Thoughts From Eric Archive

I ended my observance of CSS Naked Day 2020 by launching an entirely new design for meyerweb.  I’m calling it Hamonshū after the source from which I adapted most of the graphic elements.  I’ve been working on it sporadically in my free time since mid-January, finally coming to a place I thought was ready to launch in late March.

Naked Day was a convenient way to change over the structure of pages while there was no design, which probably makes it sound like that’s the only reason I even observed it.  To the contrary, I hadn’t planned to launch the new design until June 8th of this year — but once I decided on going style-naked, I realized it was the perfect opportunity to make the switch.

I might still have delayed, if not for everything happening in the world right now.  But Cameron Moll said it best as he recently launched a new design: “Deploying in the middle of a pandemic seems so unimportant at the moment. Or maybe there’s no better time for it.”  That last sentence resonated with me unexpectedly deeply, and came to mind again as I took the CSS away for Naked Day.

I’ll have quite a few things to say about the design in the future: things I learned, techniques I used, bits I really like, that sort of thing.  In this post, I want to say a bit about its genesis.

It all started when someone — I’ve since lost track of who, or even where it happened — brought my attention to Hamonshū, Vols. 1-3, available on the Internet Archive thanks to the Smithsonian Institution.  Hamonshū, a word which I understand roughly translates into English as “wave forms” or “wave design”, is a three-volume set of art studies of water.  Created by Yūzan Mori and published in 1903, I had never heard of it before, but the sketches immediately appealed to me.  You can get an preview of some of Yūzan’s art in this article from Public Domain Review, or just go to the source (linked previously, as well as in the footer of the site) and immerse yourself in it.

As I absorbed Yūzan’s ink studies of ocean waves, rivers, fountains, and more, the elements of a design began to form in my head.  I won’t say I saw it — being aphantasic, I couldn’t — but certain sketches suggested themselves as components of a layout, and stuck with me.

Early on, I had thought to combine elements from Hamonshū with other artwork, primarily ink landscape paintings from the Qing Dynasty and Edo periods: two such examples being Tall Bamboo and Distant Mountains, after Wang Meng (Wang Hui 王翬, 1694) and View of West Lake (Ike Taiga, 1700s).  I made attempts, but the elements never really combined properly.  I eventually realized I was trying to combine close-up studies of water with adaptations of much larger works, and the scale of the brush strokes was clashing.  At that point, I abandoned the paintings and concentrated exclusively on Hamonshū.

As the various design elements came together, I went looking for fonts to use.  I originally thought to use variable fonts, but I kept coming back to IM Fell, a typeface I’d seen Simon St. Laurent use and had put to my own purposes in an experimental typeset of Neal Stephenson’s Mother Earth Mother Board.  IM Fell has a sort of nautical feel to it, at least to me, which fit nicely with the water elements I was adapting from Hamonshū, so I ended up using it as a “site elements” typeface.  It’s what’s used for the site name in the header, the main navigation links, metadata for posts, sidebar heading text, the h1 on most pages, and so on.

Originally I used IM Fell for the titles of blog posts like this one, but it didn’t feel quite right.  I think it caused the titles to blend into the rest of the design a little too much unless I kept it relatively huge.  I needed something that felt consistent, but distinguished itself at the smaller sizes I needed for post titles.  I went back to Google Fonts and scrolled through the choices until I narrowed down to a few faces, of which Eczar was the eventual winner.  In addition to using Eczar for post titles, I also employ it in the site’s footer, at least wherever IM Fell isn’t used.  The general body copy of the site is Georgia Pro, falling back to Georgia or a generic serif as needed.

