Why? Because we opened the An Event Apart 2010 schedule for sales back in, um, flippin’ November, and I never mentioned it here. Cripes, I never even posted when we announced the lineup of cities. I could go through the great big long sob-story list of reasons why 2009 was really tough and blah blah blah, but when you get right down to it, I fell down on my job.

Okay. So. Time to correct that.

(deep breath)

Hey everyone, check it out: the complete tour schedule for An Event Apart 2010! Woohoooo!

1. Seattle: April 5-7, 2010 (yes, three days; more on that anon)
2. Boston: May 24-25, 2010
3. Minneapolis: July 26-27, 2010
4. Washington, DC: September 16-17, 2010
5. San Diego: November 1-2, 2010

We’ve got a pretty killer lineup, if I do say so myself. You can get the mostly-complete list from our opening-of-sales announcement last November. It lists the people we had confirmed at the time; there have been a few additions since then. Check out your city of choice to see who’s going to be there! (But always remember that speaker lineups are subject to change: speakers are people too, and life has a way of interfering with schedules. I myself had to withdraw from An Event Apart Boston last year due to a family emergency.)

The price to register for these two-day, one-track Events is the same as it was in 2009, and there are educational and group discounts available for those who are interested.

But wait, I just said “two-day” when the first show of the year is clearly three days. What gives?

Seattle is the site of our first-ever A Day Apart, a full-day workshop that can be attended on its own or as part of a full three days of Event Apart ecstasy. And the inaugural Day Apart will be nothing less than a detailed plunge into HTML 5 and CSS3 with Jeremy Keith and Dan Cederholm. Jeremy handles the markup; Dan gets stylish. It’s going to be fantastic. I’m going to be in the back of the room for the whole day, soaking up as much as I can.

If you want to attend just the workshop, it’s $399 for the whole day if you buy an early bird ticket (available through March 5th). The price goes up $50 when early bird ends, and another $100 if you show up at the door. But I wouldn’t recommend that last, because I don’t think there will be any tickets available at the door. Again: if you show up unannounced on the day of the workshop and ask to buy a ticket, we will most likely have to turn you away, because I expect that there won’t be any seats available.

On the other hand, maybe you’d like to experience more than just one day of AEA goodness. Maybe you’d like to go whole hog and attend both the two-day Event Apart and the subsequent Day Apart, soaking up all the knowledge and enthusiasm and camaraderie that typifies An Event Apart. And who could blame you? If you do that, then the total early bird price for all three days is $1,190, whereas buying the event and workshop passes separately would total $1,294. That’s right: you actually get slightly more than $100 off the cost of the workshop if you attend all three days, over and above the early bird discount. (Or you can think of it as getting $100+ off the cost of the conference. We’re not fussy.)

As it happens, these three-day passes have proved quite popular. So if you want to get your hands on one of those—or on any Seattle tickets, whether one, two, or three days—I wouldn’t wait too long. Our internal analyses suggest that there will come a time, some time before the doors open on April 5th, that the ability to buy a ticket will cease to be. It may even pine for a fjord or two.

As for the four shows that come after Seattle, well, they’re looking pretty popular too.

I know I say this every year, but I’m really excited about what we’ve got planned for the year. Jeffrey and I constantly and (we hope) consistently strive to create an event that we ourselves want to attend, and that’s absolutely true of the shows and workshop we have planned in 2010. I can’t wait to hear what the speakers and attendees have to share. Hope to see you there!

Why did I agree to participate? As much as I’d like to say “fat sacks of cash“, that wasn’t it at all. (Mostly due to the distinct lack of cash, sacked or otherwise. Sad face.) The contest’s entry requirements actually say it for me. In excerpted form:

• The entry MUST use one or more of the following technologies: Silverlight, Gestalt or HTML5…
• The entry MUST function in 3 or more of the following browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, or Chrome…
• The entry MAY use any of the following additional technology components…
  • CSS
  • JavaScript
  • XAML/XML
  • Ruby
  • Python
  • Text, Zip and Image files (e.g. png, jpg or gif)

Dig that: not only is the contest open to HTML 5 submissions, but it has to be cross-browser compatible. Okay, technically it only has to be three-out-of-five compatible, but still, that’s a great contest requirement. Also note that while IE is one of the five, it is not a required one of the five.

