That’s not at all minor point.  I don’t believe it overstates the case to say that if CERN hadn’t made the web free and open to all, it wouldn’t have taken over the net.  Like previous attempts at hypertext and similar information systems, it would have languished in a niche and eventually withered away.  There were other things that had to happen for the web to really take off, but none of them would have mattered without this one simple, foundational decision.

I would go even further and argue that this act infused the web, defining the culture that was built on top of it.  Because the medium was free and open, as was often the case in academic and hacker circles before it, the aesthetic of sharing freely became central to the web community.  The dynamic of using ideas and resources freely shared by others, and then freely sharing your own resources and ideas in return, was strongly encouraged by the open nature of the web.  It was an implicit encouragement, but no less strong for that.  As always, the environment shapes those who live within it.

It was in that very spirit that Dave Shea launched the CSS Zen Garden ten years ago this week.  After letting it lie fallow for the last few years, Dave has re-opened the site to submissions that make use of all the modern capabilities we have now.

It might be hard to understand this now, but the Zen Garden is one of the defining moments in the history of web design, and is truly critical to understanding the state of CSS before and after it debuted.  When histories of web design are written—and there will be—there will be a chapters titled things like “Wired, ESPN, and the Zen Garden: Why CSS Ended Up In Everything”.

Before the Zen Garden, CSS was a thing you used to color text and set fonts, and maybe for a simple design, not for “serious” layout.  CSS design is boxy and boring, and impossible to use for anything interesting, went the conventional wisdom.  (The Wired and ESPN designs were held to be special cases.)  Then Dave opened the gates on the Zen Garden, with its five utterly different designs based on the very same document…and the world turned.

I’m known to be a history buff, and these days a web history buff, so of course I’m super-excited to see both these sites online and actively looked after, but you should be too.  You can see where it all started, and where a major shift in design occurred, right from the comfort of your cutting-edge nightly build of the latest and greatest browsers known to man.  That’s a rare privilege, and a testimony to what CERN set free, two decades back.

@supports (text-decoration: blink) {
	#test {
		color: green;
		background: yellow;
		text-decoration: blink;
	}
}

Results in all @supports-supporting browsers I was able to test: green text on a yellow background, except Firefox 22, which additionally blinks the text.  The latest nightly builds of Firefox 23 do not blink the text, thanks to bug 857820.

Discuss.

I mean, what do you think @supports means?  Take a moment to formulate a one-line definition of your understanding of what it does, before moving on to the rest of this piece.

If you’ve never heard of it before and wonder how it works, here’s a very basic example:

body {background-color: white;}
@supports (background-color: cornflowerblue) {
	body {background-color: cornflowerblue;}
}

The idea is that if the browser supports that property:value combination, then it will apply the rule or rules found inside the curly brackets.  In this sense, it’s just like @media rules: if the conditions in the parentheses are deemed to apply, then the rules inside the declaration block are used.  The module refers to this ability as “feature queries”.

There are some logical combination keywords available: and, or, and not.  So you can say things like:

body {color: #222; background-color: white;}
@supports ((background-color: cornflowerblue) and (color: rgba(0,0,0,0.5))) {
	body {background-color: cornflowerblue; color: rgba(0,0,0,0.5);}
}

Okay, but what does that actually mean?  Here’s what the specification says:

A CSS processor is considered to support a declaration (consisting of a property and value) if it accepts that declaration (rather than discarding it as a parse error). If a processor does not implement, with a usable level of support, the value given, then it must not accept the declaration or claim support for it.

So in that first sentence, what we’re told is that “support” means “accepts [a] declaration” and doesn’t drop it on the floor as something it doesn’t recognize.  In other words, if a browser parses a property:value pair, then that qualifies as “support” for said pair.  Note that this sentence says nothing about what happens after parsing.  According to this, a browser could have a completely botched, partial, and generally unusable implementation of the property:value pair, but the act of recognizing means that there’s “support”.

But wait!  That second sentence adds an additional constraint, after a fashion: there must be “a usable level of support”, the lack of which means that a browser “must not…claim support”.  So not only must a browser parse a property:value pair, but support it to “a usable level”.