One of the limitations I set for myself was to be reasonably lightweight, and that was a major part of the process.  The details merit a post or two of their own, but my overall goal was to get even the post archive pages under a megabyte in total.  I’m pleased to say I was able to get there, for the most part.  As an example, the main post archive page is, as I write this (but before I posted it) 910.98KB, and that includes the various photographs and other images embedded in posts.  The time to DOMContentLoaded over WiFi is consistently below 200ms, 400-500ms on “Regular 3G”, and 500-600ms on “Regular 2G”, all with the local cache disabled, at least when the server is responding well.  I still have work to do in this area, but I was comfortable enough with the current state to launch the design publicly.

Since I was redesigning anyway, I did some sprucing up of various subpages.  Most notable are the Toolbox and Writing pages, which use a number of techniques to improve organization and appearance.  I still think the top part of the Writing page could use some work, but it’s leagues better than it used to be.  The one major page I’d like to further upgrade is CSS Work, but I’m still looking for an approach that is distinct from the other pages, yet thematically consistent.  If I can’t find one, I’ll probably take the same general approach I did for Toolbox.  I also rewrote some of the microcopy, such as the metadata (publication date, categories, etc.) at the bottom of blog posts, to be more evocative of the feel I was going for.

Late in the process, I got a welcome assist from Jesse Gardner, who had seen a preview of article design.  He had the idea to make a traced SVG version of the “Hand Made With Love” necklace charm from the masthead of the previous design, and then he just up and did it and sent me the file.  You’ll find it in the footer of the site.  It isn’t interactive, although it may in the future.  I haven’t decided yet.

I really hope you enjoy the new look.  It’s the first design I’ve done that wasn’t cribbed off someone else’s site in, oh, 15-20 years, give or take, and I’m rather proud of it.  It won’t win any awards, but it makes the statement I want it to make, and visiting my own site gives me a little glow of satisfaction.  I don’t know if I could ask for more than that.

• Hamonshu was published on Monday, April 13th, 2020.
• It was assigned to the Design, Projects, and Redesign categories.
• There have been ten replies.

If you’re here on meyerweb on April 9th, 2020, then you’re seeing the site without the CSS I wrote for its design and layout.  Why?  It’s CSS Naked Day!  To quote that site:

The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of HTML, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good old play on words. It’s time to show off your <body> for what it really is.

So last night, I removed the links to the main stylesheets for the site.  There are, I should note, scattered pages where local CSS is still in play. I could have tracked them all down and removed their CSS as well, and I considered doing so, but in the end I decided against it.

There’s a history to this day.  In the late Aughts, it was an annual thing, not unlike Blue Beanie Day, to draw attention to web standards and reinforce among the community that good, solid, robust development practices are a good thing.  Because after all, if your site isn’t usable without the CSS, then it almost certainly has structure and accessibility problems you probably haven’t been thinking about.

In all honesty, I had forgotten about it until just a couple of days prior, I suddenly thought, “Wait, early April, isn’t that when CSS Naked Day was observed?”  I went looking, and discovered that yes, it was.  I had remembered April 7th, but apparently April 9th was the actual date.  Or became it over time.  Either way, here we are, feeling fancy-free!

What’s been interesting has been what CSS Naked Day has revealed about browsers as well as about our HTML.  To pick one example, suppose you have a very large SVG logo, which you size to where you want it with CSS.  This is ordinarily a best practice: the SVG is the same file size whether it renders huge or tiny, so there’s no downside to having an SVG that renders 1200 x 1000 when you view it directly — thus allowing you to see all the little details — but is sized to 120 x 100 via CSS for layout purposes.

But take away the CSS, and the SVG will become 1200 x 1000 again.  That might tell you to resize it for production, sure, and you probably should.  But it also points out that browsers will not constrain that image, not even to the viewport.  If your window is only 900 pixels wide, the SVG could well spill outside, forcing a horizontal scrollbar.  Is that good?  Maybe!  Maybe not!  We might wish browsers would bake something like img {max-width: 100%; height: auto;} into their user-agent stylesheet(s), but maybe that would have unforeseen downsides.  The point is, this is a thing about browsers that CSS Naked Day reveals, and it’s worth knowing.

