meyerweb.com

I am now a Fray Contributor. Official, for real, badge and everything—check the sidebar on the home page. My completely and in many ways unbelievably true story of beginnings around an ending, “A Death of Coincidence”, appears in Issue 3: Sex & Death.

This is a huge deal for me. I still have a little trouble believing it.

For a long time—as in, for more than a decade—I’ve had “participate in Fray” as one of those little deferred dreams we all carry around in the background. I certainly could’ve submitted pieces all along, either for the original site or one of the live events, and might even have been accepted. The thing is, I wasn’t dreaming of simply getting a piece accepted and checking an internal to-do box. I wanted to participate the right way, by my own internal reckoning. That meant not only vying for inclusion, but doing so with a worthy story, one that felt right.

When Fray relaunched as a themed quarterly, I took notice. I often work better when I have something to work against; constraints energize me more than they chafe. The first issue’s theme, “Busted!”, called to mind a few childhood incidents, but nothing really coalesced. There was nothing that said, “I’m a Fray piece; write me.” The second issue’s theme, “Geek”, left me with far too many options. I couldn’t hook onto anything with the right vibe.

Then issue 3’s theme was announced, and I knew exactly what I was going to submit. No rumination of possible narratives, no idle exploring my past for ideas, no doubt at all. I knew, and it was right.

In fact, it was a piece I’d already written, except for the ending. The ending I had used was certainly good enough, and was certainly the right ending for the time and place I wrote and performed it. But there had always been a different, nearly unbelievable ending to that story and I’d always held it back, kept close to myself, never quite sure why. Now I know why. It was the piece that made that story a Fray story.

If you want to read it, you’ll need to pick up Issue 3 of Fray, which you can of course do very easily. You can pick up issues 1 and 3 together for a great price, or become a subscriber and get issue 3 as your first. Any of those would be awesome. Or, I suppose, you can wait until the piece is published for free on the Fray site, though I should tell you that it could be a long while until that happens.

I can’t thank Frayer-in-Chief Derek Powazek enough for including me in Fray. I am quite literally as proud as I was when my first book was published. I’ve passed a personal and professional milestone, and far from just ticking off a checkbox on some internal to-do list, I’m basking in the glow of a dream fully and properly fulfilled.

You probably don’t need me to tell you about today’s issue of A List Apart, but just in case you hit this entry in your feed reader before reaching the ALA feed, head on over. If you have anything to do with web development, there’s news of a coming change that you absolutely need to read.

I know there will be many people who disagree with my take on version targeting. As did I, at first. Originally I wasn’t even going to be part of this ALA issue but as I argued with Aaron about it on the ALA editorial board and started to shift my perspective, we realized that having someone document that thinking process would be valuable. So I did.

Already I’ve seen a lot of negative reactions to the idea, and they remind me of my initial reactions. That’s not to say that my views are more advanced, nor that everyone will eventually come to the same way of thinking. It’s entirely possible that after due rational consideration, many people will come to the conclusion exactly opposite my own. I still thought it might be useful to share my thoughts on the matter as someone who has been concerned about browser compatibility and standards advancement for a very long time now.

Comments are closed here, but discussion is open at ALA.

Update: I wanted to point to some other material about this topic. I’ll probably keep updating this as time goes on.

• Compatibility and IE8 — a post by Chris Wilson about the challenges faced by browsers when advancing standards, and the particular situation experienced in the IE7 deployment. You don’t have to agree with the conclusions, but understanding the problem is important.

• The versioning switch is not a browser detect — this is vitally important to any hope of useful debate on this topic. I tried to clearly make the same point in my ALA article, but reiteration doesn’t hurt.

• Broken — Jeremy objects to the default behavior. I actually agree with him, and made that case at length with a member of the IE team. I couldn’t make what I wanted square with their requirements, and came to see that I couldn’t, and was deeply saddened by it. I sincerely hope that Jeremy, or indeed anyone, can succeed where I failed.

• That Red-headed Monster Next to You? Yeah, that’s Anger — no, I didn’t link this because of the hair-color reference. I’ve been deeply disheartened by the overall tenor of the reaction. Disagreement is fine, in fact welcomed; but the level of vitriol, name-calling, and outright personal attacks came as a rude and unwelcome surprise.

Last Thursday, I came down from the office to discover a stack of five boxes on the front porch. Three were for Kat, who is one of those annoying people who plans way ahead for Christmas, and two others were my author copies of CSS Web Site Design (formerly “CSS Hands-On Training”). This is a title I did for lynda.com, and published by Peachpit, and it’s most tersely described as “Eric Meyer on CSS, but for beginners”. It’s also the hard-copy version of the video training title “CSS Site Design“, and includes all the videos and exercise files from the video title on a CD-ROM bundled with the book.