But what constitutes a “usable level”?  According to everyone who’s told me that I was wrong about vendor prefixes, any browser implementation of a feature should be complete and error-free.  Is that what’s required to be regarded as a usable level?  How about if the implementation has one known bug?  Three?  Ten?  Can any of them be severe bugs?  What about merely serious bugs?  What if two browsers claim usable support, and yet are not interoperable?

So.  How does the definition of @supports match the one-line definition I asked you to formulate, back at the beginning?  Are they exactly the same, or is there a difference?

I suspect that most people, especially those coming across @supports for the first time, will assume that the word means that a browser has complete, error-free support.  That’s the implicit promise.  Very few people think of “supports” as a synonym for “recognizes” (let alone “parses”).  There’s a difference, sometimes a very large one, between recognizing a thing and supporting it.  I’m sure that browser teams will do their best to avoid situations where a property:value pair is parsed but not well supported, but it’s only a matter of time before a “supported” pair proves to be badly flawed, or retroactively made wrong by specification changes.  Assuming that such things will be allowed, in an environment where @supports exists.

If feature queries were set with @feature, as media queries are set using @media, or even if the name were something along the lines of @parses or @recognizes, I’d be a lot less bothered.  The implicit promise would be quite a bit different.  What I feel like we face here is the exact inversion of vendor prefixes: instead of a marker for possible instability and a warning that preserves the possibility of changing the specification when needed, this pretends to promise stability and safety while restricting the WG’s ability to make changes, however necessary.  My instinct is that @supports will end up in the same place: abused, broken, and eventually reviled—except this time, there will be the extra bitterness of authors feeling that they were betrayed.

So how did they do it?  With CSS.  Here it is:

.tweet-display-linebreaks .tweet .js-tweet-text{
	white-space:pre-wrap
}

That’s it.  I’m not going to comment on their selector construction, except in the meta sense that I just did, but that single rule is all it took.

Well, not quite all.  The other thing they’ve done is to trim off any leading or trailing whitespace, and make sure the tweet’s content is right up against the opening and closing tags of the element.  It looks like so:

<p class="js-tweet-text">Y’all ready for this?</p>

When I input that tweet, it was like this, extra linefeeds and all:

Y’all ready for this?

So why do they trim off the edges?  Because if they left any whitespace between the tags and the content, pre-wrap would honor it.  This would happen even if Twitter, and not the author, was the source of the linefeeds between tags and content.  So rather than just ensure the content was placed normally, without any extra space, they went the trim($tweet) route.  I’m sure there are ways to beat the trimming; I haven’t tried to find them.  And there may be perfectly good reasons why they went the trim() route.  Maybe someone from Twitter will drop by to fill us in.

I will also note that white-space: pre-wrap preserves spaces between characters, just like pre elements do.  That means that anyone who double-spaces after sentences will have that space show up in their tweets, for everyone else to see.  Just like with the line breaks, author intent is thus preserved.  Deal with it.

To see what I mean, you can load up my testcase in any Windows browser—IE, Firefox, Chrome, whatever—assuming that you haven’t installed Helvetica on your Windows machine.  (If you have, then I’d love to know what results you get.)  Given that you haven’t installed Helvetica, you should see that three of the four bottom-bordered spans are using Arial.  This can be determined due to the shapes of the “GR” characters—they are notably different between Helvetica and Arial.  Here’s what I apply to the first test list item:

#l01 .s01 {font-family: Helvetica, monospace;}
#l01 .s02 {font-family: Arial, monospace;}

My result is that they use exactly the same face, and that face is Arial, which should not have happened.  If Helvetica is not present, the first span should be rendered using a monospace font face.  If it is present, then the first span should have different letterforms than the second.

But it’s the second line where things get really interesting.  There, I assigned local copies of Helvetica and Arial (if they exist) to the invented family names “H” and “A”.  Then I apply this to the second test list item:

#l02 .s01 {font-family: H, monospace;}
#l02 .s02 {font-family: A, monospace;}

The result should be the same as the first line, but it isn’t: the first span gets a fallback font face, and the second span gets Arial.  So while the system redirects requests for Helvetica to Arial, it doesn’t do so in such a way that the invented family name “H” resolves to Arial, even though it was assigned Helvetica (or perhaps I should say “Helvetica”) as its source.