Similarly, this reveals that browsers don’t have a way to restrict the width of lines of text.  Thus, if the browser window is wide, the lines get very long — long enough to make reading more difficult.  This isn’t a problem on handheld devices like smartphones, but on desktop (use of which has risen significantly in areas locked down to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2) it can be a problem.  Again, if browsers had something like body {max-width: 70em;} or max-width: 100ch or suchlike, this wouldn’t be a problem.  Should they?  Maybe!  It’s worth thinking about for your own work, if nothing else.

(For much more thinking about these kinds of browser behaviors and how to address them, you should absolutely check out the CSS Remedy project.  “CSS Remedy sets CSS properties or values to what they would be if the CSSWG were creating the CSS today, from scratch, and didn’t have to worry about backwards compatibility.”)

If I’d remembered sooner, I might have contacted the maintainers of the CSS Naked Day site and posted about it ahead of time and thought about stuff like a hashtag to spread the word.  Maybe that will happen next year.  Until then, enjoy all the nudity!

• CSS Naked Day 2020 was published on Thursday, April 9th, 2020.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, CSS, and Standards categories.
• There have been two replies.

If you are in charge of a web site that provides even slightly important information, or important services, it’s time to get static.  I’m thinking here of sites for places like health departments (and pretty much all government services), hospitals and clinics, utility services, food delivery and ordering, and I’m sure there are more that haven’t occurred to me.  As much as you possibly can, get it down to static HTML and CSS and maybe a tiny bit of enhancing JS, and pare away every byte you can.

Because too many sites are already crashing because their CMSes can’t keep up with the traffic surges.  And too many sites are using dynamic frameworks that drain mobile batteries and shut out people with older browsers.  That’s annoying and counter-productive in the best of times, but right now, it’s unacceptable.  This is not the time for “well, this is as performant as our stack gets, so I guess users will have to live with it”.  Performance isn’t just something to aspire to any more.  Right now, in some situations, performance could literally be life-saving to a user, or their family.

We’re in this to serve our users.  The best service you can render at this moment is to make sure they can use your site or service, not get 502/Bad Gateway or a two-minute 20%-battery-drain page render.  Everything should take several back seats to this effort.

I can’t tell you how best to get static — only you can figure that out.  Maybe for you, getting static means using very aggressive server caching and a cache-buster approach to updating info.  Maybe it means using some kind of static-render plugin for your CMS.  Maybe is means accelerating a planned migration to a static-site CMS like Jekyll or Eleventy or Grav.  Maybe it means saving pages as HTML from your browser and hand-assembling a static copy of your site for now.  There are a lot of ways to do this, but whatever way you choose, do it now.

---

Addendum: following are a few resources that can help. Please suggest more in the comments!

• Emergency Site Kit: “This project aims to enable people to quickly publish a simple website that can withstand large amounts of traffic and will work even under extreme conditions. It is built on the rule of least power, using simple technologies for maximum resilience.”
• FastCGI Cache for Nginx.
• Sitesauce is offering free accounts for critical sites impacted by the pandemic.

• Get Static was published on Sunday, March 22nd, 2020.
• It was assigned to the Commentary and Web categories.
• There have been seventeen replies.

I’ve been working from home for (checks watch) almost 19 years now, and I’d love to share some tips with you all on how to make it work for you.

Except I can’t, because this has been incredibly disruptive for me.  See, my home is usually otherwise empty during the day — spouse at work, kids at school — which means I can crank up the beats and swear to my heart’s content at my code typos.  Now, not only do I have to wear headphones and monitor my language when I work, I also am surrounded by office-mates who basically play video games and watch cat videos all day, except for those times when I really get focused on a task, when they magically sense it’s the perfect time to come ask me random questions that could have waited, derailing my focus and putting me back at square one.

Which, to most of you used to working in an office setting, I suppose might seem vaguely familiar.  I’m not used to it at all.

