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Just a quick followup on HSL color visualizations and CSS: The Definitive Guide.

To take those two things in reverse, I got word from my editor that color is definitely an option for the book, though the exact form it will take is not 100% certain.  The options range from an insert of color plates to printing color on a per-page as-needed basis, and it’s hard right now to know what will make the most sense for the book and its price.  We’re hoping for the per-page approach, but it will depend on just how fast color prices plunge in the near(ish) future and what the book requires.  The glorious, glorious upshot is that I can abandon all thought of grayscale requirements and only concentrate on avoiding light yellows, which I guess print badly.

As for visualizations, I created another to go with the HSL-16 and HSL-147 visualizations I mentioned in an earlier post:

• Getting HSL from RGB — a look at how the arrangement and fading of the three primaries yields the complete hue wheel.  Its point is a little less obvious than the others, but (I hope) only by a little.  If you’ve ever wondered how RGB and the hue part of HSL relate to each other, this visualization should help answer the question.

I think I’m done with visualizing colors for now, but I think I said that before, so you never know.  I mean, you know, colors, man!  What do they mean?

I’ve been working through and rewriting the chapters of CSS: The Definitive Guide for its fourth edition, and at present I’m nearing the end of chapter 4, “Values and Units”.  That means I just worked through the color values, which required a lot more of a rewrite than you might think.  After all, when the third edition came out, RGBa, HSL, and HSLa weren’t viable options, so they didn’t get coverage.  Expanding the color-values section to incorporate them posed two major challenges.

First, I couldn’t just drop them in as add-ons; the whole section had to be partially rearranged, and chunks of the text rewritten or replaced.  Okay, yes, I admit, that’s par for the new-edition course, and I’m not complaining so much as describing.  The far more troubling challenge: how to explain HSL in a grayscale book.

(I should note that I’m hoping to convince O’Reilly to make the move to color, even though that likely means reshooting damn near every figure in the text.  Even if full color for 600-700 pages is not economically viable, which has always been the problem in the past, then I’m hoping for at least a set of color plates.  We’ll see!  At present, though, I have to assume we’ll be committing grayscale to paper.)

Partly the challenge here is one of clear explanation and illustration, which is never easy even in the most ideal of environments; but the other part is that I’ve never really been comfortable with HSL.  I know it’s held to be far more intuitive than RGB, but I have 30 years of RGB experience and next to no HSL experience.  I can’t help but have that color my perception (ah HA ha).

In an effort to overcome my discomfort, I started messing around with the relationships between HSL and more familiar colors, starting with keyword sets.  I’ve spun two visualizations out of that effort:

• HTML4 Color Keywords in HSL—wherein I map the sixteen color keywords defined in HTML4 onto an HSL color wheel and grayscale bar.  What I really like about the end result is the clear evidence of careful color selection.  It’s a balanced set, at least mathematically, and seeing the relationships between the colors and thus how to present them helped me develop a fair amount of HSL intuition.

  This was also an excuse to attempt cleverness with CSS Transforms.  The results please me.

• SVG/CSS3 Color Keyword Distribution—mapping out how the full set of 147 SVG/CSS3 (neé X11) color keywords are distributed around the hue wheel.  Not very well, as it turns out.  I don’t know that this taught me very much about HSL itself, but I did get a firmer grip on the interplay between saturation, lightness, and luminance, all of which helped a great deal in the arrangement of the ‘spikes’.

  This one turned into an excuse to play with canvas drawing, after Mårten Björk responded to a Twitter request with a huge head start on the problem.  Originally, this was going to be another Transformapalooza, but I’m glad it went in this direction instead.

Thanks to these visualizations and (more importantly) the programming and thinking I did to create them, I’m now much more comfortable with HSL.  As a result, the “HSL and HSLa Colors” section of chapter 4 is a lot better than it would have been.  I even came up with what I think are some pretty good ways for illustrating HSL in a grayscale environment and ways to link it to the RGB model for the benefit of people like me.  The book will be a lot better for it when it finally comes out.  In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the visualizations!

When you have children who are new to walking, getting things out of a car while in a parking lot can be a nerve-wracking experience: you know that your kid is capable of walking in any direction, and also that they’re not really aware of the dangers a parking lot can contain.

Following the philosophy of “don’t baby-proof the environment, make the baby proof for the environment”, we had two parking lot rules that worked out pretty well, used for different stages of development.

1. Hand on the car.  When out of the car, one of the child’s hands must always be touching the car unless a parent is holding their hand.  This sets a bound on how far away they can get from you.
2. Feet on the yellow line.  The lines separating parking spaces are treated as if they’re balance beams.  The child can walk along the line, but not step off of it, unless a parent is holding their hand.  This keeps the child between cars and away from the flow of traffic.

Obviously, these require training periods, and during that training you have to keep an eagle eye on the kid.  And of course you can’t rely on these rules to keep your children completely safe in a parking lot—only you can do that.  In our experience, though, it greatly reduced our stress levels even in busy Christmas-time lots; plus, it was another way to stress the importance of both safety and obedience.

I get asked from time to time for my number one tip for new parents.  My answer is always a single word.

“Earplugs.”

Seriously.  Get some earplugs.  They don’t have to be fancy; the squishy yellow foam plugs you can get in a cardboard holder for a dollar work just fine.  If you already have some fancier in-ear jobs for rock concerts or woodworking or whatever, those are good too.

