For fun, and also to give fans of this or that property a chance to petition for re-inclusion, here are the properties and modules I cut.  Think of it as the blooper reel, which can be taken more than one way.  I’ve organized them by module because it’s easier that way.

• The backface-visibility property from the 3D Transforms module.  This is one I’m already reconsidering, but I haven’t found any indication that anyone besides Webkit will be picking it up in the near future.  Still, I did document the rest of the 3D Transforms module so I may add this back in during the tech review stage.
• rotation and rotation-point from the CSS3 Box module.  These have been effectively replaced by the 2D Transforms module, but the Box module hasn’t been updated since that happened.
• Everything in the Flexible Box Layout module.  There are, as of now, just too many sections bearing notes, warnings, questions, and general feelings of instability and future change for me to feel comfortable including the properties from this module.  I’m probably going to catch some flak for that.
• grid-columns and grid-rows from the Grid Positioning Module Level 3, which effectively means means excluding the entire module.  Some day maybe I’ll write a separate pocket reference just for the various CSS layout systems.
• font-stretch.  Its continued exclusion saddens me, because I am exactly the sort of sheep-stealing lowlife who would programmatically stretch and compress font faces and like it, but so far as I can tell nobody’s supporting the property.  Alas.
• Basically, the entirety of the Generated Content for Paged Media module.
• The Behavioral Extensions module, which means the binding property as well as the :bound-element pseudo-class.
• All the properties in CSS Marquee module.  I’d love to see someone make a compelling case for re-instating them.
• The following properties from CSS Text Level 3: hanging-punctuation, punctuation-trim, text-align-last, text-emphasis-position, text-emphasis-style, text-emphasis, text-justify, text-outline, text-wrap, white-space-collapsing, and word-break.
• The following properties from the Basic User Interface module, dated 2004: appearance, icon, nav-down, nav-left, nav-right, nav-up, and nav-index.
• The Hyperlink Presentation module, dated 2004.
• The Presentation Levels module, dated 2003.
• move-to and crop from the CSS3 Generated and Replaced Content module, dated 2003.
• The Line module, dated 2002 and bearing my name for no reason I can recall.  The one property listed there which I kept is vertical-align, and I just used the CSS2.1 definition.

After all that, I imagine you’re going to laugh uproariously when I tell what I did include:  paged and aural properties.  I know—I’m kind of poleaxed by my own double standard on that score.  I included them for historical reasons (they’ve long been included) and also because they’re potentially very useful to a more accessible future.  Besides, if we run out of pages, they’re in their own section and so very easy to cut.

I’m pretty sure I listed everything that I explicitly dropped, so if you spot something that I absolutely have to reinstate, here’s your chance to let me know!

Well, I done did it again: I wrote a book.  This time, it’s Smashing CSS: Professional Techniques for Modern Layout, published by Wiley and Sons and available as of some time last week.  (Just in time for the holiday gift-giving season!  Buy one for everybody in the family!  Don’t delay—act now!)

What’s different about this book as compared to others I’ve written is that this is a collection of short tips, tricks, and techniques for using CSS in everyday work.  Many of them involve making changes and seeing the results, similar to my New Riders books, but where those books had chapter-long projects these are usually only a page or three in length.  Well, okay, a few get up towards ten pages, but only on occasion.

Another difference is that Smashing CSS spans the spectrum from basic tools and browser features that can speed your development and debugging to some cutting-edge ideas and a taste of the latest CSS3 hotness.  I really do hope there’s something in it for everyone, and with something like a hundred entries, I think my odds are pretty good.

I’m especially happy that it’s in full color, which allowed me to do lots of screenshots as well as color-hinting of the markup and CSS, and personally I think it looks awesome.  I hope you’ll agree.  Check out the official catalog page at Wiley or comparison-shop at ISBN.nu, and thanks!

Update 19 Nov 10:  Kindle, ePub, and PDF versions of the book should be available within the next week.  They’re all in the hands of Wiley’s ebook distributor, so now it’s up to the distributor to get the files into the hands of ebook sellers.  On behalf of all you ebook fans, I hope it will happen soon!  (Is “ebook” the way we write that now?  I’m a little light on the lingo.)

