I wil reiterate something I said on Twitter, though: the members of tech community, particularly those who are intimately familiar with the basic protocols of the Internet, need to keep working on ways to counteract SOPA/PIPA. What form that would take, I’m not sure. Maybe a truly distributed DNS system, one that can’t be selectively filtered by any one government or other entity. I’m not an expert in the area, so I don’t actually know if that’s feasible. There’s probably a much more clever solution, or better still suite of solutions.

The point is, SOPA and PIPA may soon go down to defeat, but they will return in another form. There is too much money in the hands of those who first drafted these bills, and they’re willing to give a fair chunk of that money to those who introduced the bills in Congress. Never mistake winning a battle with winning the war. As someone else observed on Twitter (and I wish I could find their tweet now), the Internet community fought hard against the DMCA, and it’s been US law for more than a decade.

By all means, take a moment to applaud the widespread and effective community effort to oppose and (hopefully) defeat bad legislation. When that’s done, take notes on what worked and what didn’t, and then prepare to fight again and harder. Fill the gap between battles with outreach to your elected representatives and with efforts to educate the non-technical in your life to explain why SOPA/PIPA were and are a bad idea.

Days of action feel great. Months of effort are wearying. But it’s only the latter that can slowly and painfully bring about long-term change.

Instead, I will reproduce here the letter I attempted to send via contact form to my state Senator this morning, and which I will print out and send by regular postal service later today.

Senator Brown:

I grew up in Lexington, Ohio. I moved to Cleveland in pursuit of a career, and found success. Through a combination of good luck and hard work, I have (rather to my surprise) become a widely recognized name in my field, which is web design and development. Along the way, I co-founded a web design conference with an even more widely respected colleague that has become one of the most respected and successful web design events in the world. This business is headquartered in Ohio—I live in Cleveland Heights with my family, and I intend to stay here until I either retire to Florida or die. Politically I’m best described as a moderate independent, though I do tend to lean a bit to the left.

As you can imagine, given my line of work, I have an opinion regarding the PROTECT IP Act which you have co-sponsored. The aims of PROTECT IP are understandable, but the methods are unacceptable. Put another way, if you wish to combat piracy and intellectual property theft, there are far better ways to go about it.

As someone with twenty years of technical experience with the Internet and nearly as many with the web—I started creating web pages in late 1993—please believe me when I say the enforcement mechanisms of the bill are deeply flawed and attack the very features of the Web that make it what it is. They are akin to making a criminal of anyone who gives directions to a park where drug trafficking takes place, regardless of whether they knew about the drug trafficking. You don’t have to be in favor of drug trafficking to oppose that.

This is not a case where tweaking a clause or two will fix it; correction in this case would mean starting from scratch. Again, the objection is not with the general intent of the bill. It is with how the bill goes about achieving those aims.

If you would like to discuss this with me further, I would be delighted to do whatever I can to help, but in any event I strongly urge you to reconsider your co-sponsorship of the PROTECT IP Act.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Eric A. Meyer (http://meyerweb.com/)

Partner and co-founder, An Event Apart (http://aneventapart.com/)

If you agree that the PROTECT IP Act is poorly conceived, find out if your senator supports PIPA. If they do, get in touch and let them know about your opposition. If they oppose the bill, get in touch and thank them for their opposition. If their support or opposition isn’t known, get in touch and ask them to please speak out in opposition to the bill.

As others have said, postal letters are better than phone calls, which are in turn better than e-mail, which is in turn better than signing petitions. Do what you can, please. The web site you save might be your own.

I’m proud to have been a part of this effort since its inaugural launch back in 2007. It’s a major undertaking, mostly in analyzing the data and turning that into a detailed report, but it’s more than worth the time and effort. Before the Survey, we really didn’t know very much about who we were as a field of practice, and without it we wouldn’t have as clear a picture of who we are today.

There have been growing pains, of course, chief among them UCCASS, the survey software we’ve been using since the outset. Its limitations and lack of updates finally pushed us to find another platform, and we chose to move over to Polldaddy. Many thanks to the Polldaddy team for giving the survey a home and helping me figure out the best strategies for recreating the survey. (And also for putting up with my occasionally testy feature and support requests. Sorry, gang.)

Due to differences between UCCASS and Polldaddy, we ended up restructuring the survey into two distinct paths. I think this change actually speeds the process of taking the survey. I’m pretty sure just about anyone could get through it in under ten minutes.