Here’s what I can tell you: if you’re having trouble focusing on work, or anything else, it’s not that you’re terrible at working from home or bad at your job.  It’s that you’re doing this in a set of circumstances completely unprecedented in our lifetimes.  It’s that you’re doing this while worried not only about keeping yourself and your loved ones safe from a global pandemic, but probably also worried about your continued employment — not because you’re doing badly, but because the economy is on the verge of freezing up completely.  No spending means no business income means no salaries means no money to spend.

We can hope for society-level measures to unjam the economic engine, debt leniency or zero-interest loans or Universal Basic Income or what have you, but until those measures exist and begin to work together, we’re all stumbling scared in a pitch-black forest.  Take it from someone who has been engulfed by overwhelming, frightening, pitiless circumstances before: Work can be a respite, but it’s hard to sustain that retreat.  It’s hard to motivate yourself to even think about work, let alone do a good job.

Be forgiving of yourself.  Give yourself time and space to process the fear, to work through it and you.  Find a place for yourself in relation to it, so that you can exist beside it without it always disrupting your thoughts.  That’s the only way I know to free up any mental resources to try to do good work.  It also puts you in a place where you can act with some semblance of reason, instead of purely from fear.

Stay safe, friends.  We have a long, unknown road ahead.  Adjustment will be a long time in coming.  Support each other as much as you can.  Community is, in the end, the most resilient and replenishing force we have.

• Trying to Work From Home was published on Wednesday, March 18th, 2020.
• It was assigned to the Commentary and Work categories.
• There has been one reply.

Six years ago, we participated in our first St. Baldrick’s event.  Carolyn was preparing to shave her head to support Rebecca, who was still very much alive and, we thought, cancer-free.  And Joshua, the little brother at just over three years old, had apparently decided to do the same to his head, although he didn’t tell us until the day of the event.

This year, Joshua will be participating in St. Baldrick’s for the seventh time in a row, shaving his head to raise money for and awareness of the campaign to cure cancers in memory of his sister at the Cleveland Heights event on Sunday, March 15th.  He’s been letting his hair grow all year for maximum payoff: literally, he has not had a single hair cut since last year’s St. Baldrick’s event.  He also recently had Carolyn dye it blue, which means he’s giving off a strong JRPG vibe.  (He rolls his eyes whenever I mention this.)

This being his seventh year, Joshua will officially become a Knight of the Bald Table.  In his honor, I will be his squire for the day — which means I will be shaving my head as well, for the first time.

If you can, please support Joshua’s knighting shave by supporting his fundraising efforts.  He’s set an ambitious goal, but I’m pretty sure that working together, we can well exceed it.  You can do it in honor of him, or in honor of his sister, or both; but please, if you can give him a boost, please do so.  Any amount will help, as will spreading the word on les médias sociaux.  Thank you.

• Sir Joshua Meyer was published on Thursday, March 5th, 2020.
• It was assigned to the Joshua category.
• There have been no replies.

Back in 2011, I decided to make a timeline out of CSS modules’ version histories, where “version history” means “a list of all the various drafts that were published”.  I updated the data every now and again, and then kind of let it go dormant for a few years.

Until this past weekend, when for no clear reason I decided what the hell, it’s time for a refresh.  So I trawled through all the specs’ version histories to get the stuff I didn’t have, and gave the presentation a bit of an upgrade.  The overall look and feel is pretty consistent, except now, thanks to repeating linear gradients, I have vertical stripes to show each year in the now 21-year-long timeline.  I put labels up at the top of the stripes, and figured they should remain visible no matter where you scroll, so I set them to position: sticky.  Then I realized most people would have to scroll horizontally, so I made the specification names sticky as well.

So now, no matter where you scroll on the page, you’ll see the specifications along the left and the years along the top.  The layout isn’t mobile-hostile, exactly, but it isn’t RWD-ized either.  I’m not really sure how I could make this fully responsive, except maybe to just drop the timeline layout altogether and revert to the lists that underlie the layout.