Because as much as you love your new baby, and as much as you will work to keep them calm and happy, there will almost certainly be times when they are hurting or uncomfortable or just generally upset and unable to be soothed.  No matter how much you cuddle and sing and swaddle, they will scream and cry.  Some kids will do this rarely.  Others will do it all the time.  (A friend of ours tells how her eldest child screamed more or less non-stop from the day she was born until the day she walked.)  I don’t honestly know which is harder to handle, but I do know that the screaming worked its way through my eardrums and into my brain to induce a panicked pseudo-flight-or-flight response.  It was cumulatively, enormously stressful.

Earplugs do not shut out the cries completely.  You will not be denying your baby’s distress or placing unwarranted distance between you and your child.  Earplugs simply take the raw, serrated edge off their cry, giving you some mental space to cope with it and be a calmer and therefore better parent.  It lets you hang in there longer, putting off the point where you have to put the baby in the crib and walk away for a few minutes.  (And that’s okay too; the baby won’t die if you take five to regroup.)  That means more direct contact with your baby, and possibly a shorter time to a calm baby due to longer, more continuous periods of parental contact.

So: earplugs.  Probably the highest-ROI parental purchase I ever made.

Last Thursday, I had the rare honor and privilege of chatting with Jen Simmons as a guest on The Web Ahead .  (I’ve also chatted with Jen in real life.  That’s even awesomer!)  As is my wont, I completely abused that privilege by chatting for two hours—making it the second-longest episode of The Web Ahead to date—about the history of the web and CSS, what’s coming up that jazzes me the most, and all kinds of stuff.  I even revealed, toward the end of the conversation, the big-picture projects I dearly wish I had time to work on.

The finished product was published last Friday morning.  I know it’s a bit of a lengthy beast, but if you’re at all interested about how we got to where we are with CSS, you might want to give this a listen:  The Web Ahead, Episode #18.  Available for all your finer digital audio players via embedded Flash player, iTunes, RSS, and MP3 download.

My deepest thanks to Jen for inviting me to be part of the show!

The moment I hit “Publish” on this post, I will have crossed a major base-ten barrier:  this is the one thousandth post published here on meyerweb.  When I started putting up little missives back in December 1999, the idea was to communicate with my friends and family about what was going on in my life, and to maybe open a dialogue with the few people I hoped might read the forthcoming Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide.    (We expanded the acronym CSS in the title for fear potential readers might not know what “CSS” stood for—a legitimate concern back in 2000!)  Posts were written in the first-person plural, of all things, and there were no comments or search.  In fact, the whole thing was an unholy agglomeration of XML, XSLT, and shell scripts that somehow spit out HTML into quarterly archive pages—in chronological order, I’ll have you know.

Years later, I migrated to WordPress (mostly because I knew Matt personally, back before he started hobnobbing with Richard Branson and storing fruit in Louis Armstrong’s trumpet and all that), turned on comments, and never looked back.  As more and more sites have disabled commenting, I’ve left that door open and have yet to regret it.  Curating the comments has become easier to manage in the last few years as the number of comments per post has dropped, but I still believe it’s a worthwhile effort.  I was never here simply to talk; a good conversation beats a great soliloquy any day of the week.

It’s also true that, as my life has gotten more complex and my responsibilities have grown, my frequency of posting has dropped in the last few years (I believe that’s at least part of the reason for the drop in comments).  Speaking at an increasing number of conferences, founding and developing An Event Apart with Jeffrey, taking our family’s size from two to five, and trying (trying!) to keep up with the inbox and friends online—all ate into my blogging time.  I allowed it to happen, of course, in the most natural and unconscious way possible: I simply didn’t focus on blogging.  A lot of my focus I let flow into watching social networks stream crumbs of information past me, and occasionally tossing in my own crumbs, partly just to see where they flowed.

I will of course continue to put time and energy into An Event Apart and writing and above all my family, but I am reclaiming in the name of blogging the pieces of my attention I ceded to Twitter and Facebook and all that jazz.  This site, in the last 12 years, has (like an old friend) seen me through failure and success, horror and beauty, war and peace, through death and new life and all the things that greet all of us every day.  It deserves more of my focus, and that’s what I have committed to give it.  I’ll be returning to my old mix of technical and personal material, writing about CSS and standards right alongside child-raising and kitchen faucets.  You can follow along via RSS, or if you prefer a patchier approach you can watch for post announcements on Twitter.  Whatever the balance of content, whatever the post topic, I can most definitely assure you that I will continue to abuse parenthetical asides, lead off paragraphs with “Anyway”, employ British-style punctuation rules, and make jokes so obscure only I get them.

Prior to hitting “Publish” on this post, the archive of “Thoughts From Eric” (the official title of the blog portion of meyerweb) contains 400,409 words, according to WP Word Count.  This post contains 608.  Here’s to the next 598,983.

After the blackout on Wednesday, it seems that the political tides are shifting against SOPA and the PROTECT IP Act—as of this writing, there are now more members of Congress in opposition to the bills than in favor.  That’s good news.

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.

Though I certainly do not support SOPA or the PROTECT IP Act (the complete, rather contrived acronym of PIPA), I will not be blacking out meyerweb.  This is largely because the vast majority of my readers already know about these bills, and very likely oppose them; as for anyone who visits but does not know about these bills, I feel I’ll do better to speak out than to black out.  (Which is not a criticism of those who do black out.  We all fight in our own ways.)

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.