I’d be interested to know if there’s something I’ve overlooked or misunderstood here, because these waters are deep and I suspect my understanding of them is somewhat shallow.

I gave him the requested high-five, of course, and then another for being proactive.  It was the first time he’d ever asked for one.  He could not have looked more pleased with himself.

And I suddenly realized that I wanted to be able to say to my glasses, “Okay, dump the last 30 seconds of livestream to permanent storage.”

There have been concerns raised about the impending crowdsourced panopticon that Google Glass represents.  I share those concerns, though I also wonder if the pairing of constant individual surveillance with cloud-based storage mediated through wearable CPUs will prove out an old if slightly recapitalized adage: that an ARMed society is a polite society.  Will it?  We’ll see—pun unintentional but unavoidable, very much like the future itself.

And yet.  You think that you’ll remember all those precious milestones, that there is no way on Earth you could ever forget your child’s first word, or the first time they took their first steps, or the time they suddenly put on an impromptu comedy show that had you on the floor laughing.  But you do forget.  Time piles up and you forget most of everything that ever happened to you.  A few shining moments stay preserved, and the rest fade into the indistinct fog of your former existence.

I’m not going to hold up my iPhone or Android or any other piece of hardware all the time, hoping that I’ll manage to catch a few moments to save.  That solution doesn’t scale at all, but I still want to save those moments.  If my glasses (or some other device) were always capturing a video buffer that could be dumped to permanent storage at any time, I could capture all of those truly important things.  I could go back and see that word, that step, that comedy show.  I would do that.  I wanted to do it, sitting on the floor of my child’s room this morning.

That was when I realized that Glass is inevitable.  We’re going to observe each other because we want to preserve our own lives—not every last second, but the parts that really matter to us.  There will be a whole host of side effects, some of which we can predict but most of which will surprise us.  I just don’t believe that we can avoid it.  Even if Google fails with Glass, someone else will succeed with a very similar project, and sooner than we expect.  I’ve started thinking about how to cope with that outcome.  Have you?

On Friday, the Web Standards Project announced its own dissolution.  I felt a lot of things upon reading the announcement, once I got over my initial surprise: nostalgia, wistfulness, closure.  And over it all, a deep sense of respect for the Project as a whole, from its inception to its peak to its final act.

In some ways, the announcement was a simple formalization of a longstanding state of affairs, as the Project has gradually grown quieter and quieter over the years, and its initiatives had been passed on to other, more active homes.  It was still impressive to see the group explicitly shut down.  I can’t think of the last time I saw a group that had been so influential and effective recognize that it was time to turn off the lights, and exit with dignity.  As they wrote:

Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality. While there is still work to be done, the sting of the WaSP is no longer necessary. And so it is time for us to close down The Web Standards Project.

I have a long history with the WaSP.  Way, way back, deep in the thick of the browser wars, I was invited to be a member of the CSS Action Committee, better known as the CSS Samurai.  We spent the next couple of years documenting how things worked (or, more often, didn’t) in CSS implementations, and—and this was the clever bit, if you ask me—writing up specific plans of action for browsers.  The standards compliance reviews we published told browsers what they needed to fix first, not just what they were getting wrong.  I can’t claim that our every word was agreed with, let alone acted upon, but I’m pretty confident those reviews helped push browser teams in the right direction.  Or, more likely, helped browser teams push their bosses in the direction the teams already wanted to go.

Succumbing to a wave of nostalgia, I spent a few minutes trawling my archives.  I still have what I think is all the mail from the Samurai’s mailing list, run through Project Cool’s servers, from when it was set up in August 1998 up through June of 2000.  My archive totals 1,716 messages from the group, as well as some of the Steering Committee members (mostly Glenn Davis, though George Olsen was our primary contact during the Microsoft style sheets patent brouhaha of February 1999).  If I’m not reading too much into plain text messages over a decade old, we had a pretty great time.  And then, after a while, we were done.  Unlike the WaSP itself, we never really declared an end.  We didn’t even march off into the sunset having declared that the farmers always win.  We just faded away.