I imagine there will be a fair number of Silverlight and Gestalt entries, and I might look at them, but I’m really there—was really asked—because of the HTML 5 entries. By which I mean the open web entries, since any HTML 5 entry is also going to use CSS, JavaScript, and so on.

The downside here is that the contest ends in just one week, at 3pm U.S. Pacific time on 29 January. I know that time is tight, but if you’ve got a cool HTML 5-based application running around in your head, this just might be the time to let it out.

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.

And I’m pretty sure this isn’t just a case of the correct characters lurking in the DB and being downsampled on their way to me, as I have WordPress configured to use UTF-8, the site’s head contains a meta that declares UTF-8, and a peek at the HTTP response headers shows that I’m serving UTF-8. Of course, I’m not really expert at this, so it’s possible that I’ve misunderstood or misinterpreted, well, just about anything. To be honest, I find it deeply objectionable that this kind of stuff is still a problem here on the eve of 2010, and in general, enduring the effluvia of erroneous encoding makes my temples throb in a distinctly unhealthy fashion.

Anyway. Moving on.

I found a search-and-replace plugin—ironically enough, one written by a person whose name contains a character that would currently be corrupted in my database—that lets me fix the errors I know about, one at a time. But it’s a sure bet there are going to be tons of these things littered all over the place and I’m not likely to find them all, let alone be able to fix them all by hand, one find-and-replace at a time.

What I need is a WordPress plugin or something that will find the erroneous character strings in various fields and turn them back into good old UTF-8. Failing that, I need a good table that shows the ISO-8859-1 equivalents of as many UTF-8 characters as possible, or else a way to generate that table for myself. With that table in hand, I at least have a chance of writing a plugin to go through and undo the mess. I might even have it monitor the DB to see if it happens again, and give me a big “Clean up!” button if it does.

So: anyone got some pointers they could share, information that might help, even code that might make the whole thing go away?

I crossed the last street before the hotel, keeping an eye on both the short-cycle light and the short-tempered traffic. Not that there was any particular reason for them to be short-tempered—it was a Sunday afternoon and there were hardly any cars on the bridges and roads that grid the downtown area—but I knew from experience that pedestrian intimidation was something of a sport for the locals, and I really didn’t feel like tempting fate, or at least somebody’s ideas about what constituted a bit of fun.

Having threaded through the small bunch of oncoming pedestrians and reached the relative safety of the sidewalk, I came upon a large man with two children in tow, all bundled against the cold in parkas and scarves and hats. He asked if I had a minute, and I immediately knew what was coming. Sure enough, it came out: the request for a dollar, some change, anything I could spare. I glanced at him, at the children, back at him. Something for bus fare, he said. They’d missed dinner at the Mission the night before, he said. Just a little help, anything I could do, he said.

How many times had I heard this before? I gave the usual excuses about not having any cash, I only travel with credit cards, so sorry, had to go.

And went, the wind biting into my cheeks as I strode to the hotel’s front door, the overhead heater blowing a curtain of warmth across the entryway. Into the lobby. Into the elevator. Thirty floors into the air. And in my sight, still, the children looking at me. The boy of maybe eight, looking up at me curiously. The girl of six, peeping at me warily from behind the man’s bulk. Props? Accomplices?

Did it matter?

I stood at the counter of the lobby gift shop, stacks of nutrition bars in my hands. A bottle of water in the side pocket of the jacket I had yet to shed. An apple in the other. My credit card between two fingers, ready for the attendant to take.

Through the doors, into the cold wind under the canopy, the plastic shopping bag weighing down my hand. I reached the sidewalk and there they were on the same corner, looking like they were getting ready to cross the street. I caught the man’s eye, signaled him to wait. As I approached his face shifted, softened, something like relief warring with shame melding into a curiously childlike expression.

“God bless you,” he said to me, and I chose to believe that he meant it. The little boy smiled up at me, a tiny edge embedded in the corners of his mouth. The girl still peeped warily, maybe even more so now. The man and I were shaking hands, looking squarely at each other for a moment. I told him to make sure to get the kids to that Mission dinner. I could think of nothing else to say, because it was the only thing I was thinking. Get the kids fed, keep them as healthy as possible, no matter what else.