Unsurprisingly, participation in the survey has dropped over the years; last year’s survey had a bit more than half as many respondents as the first-ever survey back in 2007. Tellingly, the actual results have been pretty consistent over the years. I’d really like to see how those results stand up to an increase of respondents, so please:

• If you haven’t taken the survey yet, kindly set aside ten minutes and do so.
• If you have taken the survey, thank you. Now, spread the word! If you could post a quick link to any mailing lists, web forums, newsgroups, or other professional communities in which you participate, it will be an enormous help. The more practitioners we have answer, the better the results.

As always, the survey will close a month after it opened; and as always, a detailed report will be published—feel free to peruse the reports from 2007 (PDF), 2008, 2009, and 2010—along with anonymized data sets for independent analysis. Together, they form a picture, but one that is still being drawn. Please help us to add the most essential detail—you!

Just yesterday, I took a screenshot of the title page of Dive Into HTML5 to include in a presentation as a highly recommended resource. Now it’s gone. That site, along with all the other “Dive Into…” sites (Accessibility, Python, Greasemonkey, etc.) and addictionis.org, is returning an HTTP “410 Gone” message. Mark’s Github, Google+, Reddit, and Twitter accounts have all been deleted. And attempts to email him have been bounced back.

This is very reminiscent of Why the Lucky Stiff’s infosuicide, and it’s honestly shocking. If anyone is in direct contact with Mark, please let me know that he’s okay via comment here or by direct e-mail, even if his internet presence has been erased. As much as I hate for the world to lose all of the incredible information he’s created and shared, that would be as nothing compared to losing the man himself.

“Embracing HTTP error code 410 means embracing the impermanence of all things.”

—Mark Pilgrim, March 27, 2003 (diveintomark.com)

Update 5 Oct 11: Jason Scott just tweeted the following:

Mark Pilgrim is alive/annoyed we called the police. Please stand down and give the man privacy and space, and thanks everyone for caring.

The communication was specifically verified, it was him, and that’s that. That was the single hardest decision I’ve had to make this year.

So there you have it. I’m sorry to have helped annoy Mark, am very glad he’s well, and sincerely hope that we can all give him the privacy he desires. And with that, I’m going to sleep now. Thank you, everyone.

Addendum 5 Oct 11: Several people have asked me if I know why Mark took this step. I don’t. I have three comments in the moderation queue all claiming to be from Mark, only one of which even approaches sounding credible, and none of which have any sort of verification. Unless Mark contacts me directly, or changes his server to return an explanatory note instead of or along with a 410, or something similar, I’m as much in the dark as anyone else. If he’d like to talk with me about it, he’s certainly more than welcome to do so, but he’s under no obligation to explain himself to me or anyone else.

Mirrors of Mark’s work have started appearing (see the comments for some of them) and so his legacy, if not his presence, will not be lost. I am assuming that he has simply withdrawn from digital life, his reasons are his own, and that if he feels interested in explaining those reasons he will find a way to do so. Regardless, his path is his own and we should leave him to walk it as he chooses.

I’ll warn you up front that as of this writing the user interaction is not ideal, and in some places the presentation suffers from too much content overlap. This happens in timelines where lots of drafts were released in a short period of time. (In one case, two related drafts were released on the same day!) I intend to clean up the presentation, but for the moment I’m still fiddling with ideas. The obvious one is to rotate every other spec name by -45 degrees, but that looked kind of awful. I suspect I’ll end up doing some sort of timestamp comparison and if they’re too close together, toss on a class that invokes a -45deg rotation. Or maybe I’ll get fancier!

The interaction is a little tougher to improve, given what’s being done here, but I have a few ideas for making things, if not perfect, at least less twitchy.

I should also note that not every module is listed as I write this: I intentionally left off modules whose last update was 2006 or earlier. I may add them at the end, or put them into a separate set of timelines. The historian in me definitely wants to see them included, but the shadow of a UX person who dwells somewhere in the furthest corners of my head wanted to avoid as much clutter as possible. We’ll see which one wins.

Anyway, somewhat like the browser release timeline, which is probably going to freeze in the face of the rapid-versioning schemes that are all the rage these days, I had fun combining my love of the web and my love of history. I should do it more often, really. The irony is that I don’t really have the time.