Not that that’s entirely a bad thing.  At a certain point, our work was done, and we moved on.  Still, I look back now and wish we’d made it a little more formal.  Had we done so, we might have said something like the WaSP did:

The job’s not over, but instead of being the work of a small activist group, it’s a job for tens of thousands of developers who care about ensuring that the web remains a free, open, interoperable, and accessible competitor to native apps and closed eco-systems. It’s your job now…

And so it is.  These last years have shown that the job is in very good hands.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” said Margaret Mead.  I see now that the way those small groups truly change the world is by convincing the rest of the world that they are right, thus co-opting the world to their cause.  Done properly, the change makes the group obsolete.  It’s a lesson worth remembering, as we look at the world today.

I’m honored to have been a part of the WaSP, and I offer my deepest samurai bow of respect to its founders, its members, and its leaders.  Thank you all for making the web today what it is.

Well, so it was.  But there was another stage to the analogy that I didn’t bring up because it seemed to so remote, back then: that one of the browsers would start to gobble up or kill off its competitors, as MS Word did in the word processor space.  Sure, there are still alternatives, but how many people use them?

You can argue that this sort of consolidation is inevitable.  You can argue that it has benefits that outweigh the drawbacks, and vice versa.  Certainly having a de facto word processor made publishers’ lives easier in many ways, even if it disrupted life for authors who had invested in other-than-de-facto programs.  It made life easier for people who wanted to extend the word processing space by writing extensions, helpers, and other tools.  And it definitely made life easier for the Office team, which could proceed to add whatever feature they liked without having to worry overmuch about interoperability with others.  (It was, obviously, up to others to be interoperable with them.)

This is the lens through which I view Opera’s announcement that they will migrate to WebKit.  Actually, that’s not true: it’s one of the lenses.  I also remember the first browser wars, and the calls to have all browsers just use Trident, the engine in IE5 and IE6.  It was dominant, after all, and as good as or better than all its competitors, blessed with great resources and smart developers.  I find myself peering through that lens as well.

There are parallels and divergences, of course:  no analogy is ever perfect and no two events are identical.  We could argue about how this is exactly like or not like a decade ago, how this is precisely like or not like the word processor market, and some of us will.  No matter where you fall, of course, the Opera migration to WebKit and the sunset of Presto is going to happen.  As once was said:  The avalanche has already started.  It is too late for the pebbles to vote.

To which I would add: in this case the pebbles have already voted, have been voting for years now, and their votes determined that the avalanche would proceed in this direction and not another.  And no, I don’t mean the users.

You may want to exclude hyphenation on <code> tags within your blog. For both readability purposes (since many CSS tags already make heavy use of hyphens) and to avoid introducing some confusing/misleading references… Is it re-peating-linear-gradient? Or perhaps repeating-lin-ear-gradient?

He’s absolutely right, of course.  If you’re going to blog about technical topics, or even if you’re just writing a style sheet that you expect to release into the wild for use by anyone, there are some elements that you should avoid hyphenating.  And since hyphens is an inherited property, it isn’t sufficient to set it for a limited number of elements and assume you’re done.  You have to make sure you’ve turned it off for the elements that shouldn’t be hyphenated.

In my opinion, those elements are:

• code
• var
• kbd
• samp
• tt
• dir
• listing
• plaintext
• xmp
• abbr
• acronym

Yes, most of those are old and obscure and in some cases (massively) deprecated, but they’re all elements that could be hanging around on a web site and by their nature shouldn’t have their content hyphenated.  I mean, I would hope that a browser would recognize not to hyphenate an acronym or abbreviation element, but who knows?  Maybe ZOMGWTFBBQROFLMFAOCOPTER has enough word-like strings to qualify for hyphenation in some hyphenation dictionaries.  (Or not.)