As I turned into the recessed, canopied area that sheltered the hotel’s front door, I glanced back at the street corner. The three of them were waiting to cross toward the small park to the north, the gift shop’s white bag ludicrously small in the big man’s hands, and then they were occluded by the building’s corner. I walked back through the wall of warm air, into the dim lobby and out of the bright outdoors, thinking that there was every chance I’d been suckered, and knowing that it didn’t matter.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

p::after {content: " -\2761-"; font-size: smaller;}

Drop that style into any document that has paragraphs. Load it up in your favorite development browser. Now inspect a paragraph. You will not see the generated content in the DOM view, and you won’t see the pseudo-element rule in the Styles tab (except in IE, where you get the latter, though not the former).

The problem isn’t that I used an escaped Unicode reference; take that out and you’ll still see the same results, as on the test page I threw together. It isn’t the double-colon syntax, either, which all modern browsers handle just fine; and anyway, I can take it back to a single colon and still see the same results. ::first-letter, ::first-line, ::before, and ::after are all basically invisible in most inspectors.

This can be a problem when developing, especially in cases such as having a forgotten, runaway generated-content clearfix making hash of the layout. No matter how many times you inspect the elements that are behaving strangely, you aren’t going to see anything in the inspector that tells you why the weirdness is happening.

The same is largely true for dynamic pseudo-classes. If you style all five link states, only two will show up in most inspectors—either :link or :visited, depending on whether you’ve visited the link’s target; and :focus. (You can sometimes also get :hover in Dragonfly, though I’ve not been able to do so reliably. IE8’s Developer Tool always shows a:link even when the link is visited, and doesn’t appear to show any other link states. …yes, this is getting complicated.)

The more static pseudo-classes, like :first-child, do show up pretty well across the board (except in IE, which doesn’t support all the advanced static pseudo-classes; e.g., :last-child).

I can appreciate that inspectors face an interesting challenge here. Pseudo-elements are just that, and aren’t part of the actual structure. And yet Internet Explorer’s Developer Tool manages to find those rules and display them without any fuss, even if it doesn’t show generated content in its DOM view. Some inspectors do better than others with dynamic pseudo-classes, but the fact remains that you basically can’t see some of them even though they will potentially apply to the inspected link at some point.

I’d be very interested to know what inspector teams encountered in trying to solve this problem, or if they’ve never tried. I’d be especially interested to know why IE shows pseudo-elements when the others don’t—is it made simple by their rendering engine’s internals, or did someone on the Developer Tool team go to the extra effort of special-casing those rules?

For me, however, the overriding question is this: what will it take for the various inspectors to behave more like IE’s does, and show pseudo-element and pseudo-class rules that are associated with the element currently being inspected? And as a bonus, to get them to show in the DOM view where the pseudo-elements actually live, so to speak?

(Addendum: when I talk about IE and the Developer Tool in this post, I mean the tool built into IE8. I did not test the Developer Toolbar that was available for IE6 and IE7. Thanks to Jeff L for pointing out the need to be clear about that.)

“This is a clear violation of constitutional rights and federal and state law. Mr. Bardwell’s actions should be fully reviewed by the Judiciary Commission and disciplinary action should be taken immediately – including the revoking of his license.”

As for Mr. Bardwell himself, he has claimed not to be racist, but instead concerned for the biracial children that result from mixed-race marriage. Of all that he’s said, though, I was particularly interested by the following:

“I didn’t tell this couple they couldn’t get married. I just told them I wouldn’t do it.”

It interested me because it’s exactly the kind of reasoning that underlies “conscience protection” laws that exempt medical professionals who wish to refuse participation in abortion, or dispensation of contraception.

So now I’m very curious to know whether what pro-life groups have to say about what this man has done and how he’s done it. Or, for that matter, what Governor Jindal himself now thinks of the bill he recently signed into law.

Example: “Wait, you wanted me to buy cheerleader pom poms? Oh. I totally cornpensated that one. …Awkward.”

You might well say to yourself: “Self, is it just me, or are the people doing this completely off their everlovin’ rockers? Because the specification for something as fundamentally simple as HTML should reach maybe 200 pages, max.” You might even despair that the entire enterprise is doomed to failure precisely because nobody sane will ever sit down to read that entire doorstop.

