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Two months ago, we had someone essentially spam css-discuss by sending a social networking invitation to the list. Now, I’m all for making connections, but inviting close to 8,400 people all over the world to join your favorite new social graph seems a bit, well, anti-social. Further, there was a statement right in the invitation that sending it to someone not personally known was an abuse of the service. Regardless, it was a violation of list policies, so we booted the offender from the list. I followed the “never send invitations to this address again” opt-out link and reported the offender via the abuse reporting address.

I very quickly got back a reponse from the team, expressing regret over what had happened and promising to take care of it. I suggested they domain-block css-discuss.org and webdesign-l.com (you’re welcome, Steve), thanked them for being so responsive, and that was the end of it. Until a few days later, when I got personally spammed from the same user account. I reported them again, this time with a bit of snark, and opted myself out. I didn’t hear a word from anyone.

Of course, as you’ve guessed from the title, the site in question was Shelfari. And thanks to what I’m now finding out about their practices, it’s quite possible—even probable—that the offender was Shelfari itself.

What we have here is a clear case of bad design causing negative ripple effects far beyond the badly designed site. In the case of css-discuss, over eight thousand people got spammed through a members-only list they’d joined on the promise of high signal and low noise. I expelled a member of that community as a result of what a site did for them thanks to bad UI. I feel bad about that. Had I known, I might have put the account on moderation until they could be reasonably sure things were cleared up with Shelfari instead of just booting them. So I’ve tracked down their address and apologized, which seems the only honorable thing to do.

It may also be the case that bad ethics are as much to blame here as bad design. This is much harder to assess, of course, but the fact that the opt-out action was completely ignored makes me much less likely to chalk it all up to a series of misunderstandings. Even if the Shelfari team was trying to be good actors and bungling the job, it’s little wonder they’re being hung with the spammer tag (the “Scarlet S”?). Automatically using people’s address books to spread your payload is a classic worm-spammer technique, after all.

Given all this hindsight, I’m definitely intrigued by the following passage from the mail they sent me on 14 September:

We make it super easy to invite, but some people just send to all, which isn’t really what we want.

In other words, the very thing they’re apologizing for now, the thing that has caused such a recent uproar, was known to them no later than two months ago. So yeah, no surprise that a whole bunch of folks are not cutting Shelfari even one tiny iota of slack.

Anyway, the bottom line is this: if you’re signing up for a social networking site and they offer to contact people you know or import your address book or things of that nature, be very cautious. And be doubly cautious if you’re signing up for Shelfari.

Just a few hours ago, I received a FedEx package containing a brand spankin’ new copy of the CSS Pocket Reference, 2nd Edition. This new edition includes all of the CSS2 and CSS2.1 properties and values, information and algorithms covering the box model, table layout, font selection, and more. It’s almost 130 pages, and that’s without a single page of it taken up by support charts. The first edition has taken some flak for being obsolete; this new edition should address those concerns. (Unless of course you want a CSS3 pocket reference, in which case this book won’t help you, and anyway, you’ll need much bigger pockets.)

And it’s still just $9.95! What a bargain. You should buy two. That way you can have one for your pocket, where it will be handily available at all times, and the other for your bookshelf, where it will stay crisp and neat.

For a while I’d had a vague plan that, when this book’s arrival was announced, I would take that opportunity to say that I was taking a break from book writing for a while. So much for that plan; I just today agreed to start another project. Looks as though Molly was right about me. I wonder how long it will be until there’s a cure…

Recently, I had a conversation with an editor at a relatively well-known and respected publisher about a CSS book concept they’re pursuing. I don’t want to give too much away about the book itself, since it’s their idea and not mine, but I will say that the concept more or less requires that the book’s author be a recognized name in the CSS and Web design community.

For various reasons, I’m not able to take on the project myself, so we were bouncing around various names of other people who might be a good fit. I shared some of my ideas, but I felt like I was struggling, and after we hung up I felt like I hadn’t really been a big help. That bothered me, so I’m going to put this to you, dear readers: tell me who would automatically make you take a CSS book seriously and consider buying it just on the strength of the name alone. (Remember, I’m not able to take this project, so don’t say, “Why, yours, Eric!” unless you want to be derided as a pointless suck-up.) You should probably list a couple of names, just in case you all pick one person as your primary and he or she isn’t available to do the book, either. After a week or so I’ll pass the results on to the publisher. Even if someone else has already named your top choice(s), list them again. The most commonly-listed names will be the ones who are at the top of the list.

So the floor is open. Let’s hear some names!

Chris Adamson has an interesting post over at the O’Reilly Network about code in books and articles. In summation: should code be given a special license, separate from the actual text?

While CSS isn’t code, exactly, the same basic questions apply to the stuff I’ve written. Let’s take my most recent title, More Eric Meyer on CSS. It contains a copyright statement that says, in effect, you can’t reproduce the book’s text, in part or in whole, without permission. There is no distinction there between the explanatory text (”Margin collapsing is an interesting problem in some cases, and here’s why, blah blah blah…”) and the styles. Taken literally, the copyright statement says that you can’t re-use any of the CSS I created in your own designs.