“So what about pre?” you ask.  A very good question.  I rate that as a solid “maybe”.  For most uses of pre, the content won’t line-wrap anyway thanks to white-space: pre, so it’s a moot point.  However, if a pre has been set to white-space of pre-wrap, pre-line, or even normal, then hyphenation may well kick in.

At that point, the question is what kind of content the pre contains.  It apparently is no longer meant to be rigidly preformatted, as the element name would imply, so what is it?  If it’s a code block, there should already be a code element present within the pre, so suppressing hyphenation for code will be sufficient.  Ditto if it’s an example of user input (kbd), program output (samp), and so on.  This is why semantic markup matters.  It’s why, if you’ve been using it all along, you can make fine-grained choices here.

Of course, lots of people weren’t as forward-looking as you and anyway nobody’s perfect, so it’s probably a good idea to switch off hyphenation for pre, just in case the more semantic elements were left out.

There are similar questions to confront regarding q and blockquote.  If you’re quoting someone, almost certainly something that someone wrote, is it advisable to hyphenate that text when they didn’t?  I’m honestly not sure if it matters or not.  I’ve personally suppressed hyphenation in those cases, but I did that purely on instinct and I’d love to know what content and typography specialists think of that question.  (Be polite, please.  We’re all learning here.)

For the last interesting question, what about auto-linked URLs?  If we suppress hyphenation for all links, then that solves one problem to introduce another.  What I have noticed is that if you drag-select CSS-hyphenated text, the auto-generated hyphen(s) and line break(s) are ignored when you copy the text.  You just get the original.  That’s why I don’t think it’s really necessary to suppress hyphenation on the a element, though I’m willing to change my mind in the presence of new evidence.

Thus, at the moment, meyerweb’s base style sheet contains the following:

body {hyphens: auto;}
code, var, kbd, samp, tt, dir, listing, plaintext, xmp,
      abbr, acronym, blockquote, q {hyphens: none;}

I may adjust those rules over time, but that’s where I’ve landed.

Update 18 Dec 12: I should make it more clear that this post is intended to be a starting point, not the final word.  I’m not proposing that these are all the elements on which one should ever suppress hyphenation, full stop, end of discussion.  There may well be others, like form labels and textareas and text inputs and so forth, that should also be excluded.  (Though I kind of enjoy watching my text input get auto-hyphenated as I type.  It’s a little surreal.)  Hopefully, this post will get people thinking about exactly how authors should handle hyphenation if they do choose to put it in place, and eventually help us figure out some solid best practices.

A couple of weeks back, PPK posted about the sudden emergence of CSS hyphenation support in several browsers (which got picked up by WebMonkey, the lucky dog).  At the time, there was some confusion about whether a lang attribute it required to allow the hyphenation to happen—PPK said it did, but my testing indicated the opposite.

Well, it turned out that at the moment I did that test, I was running Firefox 16, and FF16 apparently honored the -moz-hyphens property with nary lang a attribute in sight.  We might ask how that’s supposed to work, since hyphenation dictionaries are language-dependent, but never mind: it did.  Firefox 17, on the other hand, requires a lang attribute value in order to apply hyphens (note the lack of prefix).

I haven’t gone running down the behavior of other browsers, because the upshot is this: if you want hyphenation to work in a future-friendly way, you need a lang attribute.  What older versions do will become of fading relevance.

All of which raises a fairly important question: should you enable hyphenation?

After all, hyphenation, I am told, was invented to increase the density of text and reduce the number of column inches needed in printed media, where paper can be expensive and space at a premium.  Hyphenation, in other words, was devised as a trick to let authors be a little bit more wordy.  (Also as a way to help reduce interword spacing in fully justified text.)

On the web, of course, we have no physical length constraints: The Web Ain’t Print.  We can run on as long as we like, limited only by our thesaurus, our RSI flare-ups, and the attention span of our readers.

But wait…that’s all true for the desktop web.  We have lovely big monitors and easily resizeable windows and zoomable text.  On mobile devices, however, the real estate is much more limited.  We still have infinite length, yes, but line lengths tend to be a lot shorter on iPhone or Android—particularly if you’ve given your mobile users a nicely readble font size.