But there’s no real reason to panic, because here’s the thing about the HTML5 specification that might not be obvious right away: it’s not for you. It’s for implementors. And that’s a good thing.

If you do start reading the HTML5 draft, you’ll start running into really lengthy, excruciatingly detailed algorithms for, say, parsing a time component. Or moving through the browser’s history. Or submitting a form. There’s an entire (long) chapter on how to process the HTML syntax.

Those are all good things, actually. They greatly increase the chances of interoperability actually happening within our lifetimes. There’s no guessing about, well, much of anything. It’s all been exactingly defined, to the extent that one can exactingly define anything using a human language. A browser team doesn’t have to wonder, or even guess, what to do when the document has been completely parsed. It’s all spelled out. And the people on those browser teams will, in the end, be the people who read that entire doorstop. (Their sanity is another matter, and not discussed here.)

How is all that stuff relevant to you, the author? In the sense that when browser teams follow the spec, their products will be interoperable, which is to say consistent. (Just imagine that for a moment.)

Beyond that, though, the detailed implementation stuff isn’t relevant to you. You are not expected to know all those algorithms in order to write HTML documents. Pretty much all you need to know is the markup. That’s the part that should be no more than 200 pages, yeah?

Turns out it is, and by a comfortable margin. Michael(tm) Smith’s HTML5: The Markup Language is a version of the HTML5 draft with all of those eye-wateringly pedantic implementor sections stripped out, and when I generated a PDF it came in at 147 pages. That’s what you really need in order to get up to speed on what’s in HTML5. It’s for you.

Then I received an invitation to join a small, in-person gathering of like-minded people, many of them just as confused and dispirited as I, to turn our collective focus to the situation and see what we found. I already had plans for the meeting’s scheduled dates. I altered the plans.

Over two long days, we poked and prodded and pounded on the HTML5 specification—doing our best to figure out what was meant by, and what would result from, this phrase or that example; trying to reconcile seemingly arbitrary design choices with what we knew of the web and its history and the stated goals of the HTML5 specification; puzzling over the implications of example code and detailed algorithms and non-normative notes.

In the end, we came away with a better understanding of what’s going on, and out of that arose some concerns and suggestions. But in the main, we felt much better about what’s going on in HTML5, and have now said so publicly.

Personally, there are two markup changes I’d like most to see:

1. The content model of footer should match that of header. As others have said, the English-language name of the footer element creates expectations about what it is and how it should work. As the spec now stands, most of those expectations will be wrong. To wit: if your page’s footer includes navigation links, and especially if you have an HTML5-structured “fat footer“, you can’t use footer to contain it.

   If this feels a little familiar, it should: the same problem happened with address, which was specified to mean only the contact information for the author of a page. It was quite explicitly specified to not accept mailing addresses. Of course, tons of people did just that, because they had an address and there was an address element, so of course they went together!

   A lot of us cringed every time this came up in the last ten years of conducting training, because it meant we’d have to spend a few minutes explaining that the meaning of the element’s name clashed with its technical design. We saw a lot of furrowed brows, rolled eyes, and derisively shaken heads. That will be magnified a millionfold with footer if things are allowed to stand as they are.

   As I said, the fix is simple: just change the content model of footer to state:

   Flow content, but with no header or footer element descendants.

   That’s exactly the same content model as header, and for the same reasons.

2. time needs to be less restrictive. That’s not very precise, I know. But as things stand now, you can only apply time to Gregorian datetimes, and you’re not supposed to use it for anything that couldn’t be easily represented in a calendaring program. The HTML5 specification says:

   The time element is not intended for encoding times for which a precise date or time cannot be established.

   That makes me wonder, in a manner not at all like Robert Plant, how precise do we have to be? The answer, I’m sorry to say, is too much.

   To pick an example: I have what I think of as a great use case for the time element, and while it uses the Gregorian calendar, it’s only accurate to whole months (as is Wikipedia’s version). In some cases I could get the values down to specific days; but in others, maybe not. So I can’t use the datetime attribute, which requires at least year-month-day, if not actual hours and minutes. I could omit the attribute, and just have this:

   <time>October 2007</time>
   

   In that case, the content has to be a valid date string in content—which is to say, a valid date string with optional whitespace. So that won’t work.

