I love how you delve into the most obscure and undocumented areas of CSS!

Comment on Backgrounds, Shadows, Fonts, and the Cascade by Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer — Fri, 18 May 2012 14:00:27 +0000

I’ve tried that, Matt, and it still doesn’t take. My best hope, I think, is to link it to font stacks and hope that over time the two become mentally intertwined. I’ve got the cascade on my brain, baby, and it just won’t let go!

…actually, there’s another hurdle I didn’t recognize until just now: auto z-index. Images overlap in the reverse order that auto z-index elements would overlap, and visually, they’re the closest analogue to each other.

Damn it!

Comment on Backgrounds, Shadows, Fonts, and the Cascade by Matt Wilcox

Matt Wilcox — Fri, 18 May 2012 13:55:17 +0000

Eric: think of those declarations *exactly* as you would see the layers pallet in Photoshop. Even the way you’ve written it emphasises that heirarchy.

Whichever is higher in the list is also physically above the others. You are stacking images one top of each other, and the stacking order is physically identical to how you’re writing it.

Comment on Defining ‘ch’ by [Friday Links] The Move Edition

[Friday Links] The Move Edition — Fri, 18 May 2012 13:21:58 +0000

[...] Defining ‘ch’ [...]

Comment on Pseudo-Phantoms by Court Kizer

Court Kizer — Thu, 17 May 2012 17:46:11 +0000

Actually since the very first version of web inspector webkit/safari has ALWAYS shown the pseudo classes. Just click the little plus icon (different in older versions) at the top of the list of styles. It does the correct thing and lets you toggle on all the various states (:hover, :focus, :active, pseudo elements.

In Safari 5.2 new code based web inspect they are listed below as should be.