Right after PPK’s article hit my aggregator, I turned on hyphenation here on meyerweb.  For desktop reading, at first it caught my eye a bit, but now I don’t see it at all.  Years and years of print reading has made it seem familiar.  Things would be just fine without the hyphens, of course.  But when reading pages on mobile, the hyphens feel useful.  They give me a little bit more reading for each “screenful”, and just feel comfortable.

Thus my recommendation of the moment: if you’re going to use CSS hyphenation, turn it on for mobile contexts.  For desktop—well, that’s a much murkier call.  It may well depend on your font family, layout, default language, and so on.  If you do turn them on, just make sure you have that lang attribute (I put mine on the html element) so your hyphens will persist.

If you’re interested in joining us in 2013, you can check out the event nearest you…or maybe the event being held where you’ve always wanted to go!  If you have your eye on Atlanta, bear in mind that the Early Bird rate (which saves you $100) ends on Christmas Eve, so don’t wait too much longer.  And if you were waiting for a detailed schedule in either San Diego or Boston before deciding to register, well, your wait is over.  More schedules will be released as the shows get closer.

I don’t talk very much about An Event Apart, and I probably talk about it far less than I should.  I blame that on the show itself, partly.  Our last show of 2012, held at the opulent Palace Hotel in San Francisco, is now three weeks behind us and I’m still struck a little bit speechless by another year of fantastic attendees and speakers.  The fundamental nature of what we’ve created together really is overwhelming to me, in the best possible way.  Thank you, one and all, for making that possible.

To celebrate the year just past as well as the year to come, we’ve once again made a donation to CFY (formerly Computers For Youth) to help advance their efforts to bring digital literacy and access to impoverished elementary school students.  They’ve already seen great improvements in schools where they operate, and we’re thrilled to support their work.  If you’d like to support them as well, please do, or take a moment in all the end-of-year rush and lend some aid to the charity that speaks most clearly to you.

Web design isn’t like chemistry, where the precipitate either forms or it doesn’t. If chemical engineers had to work in conditions equivalent to web developers, they’d have to mix their solutions in several parallel universes, each one with different physical constants, and get the same result in all of them.

While that’s still true, the constants are a lot less divergent these days.  The parallel universes that are web browsers are much closer to unity than once they were.

Remember those days?  When major web sites had a home page with two links: one for Netscape users to enter, the other for IE users?

Madness.

We know better now, of course.  Thanks to early pioneers like the organizers of the Web Standards Project, the path of web development was bent to a much saner course.  We still have little glitches and frustrations, of course, but it could be so unimaginably worse.  We know that it could be, because it was, once.

Along the way, the book cover of my friend and business partner’s book, Designing With Web Standards, gave rise to Blue Beanie Day, the day on which we give visible presence to our solidarity with the idea that web standards make possible the web as we know it.  Pictures go up on Twitter, Instagram, and Flickr with the tag #bbd12, and can be added to the Flickr group if you post there.

In this rapidly unfolding age of multiple device platforms and web access experiences, standards are more important than ever, even as they come under renewed pressure.  There will always be those who proclaim that standards are a failed process, an obstruction, an anachronism.  The desire to go faster and be shinier will always tempt developers to run down proprietary box canyons.

But so too will there always be those of us who remember the madness that lies that way.  Come November 30th, thousands of us will don our blue beanies.  I hope you’ll be among us.

Image © Kevin Cornell.  Used with permission.

Let me use myself as an example.  I’m currently running OS X Snow Leopard, 10.6.8, with no intention of upgrading.  This is because after Snow Leopard, there is no more Rosetta.  That means that my preferred personal mail client, Eudora, will not work.  Neither will Word 2004.  Both are, in effect, upgrade deal-breakers for me.

But why would I hang on to such relics?

Well, Eudora has been my mail client for quite literally two decades, and thus it has two decades of archived mail that I can search very quickly and easily.  I have tried out migrations to other clients; they crash trying to suck in 3GB worth of mail text in Eudora’s special format.  I could simply declare a break and move on to a new client with no stored mail, but as soon as I upgrade my OS, even the archives will be inaccessible.  This is a major barrier.  There are possible solutions, but trying them is incredibly time-intensive with no actual guarantee of success.