Yesterday morning, in a small office on the second floor of the Cuyahoga County Courthouse in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, Kat and Carolyn and Rebecca and I finalized our adoption of Joshua. There were a few witnesses to this: the social worker who has handled our case from the outset, as she did Carolyn’s; the lawyer who made sure all of our paperwork was correct; my sister and father and stepmother; our friends Gini and Ferrett and Jim; and the magistrate who conducted the proceedings.

As with Carolyn and Rebecca, I haven’t talked about Joshua being adopted—not that it was any big secret, given our having adopted our other children. Nevertheless, I did this for the same old reasons: for the past seven months, we’ve been borrowing him from his legal guardians, the adoption agency. The usual monthly checkups from our social worker still occurred, and there was still the theoretical possibility of Joshua’s placement being revoked for any reason whatsoever. Or even for no reason at all. I had no way to know if a blog post might somehow make things more difficult, so I left it alone.

All this was always a basically theoretical possibility—there was no real fear of it actually happening—but now, even the theory is undone. Joshua is now legally our son and the girls’ brother just as completely as he has long been both in our hearts. He is now ours—but even more than that, and far more importantly, we are now his.

Over a celebratory lunch, Kat held our sleeping son in her arms and I cradled his head with my hand as we whispered our love for him, for our girls, and for each other.

Now available: the results from the A List Apart Survey for People Who Make Web Sites, 2010. This is the fourth industry snapshot we’ve compiled, and the story that’s emerged over that time is proving to be pretty consistent. You can get a high-level view from the Introduction, and then dive deeper into the results in the following chapters. And, as is traditional, the Addendum contains links to the full (anonymized) data set in three formats for your own analytical investigations. We’d love to see what you come up with!

Something that surprised me quite a bit was that in 2010 we got about half the number of respondents we’ve gotten in past years—not quite seventeen thousand participated in 2010 instead of just over thirty thousand as we saw in previous years. I’m not quite sure what to make of that. Is the industry shrinking? Did we not get the word out as effectively? Was it a bad time of year to run a survey? Are people getting tired of taking the survey? There’s no real way to know.

At least there weren’t any wild swings in the results, which might have indicated we’d lost some subgroups in disproportionate numbers. Whatever caused the drop in participation, it appears to have done so in an evenly-distributed fashion.

Regardless, I’d like to see higher participation next year, so if anyone has good suggestions regarding how to make that happen, please do let me know in the comments.

We plan to run the 2011 survey in the next couple of months (and I’ll post a bit more about that soon) but for now, I hope you find the 2010 results an interesting and useful look at who we are.

To be clear, when I say “Can CSS create art?” I don’t mean that in the sense of wondering if art, or artful designs, can be accomplished with CSS. I think we all know the answer there, and have known at least since the Zen Garden got rolling. What I’m doing here is using some basic CSS to generate art, using web sites as the medium. For the series I linked, I spun all of the elements on a page using transform: rotate() to see what resulted. Any time I saw something I liked, I took a screenshot. After I was done, I winnowed the shots down to the best ones.

As some of you old-schoolers will probably have recognized, I’m absolutely following in the footsteps of Joshua Davis here, and in fact my working title for this effort was “Once Upon a Browser”. I saw Josh speak years ago, and clearly remember his description of how he generated a lot of his art. My process is almost identical, albeit with a bit less automation and computational complexity.

Because this is me, I built a little commentary joke into the first images in the series. It’s not terribly subtle, but with luck one or two of you will get the same chuckle I did.

I’m already thinking about variants on this theme, so there may be more series to come. In the meantime, as I surf around I’ll stop every now and again to spin what I see. I’ll definitely mention any new additions via Twitter, and new series both there and here. And of course if you follow me on Flickr, you’ll see new pieces as they go up.

I hope you enjoy them half as much as I enjoyed creating them. And if anyone wants to use the originals as desktop wallpapers, as Tim proposed, feel free!

The way it works is you input a series of transform functions, such as translateX(22px) rotate(33deg) scale(1.13). The end-state and its matrix() equivalent should update whenever you hit the space bar or the return key, or else explicitly elect to take the red pill. If you want to wipe out what you’ve input and go back to a state of blissful ignorance, take the blue pill.

There is one thing to note: the matrix() value you get from the tool is equivalent to the end-state placement of all the transforms you input. That value most likely does not create an equivalent animation, particularly if you do any rotation. For example, animating translateX(75px) rotate(1590deg) translateY(-75px) will not appear the same as animating matrix(-0.866025, 0.5, -0.5, -0.866025, 112.5, 64.9519). The two values will get the element to the same destination, but via very different paths. If you’re just transforming, not animating, then that’s irrelevant. If you are, then you may want to stick to the transforms.