After I’d hauled all that into the front hallway, I grabbed my car keys and headed out the back door to run my errand. At which point I nearly fell over two more boxes, these containing my author copies of the third edition of CSS: The Definitive Guide from O’Reilly. This is of course an update of the second edition, which contains some updates based on the latest version of CSS 2.1, expanded selector coverage, updated compatibility notes taking IE7’s improvements into account, and corrected errata from the previous edition. It’s not a major update compared to the second edition, admittedly, but if you don’t already own the second edition, it’s well worth acquiring (if I do say so myself).

It’s a bit funny that both sets of books arrived on my doorstep the exact same day, considering that the two projects started out well separated, and gradually synched up. At first I was going to write one and then the other, but various complications set in and they started to interweave. I finished their final reviews with a whole lot of overlap—that was a fun couple of weeks—and now, the waves have fully amplified.

What really cracked me up was that the next day, I got packages from both Peachpit and O’Reilly, each containing a single copy of the respective books, and each containing a note along the lines of “Here’s your advance copy; the rest should arrive in a few weeks!”.

Once I got a look at the markup of my latest Vitamin piece, “Stand Up For Your Rights!“, I winced. Four paragraphs, with each alternating bit of dialogue separated by a line break? Ay caramba!

And yet, I’m not sure I could have done better, structurally speaking. The only semi-reasonable alternative that comes to mind is a set of four blockquotes with paragraphs instead of line breaks, but that doesn’t work for me. They are, after all, invented conversations. I’m not quoting anything.

Maybe paragraphed text with a div, possibly classed, for each section (yes, all right, each division) of the article would have been a better choice. Or maybe not. What do you think?

The new weekly web-design ‘zine Vitamin (a.k.a. Yet Another Major New Project From The Carsons) launched earlier this week to generally positive notice from the design community. I was glad to see this for three reasons.

1. I wrote one of the launch articles, “Making Popular Layout Decisions“. Although now that I think about it more, maybe that should have been “Making Unpopular Layout Decisions”. Anyway, it’s a commentary piece that will probably annoy a few hard-core purists. That always makes for a success in my book.
2. I’m a member of the Advisory Board, so I have some stake in seeing it do well. I’d hate to have things go badly due to my being a bad advisor! Especially since I’m kind of new to the advisory game.
3. It demonstrates that there’s plenty of room in the web design community for such resources. Not that there’s anything wrong with what we have—after all, I love A List Apart so much, I wrote the markup!—but it’s a sign of renewed health and interest in the field.

Oh, and speaking of Carson projects, I hear this May’s Professional CSS XHTML Techniques workshop is almost sold out—so if you’re interested, better get cracking. (The same is true for AEA Chicago, as it happens.)

Once was lost, now is found: “Images, Tables, and Mysterious Gaps” has been resurrected from the Great Bit Bucket Beyond and given new life on Mozilla.org. In fact, it looks like just about all the technical articles written by me and the other members of TEDS are available. Look through the full list of CSS articles, for example. You can dig into any number of topic areas from the main page of the Documentation section. (Scroll down to the “Mozilla Developer Center Contents” headline.)

Some other popular articles from my Netscape days gone by:

• Consistent List Indentation
• Defining Cross-Browser Tooltips
• Issues Arising From Arbitrary-Element Hover
• Understanding Underlines
• Liberty! Equality! Validity!

So far as I’ve been able to determine, some of the less technical pieces, like the interviews with Doug Bowman and Mike Davidson, are not available. Not now, anyway. Perhaps one day that too will change.

You asked for it, you begged for it, you demanded it: A List Apart is sporting a working print style sheet for the articles. Want to know more about it? Read “ALA’s New Print Styles“, my new article over at ALA.

Believe it or not, that’s only my second ALA article ever, and the first one was the classic “Going To Print“. Maybe one of these days I should write an ALA article that doesn’t involve ink on dead trees.

Of course, if I stick to the interval established by my first two ALA articles, the next one won’t appear until 2008 early 2009… so I guess I have some time to think about it.

I was recently honored with a request to contribute to Design In-Flight magazine, and so the latest issue contains a piece titled “Stripped Down Style”. The article is an expanded version of Really Undoing html.css, accompanied by some screen shots and containing a copy of Tantek’s undohtml.css. The magazine also includes an article from Jon Hicks about his icon design process, focusing on the icons he’s created for NetNewsWire 2; a piece from Keith Robinson on public speaking; a how-to guide for mapping out the structure of your style sheets by Yasuhisa Hasegawa; and a good deal more.

It does cost a few bucks to get a copy the magazine, but they really are a very few—certainly several less than you’d spend on a comparable magazine in print. You can also get a yearly subscription of four issues for ten bucks. Having read the first two issues of the magazine, I’m definintely feeling an urge to subscribe. Editor Andy Arikawa has proven a master at pulling together some great content from interesting authors, and at covering a diverse set of topics.

I must also admit to some amusement at how the title of this issue, “Not Your Father’s CSS”, echoes (most likely coincidentally) the title of my radio show.