As for Word 2004, I have it customized so that ⇧⌘S shifts keyboard focus to the Styles combo box.  There I can type the name of the style I want and hit return.  This is really important when I’m writing a book whose files eventually have to be passed off to a publisher’s production staff, whose toolchains depend on proper use of styles.  O’Reilly in particular went to a lot of effort, back in the day, to create style who had vi-style shortcut names, so I can highlight a few words and type ⇧⌘S fc [return] to set the highlighted text in the “literal” style (used for property names and the like).  Versions of Word after 2004 do not possess this feature.  I own Word 2011, and often use it to view documents sent to me by others, but I can’t use it as an efficient book-authoring tool because it amputated a feature I use a lot.

So the objection isn’t a simple “I like what I know, dadgumit!”, though of course I do like what I know (we all do).  The real problem is “I have built my workflow around these things, and breaking them is unacceptable”.

I hear similar complaints from my designer friends.  They’ve gotten so expert at using a particular piece of software that they bemoan even the hint that it will get a significant ‘upgrade’—which often sounds like “break everything I do while likely adding a metric ton of crap I don’t need” to the power user—or even be discontinued.  Although for the power user, discontinuing is often preferable; at least when software is discontinued, it works exactly as you expect for as long as you can keep it running.

The web doesn’t inherently fix this problem, either.  When Twitter finally retired the API access points that Twitterrific 3 depended upon, my desktop Twitter client irretrievably broke.  Why not upgrade to the latest Twitterrific?  Because version 3 allowed me to display my timeline with all tweets collapsed, except for the currently-active tweet.  It was an incredibly compact, high-density, useful interface.  Version 4 does not permit it.  no other Twitter client I’ve tried permits it.  In fact, every other Twitter client I’ve tried has come off as cartoonishly clumsy and sprawlingly obtrusive when compared to the sleekness of Twitterrific 3—including, as I say, the newer version of the very same Twitter client.

Granted, that’s more of a UI preference than a functionality problem, but UI preferences are often what drive us to use things, or not use them.  I’m much now less present on Twitter than I was before the break, and when I do go on Twitter, it’s either via the official Twitter client on my iPhone or via twitter.com itself on the desktop.

Getting back to my increasingly-aging OS version, it helps that, to echo one my long-time personal heroes Tim Bray, I have no particular interest in what’s come after Snow Leopard.  Dragging window edges might be nice, but I’ve lived without it for a very long time and rarely ever missed it.  (Not never, but rarely.)

Yes, the newer OS X versions have a whole bunch of hip new cloud features, but in my case that’s actually a bug, not a feature.  I instinctively distrust cloud-based storage for a variety of reasons.  The security concerns are pretty significant for me, and for that matter having everything stored remotely is a good idea only if I have 100% reliable network access everywhere I go.  Well, I don’t (and neither do you).

But of course the rest of the world is moving in a different direction, leaving people like me behind.  That doesn’t mean that the rest of the world has gone mad, or is wrong to move in the direction it does.  This isn’t a querulous demand that everything be frozen in the spot I like because if it was good enough ten years ago, it’s good enough now.  That’s not how the world works.  What I’m doing here, if I’m doing anything worthwhile at all, is documenting the point at which I came to the end of my box canyon, pulled out a guitar, and strummed a quiet ballad to the memory of my own forward progress.

As I say, I think all this happens to every power user at some point or another.  We become enmeshed in a web of interlocking dependencies, and sooner or later lock ourselves into a particular place.  The odds of it happening increase with age, but that’s less a function of biological age than it is elapsed time.  The younger you start, the younger you’re likely to reach this point.

I will have to exit my canyon eventually, of course—but when, how, and why all remain very open questions, and I do not look forward to the turbulent transition periods that are likely to follow.

Special thanks to Tim Bray, Grant Hutchinson, and Jon Tan for their insights and feedback on this post.