This tool grew out of the first Retreats 4 Geeks (which was AWESOME) just outside of Gatlinburg, TN. After some side conversations betwen me and Aaron during the CSS training program, we hacked this together in a few hours on Saturday night. Hey, who knows how to party? Aaron of course wrote the JavaScript. Early on we came up with the punny name, and of course once we did that the visual design was pretty well chosen for us. A free TTF webfont (for the page title), a few background images, and a whole bunch of RGBa colors later we had arrived. Creating the visual appearance was a lot of fun, I have to say. CSS geeks, please feel free to view source and enjoy. No need to say “whoa”—it’s actually not that complicated.

So anyway, there you go. If you want to see the matrix(), remember: we can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.

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!

Writing to the Norm

No, not the fat guy on “Cheers.” Actually, it’s a fundamental issue every Web author needs to know about and appreciate.

Web browsers are written by different people. Each person has their own idea about how Web documents should look. Therefore, any given Web document will be displayed differently by different browsers. In fact, it will be displayed differently by different copies of the same browser, if the two copies have different preferences set.

Therefore, you need to keep this principle foremost in your mind at all times: you cannot guarantee that your document will appear to other people exactly as it does to you. In other words, don’t fall into the trap of obsessively re-writing a document just to get it to “fit on one screen,” or so a line of text is exactly “one screen wide.” This is as pointless as trying to take a picture that will always be one foot wide, no matter how big the projection screen. Changes in font, font size, window size, and so on will all invalidate your attempts.

On the other hand, you want to write documents which look acceptable to most people. How? Well, it’s almost an art form in itself, but my recommendation is that you assume that most people will set their browser to display text in a common font such as Times at a point size of somewhere between 10 and 15 points. While you shouldn’t spend your time trying to precisely engineer page arrangement, you also shouldn’t waste time worrying about how pages will look for someone whose display is set to 27-point Garamond.

That’s from “Chapter 1: Terms and Concepts” of Introduction to HTML, my first publication of note and the first of three tutorials dedicated to teaching HTML in a friendly, interactive manner. The tutorials were taken down a couple of years ago by their host organization, which made me a bit sad even though I understood why they didn’t want to maintain the pages (and deal with the support e-mail) any longer.

However, thanks to a colleague’s help and generosity I recently came into possession of copies of all three. I’m still pondering what to do about it. To put them back on the web would require a bit more work than just tossing them onto a server, and to make the quizzes fully functional would take yet more work, and after all this time some of the material is obsolete or even potentially misleading. Not to mention the page is laid out using a table (woo 1995!). On the other hand, they’d make an interesting historical document of sorts, a way to let you young whippersnappers know what it was like in the old days.

Reading through them, now sixteen years later, has been an interesting little trip down memory lane. What strikes me most, besides the fact that my younger self was a better writer than my current self, is how remarkably stable the Web’s fluidity has been over its lifetime. Yes, the absence of assuredly-repeatable layout is a core design principle, but it’s also the kind of thing that tends to get engineered away, particularly when designers and the public both get involved. Its persistence hints that it’s something valuable and even necessary. If I had to nominate one thing about the Web for the title of “Most Under-appreciated”, I think this would be it.

There is one small change I made between 2.0b2 and 2.0 final, which is the replacement of the “THIS IS BETA” warning text with an explicit lack of license. The reset CSS has been in the public domain ever since I first published it, and the Reset CSS page explicitly said it was, but the file itself never said one way or the other. Now it does.

Thanks to everyone who contributed their thoughts and perspectives on the new reset. Here’s to progress!

It seems like a lot of people feel the same way, because every single one of our 2010 shows sold out in advance. We’re understandably proud of this, and also very, very grateful for your faith and trust in what we do, and hope to continue earning both into the future. (In honor of your support, AEA recently made a donation to Computers For Youth in support of the next generation.)

So in 2011, we’re building on what we learned in 2010. We’re going from five to six shows, including a long-delayed return to Atlanta (site of our sophmore effort), and each sporting an optional A Day Apart featuring in-depth coverage of topics like mobile web design, HTML5/CSS3, and content strategy. If you’re interested, check out our Events page for the show nearest, or of most interest, to you.

Again, our deepest thanks to all our attendees and supporters. We couldn’t do what we do without you, and we’re looking forward to the challenge of clearing the bar you’ve set for us!

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!