   I’ve pondered how best to tackle this, as did the Super Friends. Our suggestion is to allow bare year and month-day values as permitted in ISO8601. In addition, I think we should allow a valid date string to only require a year, with month, day, and time optional. That seems good enough as long as we’re going to go with the idea that the Gregorian calendar contains all the time we ever want to structure.

   But what about other, older dates, some of which are fairly precisely known within their own calendars? On that point, though the historian in me clamors for a fix, I’m uncertain as to what. PPK, on the other hand, has put alot of thought into this and written a piece that I have skimmed but never, perhaps ironically, found the time to read in its entirety.

These are not my only concerns, but they’re the big ones. For the rest, I concur with the hiccups guide, though of course to varying degrees. I’m still trying to decide how much I care (or don’t) about the subtle differences between article and section, for example, or the way aside fits (or doesn’t) with its cousin elements. And dialog just bugs me, but I’m not sure I have a better proposal, so I’ll leave it be for the time being.

At the other end of the two days, I felt a good deal more calm and hopeful than I did going in. As Jeffrey said, “the more I study the direction HTML5 is taking, the better I like it”. While there are still rough edges to be smoothed, there is time to smooth them. We’ve already seen responsiveness on some of the points we addressed in the hiccups guide, and discussions around others. The specification itself is daunting, especially to those who might remember the compact simplicity of the HTML2 spec. Fortunately, it has good internal cross-linking so that you can, with effort, track down exactly what’s meant by “valid date string with optional time” or “sectioning content” or “formatBlock candidate“.

With HTML5, the web is not ending, nor is it starting over. It’s evolving, slowly and in full view of the public, with an opportunity for anyone to have their say (which is not, of course, the same as having one’s proposals accepted). It’s the next step, and I feel quite a bit more confident that it’s a step onto solid ground.

@meyerweb *wondering just how many of your followers follow @zeldman and vice-versa*

I had no idea. Furthermore, I didn’t know of a tool that could tell me. So I built one: Followerlap.

As it turned out, the Twitter API made answering the specific question pretty ridiculously easy, thanks to followers/ids. All it takes is two API requests, one for each username. The same would be true of friends/ids, on top of which I suspect I’ll fairly shortly build a tool quite similar to Followerlap.

Since I announced Followerlap’s existence on (where else?) Twitter, I’ve had a few repeated (and not unexpected) bits of feedback.

• Why not list the common followers? Because followers/ids returns a list of numeric IDs. Resolving those IDs as usernames would require one API hit per ID. If there are 15 followers in common, that’s not such a big deal, but if there are 1,500, well, I’ll run out of my hourly allotment of API requests very quickly. Maybe there’s a better way; if so, I’d love to hear about it, because that would be a great addition.

• Why can’t I find out how many people follow both Stephen Fry and Shaquille O’Neal? Past a certain number of followers, somewhere in the 200,000–250,000 range, the API just dies. You can’t even count on getting a consistent error message back. There are ways around this, but I didn’t want to stress the API that way, so it just fails. Sorry.

• How can I link to a specific comparison? At the moment, you can’t. I hope to make that happen soon, but I decided that a tool this simple should have a similarly simple launch. Ship early, ship often, right? Anyway, it’s on the list of things to add soon. Use the new “Livelink to this result” link underneath a result. (See update below for more.)

So that’s Followerlap. Any other questions? I’ll do my best to answer them in the comments, though for a number of reasons I may be slow to respond.

Update 6 Jul 09: as noted in the edited point above, livelinking of comparison results is now, um, live. So now you can pass around results like the number of people who follow both God and the Devil (thanks to Paul M. Watson for coming up with that one!). I call this “livelinking” because hitting a result URL will get you the very latest results for that particular comparison. “Permalinking” to me implied that it would link to a specific result at a specific time, which the tool doesn’t do and very likely never, ever will.

Last month, just after speaking at a conference in Amsterdam, my laptop was stolen.

Actually, to be more painfully accurate, my laptop case was stolen—and inside it at the time was the laptop, my mobile phone, and my wallet. Plus the usual assortment of stuff that goes into a laptop case.