This is clearly in opposition to what I think most of us would agree is the expectation, which is that you can use styles (or code) as you see fit but you can’t take the ‘narrative’ text and pass it off as your work. But where’s the dividing line? Suppose that, for whatever reason, you really like one of the designs in Project 4. We can agree that you should be able to re-use the styles presented, but a whole design? Is that fair? I can imagine many arguments both for and against, many of them variants on the classic slippery-slope argument.

In my particular case, the situation is even less clear. As anyone who drops by the book’s site will discover, the project files are freely available for anyone to download. You aren’t even expected to own the book as a condition of using them. That makes them less protected, I would think, than if they were on a CD that accompanied the book—but how much sense does that make? Again, I can envision several arguments on both sides of the issue. The same questions would arise for any author that provided code samples for download, as many do.

There’s also the question of what rights can or should be granted to the reader with regard to code. I might hypothetically make the styles all freely available to anyone, but only under the condition that attribution be given to the source (either me, the book, or both). Wouldn’t you, as a reader, find that rather annoying? I would. “You mean I have to give Eric credit just to use two CSS rules that create this cool effect?”

I’ve always operated on the principle that any markup or CSS I write about is fair game, because otherwise what would be the point of writing about how to use it? I can see it now: “use of the CSS presented in this tutorial, including any derivative works, without the written consent of the author is prohibited.” Yeah, right! That would be something like a dictionary prohibiting you from using any words you look up, including all modifications and misspellings.

So should books contain an explicit license regarding use of the code? If so, what kind? I expect readers and publishers will have different viewpoints, although the more clueful publishers probably won’t be too far away from the typical reader perspective. There’s a part of me that wonders why we even have to be explicit about this at all—after all, there’s been a sort of tacit acceptance of code re-use to date—but in a litigious DMCA world, this is an issue that probably has to be addressed sooner or later.

As I ponder the subject, I’m currently contemplating putting all my code samples under a Creative Commons ShareAlike 1.0 license, both now and into the future, just to make sure the bases are covered. Then again, perhaps an explicit Public Domain license would make more sense. Which one would be better, or is there a superior approach I haven’t considered? Let me know.

Andy King, author of the excellent Speed Up Your Site and purveyor of fine content at the new Optimization Week, has posted a very nice review of More Eric Meyer on CSS. I think this might be the first official review of the book, and if he posts it over at Amazon it will very likely be the first review there as well be one of the first few reviews over there (someone posted the first review some time today!).

According to Andy, Jeffrey Zeldman (who just launched a superfine redesign over at The Daily Report) and I “actually make standards sexy.” Oh, yes, big boy… mark up my content, you style stud, you…

Okay, I promise never to do that again.

If there are other reviews out there and I’ve missed them, please let me know!

I got my first paper copy of More Eric Meyer on CSS this morning, so I had to accelerate my update process for the companion site; the project files are now online. Apparently on many machines, the cover and site colors are a startling dark pink, which isn’t the intent. On my machine, the color is a deep red, as is the actual book. Imagine a fire engine made out of tomato soup—that’s pretty much the shade of red.

Either way, it’s still fairly startling.

It’s kind of a weird feeling to have two books come out at almost the same time. CSS:TDG, Second Edition, arrived just two weeks ago. Now here’s MEMOC, forming something of a weird acronym duet. So now I have this small stack of two new books. The covers are still shiny and creaseless. They have that hot-off-the-presses crispness. I almost hate to open them. I’m always afraid I’ll break their spines, and then I won’t be able to move them any more.

I got word yesterday that More Eric Meyer on CSS has already come back from the printers, so it ought to be available within a week or so. Woo hoo! I’ve put up a companion site with the table of contents; the project files will be online soon. And yes—that really is the cover.

Speaking of books, the second edition of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide is now available pretty much everywhere. Over at Amazon, its sales rank has been hovering around 200 for a couple of weeks now, so that’s pretty cool. I’ve heard from a few readers who already have their copies, and some errata reports have started to come in. Joy! It’s always frustrating to finish a book, because I know that the errors that got missed will immediately be spotted by all the readers. No matter how hard we tried, some errors are going to slip through. The perfectionist in me quails at that knowledge.

But then, releasing a new book does afford me the chance to be amused by reader reviews. Here’s one that had me chuckling:

i understand the basics of css already, i just needed something to outline the syntax and concepts in css2 and then just function as a reference. this book did neither, and i’ve found it to be a complete waste.

Yeah, I guess you probably would. Say it with me, sparky: “Definitive Guide.” Not “Reference.” It’s not an outline, and wasn’t when the first edition came out. If you need a reference with a quick outline, you could always try the CSS2.0 Programmer’s Reference, which has, of all things, an outline of the syntax and concepts of CSS2 and provides a full property reference. Amazing.

I know you aren’t supposed to judge a book by its cover, but sometimes you can get a little guidance from its title.

Anyone who reads Italian might be interested in an interview with me conducted by Marco Trevisan. For those who don’t do as the Romans do, the English version should be available in the near future.

Update: Gini’s sister is doing better, although she was evicted from the hospital even though still suffering a lot of pain. Ferrett tells me that it looks like some of meyerweb’s readers did contribute to the support fund, and again, Kat and I both thank you for reaching out.

As I write this entry, Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition is #3 on Amazon’s Computers & Internet Bestsellers list, and the book itself has a sales rank of 144. Sweeeet.