http://meyerweb.com Things that Eric A. Meyer, CSS expert, writes about on his personal Web site; it's largely Web standards and Web technology, but also various bits of culture, politics, personal observations, and other miscellaneous stuff Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:28:51 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en At one point during An Event Apart Boston---for which I finally uploaded my few pictures, to add to the much larger pool---I observed that Boston, like parts of New York City and most European cities, is a place where maintaining a relation to the cardinal compass points is almost impossible. ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/07/08/phone-for-direction/ The "href everywhere" document (which is officially titled "HTML5: More Flexibile Linking") has been updated, so kindly give it another look and challenge my assertions, use cases (or lack thereof), and any weak points. Unless you consider the whole idea of extending linkability to be a weak point, in ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/06/12/linking-up/ In response to my request, the indomitable Hamish Macpherson has created NeverForgetcerpt, a plugin for WordPress 2.5+ that will warn you if you're about to publish a post that lacks an excerpt. I'm already using it on meyerweb and it's working like a charm. He's also expressed interest ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/06/12/excerpts-exacted-shielding-the-admin/ So after I once again published a post without filling in the excerpt, thus forcing me to go back to fill it in later, I tweeted in a fit of pique: I need a WordPress plugin that won't let me publish a post until I've filled in the excerpt field. Anyone ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/06/10/wanted-excerpt-exacter/ Just when you thought the whole embedded-video thing couldn't get any worse, here I come with videos featuring, well, me. The most recent is a short clip from one of my presentations at An Event Apart back in April, debug / reboot, where I comment at my usual pace on the ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/06/10/caught-in-the-camera-eye/ As a follow-up to "The Missing Link", I've written a fairly lengthy document that presents a number of alternatives for creating a more flexible and robust linking mechanism. The important core of the piece comes first, identifying a generic problem and covering some pros and cons of various ways ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/06/05/strengthening-links/ One of the few things I think XHTML2 got absolutely, totally, 125% right was freeing the href attribute from the few elements that accepted it and spreading it all over the language. It saddens me that this isn't happening in HTML5, especially since at least 1.5 of the four ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/06/02/the-missing-link/ Here's a late-week call for assistance in the JavaScript realm, specifically in making IE do what I need and can make happen in other browsers. I'd call this a LazyWeb request except I've been trying to figure out how to do it all [censored] afternoon, and it doesn't [censored] ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/05/29/need-help-with-table-row-events/ Just because the world hasn't suffered enough bad PHP coding, I released two WordPress plugins today. One pares down some of the admin UI, and the other is a Twitter plugin. Because the world doesn't have enough of those, either. You can find links to them on ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/05/27/wordpress-adminimize-and-latest-tweet-plugins/ In the course of building my line-height: normal test page, I settled on defaulting to an unusual but still pervasive font family: Webdings. The idea was that if you picked a font family in the dropdown and you didn't have it installed, you'd fall back to Webdings and it ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/05/22/characteristic-confusion/ I am, as ever, woefully behind on posting. (Then again, maybe it's not just me: Greg Hoy recently tweeted that it's happening all over.) I still want to follow up on line-height: normal and also on a closely related topic that emerged in the comments. And I ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/05/20/tour-de-frantic/ When I first wrote Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, the part that caused me the most difficulty and headaches was the line layout material. Several times I was sure I had it all figured out and accurately described, only to find out I was wrong. For two ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/05/06/line-height-abnormal/ My referrers lit up recently due to Jonathan Snook's article about CSS resets and how he doesn't use them. To Jonathan and all the doubters and nay-sayers out there, I have only one thing to say: Good for you. Seriously; no sarcasm or passive-aggressiveness intended. If I thought my reset ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/04/17/crafting-ourselves/ http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/04/01/full-disclosure/ So the feeds I read have been buzzing the past few days with running commentary of the WebKit and Opera teams' race to be the first to hit 100/100 on Acid3, and then after that the effort to get a pixel-perfect match with the reference image. Last I saw, ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/03/27/acid-redux/