Update 6 Dec 10: So far I’ve found the Kindle (mobi) and Nook (ePub) versions of the book.  Finding a good (read: legal) PDF version is proving difficult, so if anyone’s seen it out there, let me know so I can link away!

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…

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!

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.

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!

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.

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 mentioned yesterday, the ‘diagnosis’ favelets I used during my SXSW04i presentation generated a lot of comment, so I now have the underlying style sheets on a “Favelets” page in my “Tools” section.  For those of you who know how favelets work, just grab any or all of the style sheets you want and go for it.  For those who need some assistance, I wrote a “Favelet Creator.”  You plug in the URL of a style sheet you want to have applied to whatever page you’re viewing and the name of the favelet as you want it to appear in your toolbar.  Then you drag the resulting link into your favorites toolbar.

All this really does is create a javascript: link that, when invoked, will dynamically write a link element into the head of whatever document you’re viewing.  That link points to a style sheet, and so the styles are applied.  As an example, you could point it to a style sheet that sets borders for tables and table cells.  When you click on the favelet, all of the tables and table cells in the currently-viewed page become visible.  Figuring out exactly how a table-based page is laid out thus becomes a snap.

So if you don’t like the styles I created, you can write your own (or modify the ones I provided) and create your own diagnostic style sheets.  The favelet creator should make it even simpler.  Either way, I hope these will be helpful.

When they asked me if I was game for a book signing, I did recommend that they get copies of Eric Meyer on CSS because it seemed beyond scummy to have them stock up the first edition of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide when the second edition will be coming out within a week or two of the signing.  Hey, I’m lookin’ out for ya.  Now all I have to do is think up some witty phrases to inscribe.

(If you’re in the Austin area but aren’t going to be attending SXSW04, you can still drop by and heckle us for free by getting an iF! pass.)

In the past three weeks, I’ve tried to hack (with varying levels of success) XSLT, Perl, and JavaScript.  Since I’m no better than a middling-fair programmer in any of those languages, I suppose some confusion was inevitable, but it seems like it’s always XSLT that gets me.  Thankfully, Chriztian Steimeier provided a solution for my XSLT problem.  The way that templates get called and nest and interact with each other continues to befuddle me, but I hope that it will one day make a modicum of sense.

1. CSS and Documents
2. Selectors
3. Structure and the Cascade
4. Values and Units
5. Fonts
6. Text Properties
7. Basic Visual Formatting
8. Padding, Borders, and Margins
9. Colors and Backgrounds
10. Floating and Positioning
11. Table Layout
12. Lists and Generated Content
13. User Interface Styles
14. Non-Screen Media

1. Property Reference
2. Selector, Pseudo-Class, and Pseudo-Element Reference
3. Sample HTML 4 Style Sheet

Owners of the first edition will notice that the chapters have been rearranged a bit.  Thanks to the expansion of selectors in CSS2, it made sense to rearrange things so that they got their own chapter (which you can read in beta form from O’Reilly), and the parts about how CSS relates to document structure were folded into the chapter about specificity and the cascade.  The consolidation of floating and positioning into one chapter really helped cut down on redundancies, although that is the longest and most-enfigured chapter in the book.  (In second place, “Basic Visual Formatting.”)  “Table Layout” talks about how tables are laid out and styled, not how to do layout with tables.  The last two chapters are basically overviews with some detail, since user interface styles are almost certainly going to change radically in CSS3 and non-screen media support is limited or largely theoretical at this stage.  There’s still enough detail to satisfy, I think.

As for the other chapters, they’re largely the same as in the first edition in terms of topical coverage.  They’ve just been updated and expanded to match what’s in CSS2.1.  As an example, “Text Properties” covers everything that it did in the first edition, now updated for 2004; plus it adds information on text-shadow, direction, and unicode-bidi.

The technical reviewers for the second edition were Tantek Çelik and Ian Hickson, who were just as tough and thorough as I’d hoped.  Ian’s one of the people who pounded the inline layout model into my head until I got it when writing the first edition, actually.  I got similar treatment from both reviewers over the interaction of generated content with non-generated elements this time around, not to mention when I tried to figure out the value syntax for text-decoration.  It used to be simple, but oh no… they had to go makin’ it all fancy.