Because I still remember to this day advice Tantek gave me just before we boarded a bus to Narita airport, I had my passport on me. I happened to have picked up my camera to take some pictures of the conference hall. My clothes were still in my hotel room. Everything else was gone.

I can’t really describe the feeling. Maybe you’ve felt it. Shaking and stunned and self-blaming and nakedly vulnerable. All that magnified by the complete loss of funds and communication with my family.

And the data. The lost data. I have backups, but they’re never as current as one would want. (Which reminds me: if you aren’t backing up, and you aren’t doing so regularly, learn from my loss and start.) Besides, at that moment, as the full realization of what had happened slid coldly into my gut and started its slow, merciless expansion throughout my entire body, I didn’t think “Oh, I have backups until that date, and all my work mail is on the mail server, and I’ve been uploading the best pictures to online services.” Those things didn’t occur to me. They were completely blocked by the continual, sickening, endlessly looping thought: IT’S ALL GONE.

And that’s when people started pitching in to help me out.

In addition to helping me look for the case in hopes that it had just been moved somewhere non-obvious, Khris Loux of JS-Kit let me call home from his iPhone without a second thought, so I could tell Kat what had happened and get her immediately started on contacting banks and credit card companies. And the honest concern in his eyes helped snap me back from near-paralysis, touched by the regard coming from someone I’d only met an hour before.

Then Gabe Mac, having heard what was going on, came up to me with a fully charged mobile phone I could borrow so that I could remain in contact with my family until I went home. He didn’t ask me how I would get it back to him, because I don’t think it had occurred to him. He just said, “Eric, I have a spare phone. You need it. Take it.”

So I did. And much, much later that same night, it was nearly a lifeline.

Throughout all this, Boris and Patrick, the conference founders, were working to find out if one of the tech crew had accidentally picked it up, or it had been turned in to venue staff. And when it became inescapably clear that the case was well and truly gone, they sent one of their staff to get a SIMM card for the phone Gabe had loaned me and 200 euros in cash so I could get home. Just did it, because they could see that I would need those things even when I couldn’t. They also arranged a ride for me to get to my evening’s social appointment.

That appointment was with Steven Pemberton and his lovely family, who fed me a great dinner in their fabulous top-floor flat and were more than gracious about my disordered mental state. After dinner, Steven took me to the nearby police station and acted as translator as I filled out a report. And then he loaned me use of his home phone to call a couple of credit card companies that I had to speak with personally in order to make sure my business credit cards were cancelled.

It wasn’t the relaxed evening of dinner and shop talk I’d been hoping to have, but I did several things that needed to be done and Steven made it possible. And we did get in a tiny smidgen of (very interesting) shop talk near the end.

At every step of that evening, someone was there to help push me forward, help me lower the unexpected barriers just a little bit, help ease the situation however they could. So many people coming together to help out someone they’d known for years or never before met. Thanks to them all, I was able to get home without further incident. Thanks to them all, I had a major yang to the theft’s yin, a powerful reminder of just how good people can be.

Thank you, all.

Now, please note that I’m not saying the DiggBar, or any other framing bar, is cool and we should all love it. I’m not. I absolutely, completely, totally get all the reasons why framing bars are bad for breaking bookmarking and navigating and search engines and copyright and hijacking content and so on. But that’s precisely why I’m so confused, because we’ve known for years now that framing bars are bad mojo—and yet StumbleUpon, for example, is based on bars. There is a browser extension/plugin StumbleUpon thingy you can install, but there’s also a web-based framing bar thing (see this link, for example) that they offer, and I bet people use. You don’t have to be a member to use it: I hit that link in a browser that allows cross-site frame loading and I get the bar and the page it’s framing, and I’ve never been a StumbleUpon member. The source shows it’s using iframes to make it happen. So far as I can tell, it’s not really different from the DiggBar.

So why do we have people writing JavaScript and PHP and Ged-knows-what-else that specifically busts out of the DiggBar framing, instead of busting out of all framing? After all, site framing is universally agreed to be objectionable; even yet-to-be-discovered life forms orbiting distant stars think it’s a bad idea. So why is one instance of it being targeted while the rest are tolerated? Why are we all not just using if (top != self) {top.location.replace(self.location.href);} and other-language equivalents? Yes, I know, some of you do just that, but why isn’t everyone?