First component is the pricing of the pre-books.  Roughly speaking, each pre-book will be priced according to its length.  The assumed base for the electronic version is $2.99, and $7.99 for the print version, with significantly longer pre-books (say, one where two chapters are combined) priced somewhat higher.  How much higher depends on the length.  It’s possible that prices will drift a bit over time as production or printing costs change, but there’s no way to guarantee that.  We’re basically pricing them as they come out.

At the end of the process, when all the chapters are written and bundled into an omnibus book edition, there will be discounts tied to the chapters you’ve already purchased.  The more chapters you bought ahead, the deeper the discount.  If you bought the pre-books direct from O’Reilly, then you’ll automatically get a discount code tailored to the number of pre-book you’ve already bought.  If you bought them elsewhere, then O’Reilly’s customer service will work to create a comparable discount, though that will obviously be a slower process.

The second component is: how much will the codes cut the price of the final, complete book?  That I cannot say.  The reason is that I don’t know (nor does anyone) what minimum price O’Reilly will need to charge to cover its costs while taking into account the money already paid.  I’m hopeful that if you bought all of the pre-books, then the electronic version of the final book will be very close to free, but again, we have to see where things stand once we reach that point.  It might be that the production costs of the complete book mean that it’s still a couple of bucks even at the deepest discount, but we’ll see!  One of the exciting things about this experiment is that even my editor and I don’t know exactly how it will all turn out.  We really are forging a new trail here, one that I hope will benefit other authors—and, by direct extension, readers—in the future.

As announced last week on the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing blog, the next edition of CSS:TDG will be released chapter by chapter.  As each one is finished, it will go into production right away instead of waiting for the entire omnibus book to be completed.  You’ll be able to get each standalone as an e-book, a print-on-demand paper copy, or even as both if that’s how you roll.  I’ve taken to calling these “pre-books”, which I hope isn’t too confusing or inaccurate.

There are a lot of advantages to this, which I wrote about in some detail for the TOC post.  Boiled down, they are: accuracy, agility, and à la carte.  If you have the e-book version, then updates can be downloaded for free as errata are corrected or rewrites are triggered by changes to CSS itself.  And, of course, you can only buy the pre-books that interest you, if you don’t feel like you need the whole thing.

I should clarify that not every pre-book is a single chapter; occasionally, more than one chapter of the final product will be bundled together into a single pre-book.  For example, Selectors, Specificity, and the Cascade is actually chapters 2 and 3 of the final book combined.  It just made no sense to sell them separately, so we didn’t.  “Values, Units, and Colors”. on the other hand, is Chapter 4 all by itself.  (So if anyone was wondering about the pricing differences between those two pre-books, there’s your explanation.)

If you want to see what the e-book versions are like, CSS and Documents (otherwise known as Chapter 1) has been given the low, low price of $0.00.  Give it a whirl, see if you like the way the pre-books work as bits.

My current plan is to work through the chapters sequentially, but I’m always willing to depart from that plan if it seems like a good idea.  What amuses me about all this is the way the writing of CSS: The Definitive Guide has come to mirror CSS itself—split up into modules that can be tackled independently of the others, and eventually collected into a snapshot tome that reflects a point in time instead of an overarching version number.

Every pre-book is a significantly updated version of their third-edition counterparts, though of course a great deal of material has stayed the same.  In some cases I rewrote or rearranged existing sections for greater clarity, and in all but “CSS and Documents” I’ve added a fair amount of new material.  I think they’re just as useful today as the older editions were in their day, and I hope you’ll agree.

Just to reiterate, these are the three pre-books currently available:

• CSS and Documents (free) — the basics of CSS and how it’s associated with HTML, covering things like link and style as well as obscure topics like HTTP header linking
• Selectors, Specificity, and the Cascade — including all of the level 3 selectors, examples of use, and how conflicts are resolved
• Values, Units, and Colors — fairly up to date, including HSL/HSLa/RGBa and the full run of X11-based keywords, and also the newest units except for the very, very latest—and as they firm up and gain support, we’ll add them into an update!

As future pre-books come out, I’ll definitely announce them here and in the usual social spaces.  I really think this is a good move for the book and the topic, and I’m very excited to explore this method of publishing with O’Reilly!