Anyway, I hope that will give some idea of what lies ahead for those of you who do me the honor of purchasing the book.

I occasionally toy with the idea of setting up a Cafépress store with CSS-related merchandise.  If anyone out there has bought stuff (particularly T-shirts and other articles of clothing) from Cafépress, kindly let me know what you thought of it in terms of quality and durability.

• The support charts have been dropped.  When the first edition came out, it made sense to include that kind of information in an appendix, so we did.  As I recently wrote on www-style, the world is much different now, and the day of nifty support charts may well have passed.  In the CSS realm, anyway.  To even present a simple yes/no support chart for CSS2 would have been a dozen pages long, and a nuanced chart with notes would easily have run five times that long.  I still have notes and warnings about particularly egregious problems sprinkled through the text, though.
• The “CSS In Action” and “Look Ahead” chapters were also dropped.  There is plenty information available these days on how to actually use CSS, so we decided not to be redundant.  As for looking ahead, even a high-level overview of where CSS3 is headed could be a hundred pages long, and out of date the minute we printed it.  Better to wait and see where things end up than make a lot of ill-informed guesses.
• By rearranging the way information was presented, I was able to cut a lot of redundancies that bedeviled the first edition.  I also cut out some material that seemed important back in 1999, but has long since become irrelevant (like notes about what IE3 does or doesn’t do).
• The figure count has been scaled back.  There are still a few hundred figures throughout the book, but I went to some effort to combine several points into a single figure when I could, and not illustrate every little point I made.  You really only need to see so many examples of “boldface text,” you know?
• The text doesn’t spend time on things that were in CSS2 but aren’t in CSS2.1, and that nobody will likely ever support.  This means that some paged-media properties like marks weren’t described, and I didn’t waste time on the CSS2 marker-styling features since they will almost certainly die out and be replaced by a different approach in CSS3.  I did cover properties like font-size-adjust and text-shadow, but not in major detail.

So the second edition is an update of about 380 pages of the first edition, once you subtract out the stuff that was cut.  Every chapter of the first edition was reviewed and, in most cases, significantly overhauled even if it wasn’t expanded (for example, the Fonts chapter didn’t gain a lot, but it was still reworked to reduce the number of figures needed and to clarify some points).  There are four all-new chapters, five chapters with significant additions or revisions, and five more that were lightly to moderately revised.  So it’s practically a whole new book.

That’s even more true of the book I have coming out in mid- to late April from New Riders: More Eric Meyer on CSS, a sequel to Eric Meyer on CSS.  And when I say “sequel,” I really mean it: this is a collection of ten entirely new projects, so it is not a new edition of the older book.  You can own one without the other, although of course you should buy both!  Baby needs a new pair of shoes, after all.  (Okay, that’s a lie; she’s too little to be wearing shoes.  But you know what I mean.)  I’ll have more details as they become available.

As for the sequel to Eric Meyer on CSS, that’s suffered some setbacks due to Carolyn’s arrival, so I’m not sure when it will be finished and published.  Half the projects are already written, and the sixth has the working files all set up.  That leaves just a few more to write.  I’m hoping to get them finished before January is done, but I’m feeling less and less optimistic about meeting that goal.  We’ll see what happens.

Speaking of Carolyn, she’s suffering through her first cold, so we stayed home last night.  There are certainly worse ways to spend a New Year’s Eve than with your wife, new daughter, and a home-cooked meal.  We didn’t even bother to watch the ball drop, although the shouted countdowns from our various neighbors let us know exactly when the new Gregorian year began.

As Kat and I lay in bed last night, Carolyn miserably gurgling and wheezing between us, I kept saying to myself, “It’s just another day.”  There was something about the change to 2004 that hit me hard, a realization that this is the first year in which Mom has always been dead.  Throughout 2003, even though she was gone, she’d been a part of that year.  When that last digit changed, artificial though the division of time might be, there was suddenly a sense that I was farther away from Mom, that I’d crossed a boundary that was suddenly like a wall between us.

But it is, in the end, just another day.  Mom doesn’t have to be any further away from me than she was yesterday, or the day before.  She is always as close as I choose to allow, as close as my memories of her will permit.