Perhaps because I have yet to eradicate a stubborn streak of faith in the rationality of my peers, I assume that there’s some technical difference here that I’m missing and that, once understood, would let me understand the source of the outcry. So can someone please explain to me, or point at an explanation that states, the technical ways in which the DiggBar is worse enough than already-extant framing bars that it’s triggered this outrage? Again, nobody has to enumerate the complete list of the DiggBar’s sins; I understand. A list of any different and more egregious sins would be just fine, though.

Also, if anyone comes up with a way to bust out of the frames while still preserving the bar—that is, correcting the problems framing bars cause while preserving their functionality for the people who want to use them—that would be extra-cool. After all, people who use those services like the bars. If we could let them browse the web the way they prefer while fixing bookmark/SEO/etc. problems framing bars can cause, that would be a win all the way around.

Update 14 Apr 09: looks like Porter’s trying to keep the bar without the framing.

Update 16 Apr 09: in his post about Digg changing the way the DiggBar will work, John Gruber lists (by way of quoting Digg VP John Quinn’s post about it) the two things that made the DiggBar extra-objectionable (at least in his eyes). Thanks, John!

You can see both the problem and two workarounds if you visit this test page using IE6 or IE7. In brief, the problem occurred when I had a table cell containing a paragraph with an explicit width set. I did this through the style attribute, though tests show that for this bug, it doesn’t matter whether you use the attribute or assign it via a style sheet. Around these explicit-width paragraphs were div elements with width: 200%;, for bar-drawing purposes (it’s a little complicated). Everything was fine in 99% of cases. But as soon as the header text at the beginning of the row went to two lines of text, the explicit-width paragraphs doubled in width. What was 80.1% wide would be drawn as though it were 160.2% wide.

My hopefully understandable reaction was to say, “Whuh?”. I threw a few hasLayout triggers at the offending paragraph (relative position, zoom, etc.) and got nowhere. In the end I worked around the problem by telling IE6 and IE7 to not wrap text in the row headers of combo charts. (The bug is not present in IE8.)

I mentioned all this in my announcement post, and the ever-awesome Dan Wilkinson discovered that the problem could be fixed by setting all of the table rows to, say, height: 3em. Armed with that breakthrough, I experimented a little more and found that I could actually set the offending table row’s height to 2.75em and still have things work as intended. Below that and the paragraph widths doubled.

Then I lowered the line-height of the headers to 1 and found that I could take the overall row’s height as low as 2.33em before triggering the bug. And that’s when it dawned: the bug was triggered by the layout height of the header cell’s content being taller than the content of the cell containing the paragraph, and not explicitly declaring styles that would make the data cell as tall as or taller than the height needed to have the header cell contain its content.

Okay, that’s a little dense. Let me step through the symptoms and two found workarounds to see if that clears it up:

1. The data cell always has a single line of text. The bug is triggered by having the header cell go to two lines of text, whereas it is not if the header cell has a single line of text.
2. If the row’s height is explicitly set to a value equal to or greater than the header cell’s content, the bug is not triggered.
3. Alternatively, if the height of the data cell is set or forced to be equal to or greater than the height of the header cell, the bug is not triggered. This can be done with an explicit height or with added top and bottom padding or by adding top and bottom margins to the paragraphs in the cell.

Some side tests I did indicate that the header cell is not needed to trigger the bug. In other words, the problem could happen even if there are only data cells in the row. Furthermore, I found that the width-scaling was directly affected by the width of the wrapping div, and thus the widths were doubling only because I had the div’s width set to 200%. If I set it to 150% instead of 200%, then the paragraphs only got half again as wide instead of doubling. That seems to make sense until you see it in action. When I say the paragraphs got half again as wide, I mean that instead of being 75% as wide as the div, they were 112.5% as wide as the div. If I set the div’s width to 200%, then they were 150% the width of the div.

So. As I say, this bug does not affect IE8, so that’s good, and it can be worked around in IE6 and IE7, which is even better. The problem would be if you didn’t know how tall your cells might get—in my case, I can be (reasonably) sure that the tallest a cell’s content will ever get is two lines of text, and by setting an explicit line-height on the headers I can know how tall I have to make the rows in order to avoid the bug.

Another day, another workaround!

There are a great many reasons why it took so long to get this out the door. A big part is that it’s almost entirely a volunteer effort, which means it happens in our “free time” (and there the word “free” has a couple of meanings). I say it’s almost entirely a volunteer effort because the detailed analysis is actually done by a pair of professional statisticians, who are paid for their time and expertise. They did a great job once more, and did it in a reasonable time frame. It just took us a while to get them the data to analyze, and then a while longer to take their report and findings and process them into report form.

The biggest change this year is that we’re publishing the results as HTML+CSS instead of a PDF. This greatly increased the challenge, because it was important to me that the data be presented using styled tables, not images. That’s easy like cake if all you’re doing is putting them up as visual tables, and we certainly do that for some of the figures. In the other cases, where we have bar charts of varying kinds, things got difficult. I managed to devise solutions that are 99.9% effective, and I’m both proud of and frustrated by those solutions. Proud, of course, because I managed to wring three-stack bars out of table markup; frustrated because of the markup I had to construct to make them possible. I think this report represents more than half my lifetime usage of the style attribute, but unfortunately there’s no way (using just CSS) to say {width: content;}.

So why not use JavaScript to do that, or to just replace the tables with canvas-drawn charts? I did consider both, but decided that I would push as far as I could with plain HTML+CSS.

A few implementation notes:

• I used HTML 5 in order to step around some previously unrealized limitations of HTML 4—did you know tfoot has to come before tbody in HTML 4? I didn’t. I did not use elements like header and footer due to known problems in Firefox 2 and related browsers, which mangle pages containing those elements. Instead, I took the same path Jon Tan recommends, and classed divs using those names for later, easier conversion.

• The tables which underlie the charts do not have summary attributes. If a group of civic-minded individuals would like to write useful summaries, please let me know in the comments and I’ll let you know how best to submit them. Similarly, I did my very best to make sure all the table headers had accurate scope values, but if I botched any, let me know.

• I’m aware that Opera shows horizontal scrollbars on most chapters of the report. This is due to its refusal to apply overflow to table boxes, which according to my recent reading of the CSS 2.1 specification is the correct thing to (not) do. Every other browser I tested does apply overflow to table boxes, though, which I found most useful. I tried applying overflow: hidden to a few other boxes, and that got rid of Opera’s horizontal scrollbars, but it also cut off actual content in some other browsers. I chose a cosmetic problem in one browser over loss of content in others. The best fix I’ve devised is to wrap the tables in divs and apply overflow: hidden to those divs, but I didn’t want to rush the fix and botch it, so it didn’t make it in time for first publication. I expect to get it in shortly after publication.

• In a like vein, there are a few combo charts where a bar goes shooting off the right side of the chart in IE7. This appears to be due to some kind of width-doubling problem that’s only invoked on elements with a style attribute when the row header goes to two lines instead of being just one. Googling for an explanation yielded no joy, and a lengthy series of attempts to hack around the problem came to nothing. If anyone knows how to counteract that problem other than preventing the header text from going past a single line, I’d love to hear it. (Update: I’ve implemented the “fix” of preventing line-wrapping in the report, so there aren’t any off-the-page bars right now, but you can see an example of the problem on this test page.)

• Surprisingly, the charts mostly work in IE6. The exception is some of the triple-stack charts, where data points overlap when the rightmost sub-bars get too small, and also the double-width bars mentioned in the previous point. I don’t really have a fix for this short of upgrading the browser, but if somebody finds one, I’d be happy to test it out.

On that last point, if there are questions or suggestions surrounding the implementation of the report, we can certainly discuss them here. With regard to the survey and report itself, though—that is, the questions asked and the results we’re publishing—please direct those thoughts to the comments section of the ALA article announcing the report. I’m hoping that we’ll have the 2009 survey up within a few months, so comments on what we asked and how we asked it, what we didn’t ask but should have, and that sort of thing could well have a direct impact on the next survey. But please put those on the ALA site, where more people are likely to see them.

It’s done, it’s out, it’s yours—both the report and the data, about which I’ll soon write a little bit more. Read the report, or produce your own report using the data. Just always know that when we publish these reports, we do not mean for them to be the final word. No, what we always mean is for them to be the first words, a starting point, a place from which to grow. What comes next is as much up to you as anyone else, and I can’t wait to see what you do.