While I was at it, I converted a fair bit of the CSS to use var() and calc() so that I could set a column width in one place, and sprinkled in just a tiny bit more PHP to output offset values in a couple of places.  Nothing major, just quality-of-life upgrades for the maintainer, which is to say, me.

I bring all this up for two reasons.  One, I like the presentation upgrades, and wanted to share.  Two, by sheer coincidence, today the CSS Working Group published first versions of four CSS modules:

• CSS Color Module Level 5
• Media Queries Level 5
• CSS Conditional Rules Module Level 4
• CSS Transforms Module Level 2

So I’ve added them to the timeline, along with CSS Color Module Level 4, which I’d overlooked in my weekend update.  These are the first module versions of 2020, so enjoy!

I do find it a little weird that Color Level 5 is out when Color Level 4 has never left Working Draft status, but maybe Level 4 is about to graduate, and this just happened to come out first.  We’ll see!

• CSS Specification Timelines, Updated and Modernized was published on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2020.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Standards, and W3C categories.
• There has been one reply.

What happened was, I was preparing to roll out new designs for the News section and event pages of An Event Apart, and I had each rollout in its own branch.  Somewhere in the process of bringing both into the master branch, I managed to create a merge conflict that rapidly led to more and more conflicts.  I very nearly had to take off and nuke the entire site from orbit, just to start over.  (A couple of branches, including dev, did have to get erased and re-pulled.)

Part of what made it worse was that at one point, I accidentally committed a quick edit to master, because I’d forgotten to check out the branch I was trying to edit, and my attempts to undo that mistake just compounded whatever other mistakes already existed.  Once all the dust settled and things were back into good shape, I said to myself, “Self, I bet there’s a way to prevent commits to the master branch, because git is second only to emacs in the number of things you can do to/with it.”  So I went looking, and yes, there is a way: add the following to your .git/hooks/pre-commit file.

#!/bin/sh

branch="$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)"

if [ "$branch" = "master" ]; then
  echo "You can't commit directly to master branch"
  exit 1
fi

I got that from this StackOverflow answer, and it was perfect for me, since I use the bash shell.  So I created the pre-commit file, made a trivial README.md edit, and tried to commit to master.  That’s when OS X Mojave’s Terminal spit back:

fatal: cannot exec '.git/hooks/pre-commit': Operation not permitted

Huh.  I mean, it prevented me from committing to master, but not in a useful way.  Once I verified that it happened in all branches, not just master, I knew there was trouble.

I checked permissions and all the rest, but I was still getting the error.  If I went into .git/hooks and ran the script from the command line by ./pre-commit, I got a slightly different error:

-bash: ./pre-commit: /bin/bash: bad interpreter: Operation not permitted

So I submitted my own StackOverflow question, detailing what I’d done and the file and directory permissions and all the rest.  I was stunned to find out the answer was that Mojave itself was blocking things, through its System Integrity Protection feature.  Why did this simple file trigger SIP?  I don’t know.

The fix, shared by both Jeff and Rich, was to go into .git/hooks and then type the following to check for SIP status:

xattr -l pre-commit

It showed a com.apple.quarantine value, so I then typed:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine pre-commit

And that was it!  Now if I try to commit a change to the master branch, the commit is rejected and I get a warning message.  At that point, I can git stash the changes, check out the proper branch (or a new one), and then git stash pop to bring the changes into that branch, where I can commit them and then merge the changes in properly.

I may modify the script to reject commits to the dev branch as well, but I’m holding off on that for now, since the dev branch is often where merge conflicts are worked out before going to master.  Either way, at least I’ll be less likely to accidentally foul up master when I’m hip-deep in other problems.

• Preventing Commits to the master Branch in OS X Mojave was published on Monday, February 10th, 2020.
• It was assigned to the Guide, Mac, and Tools categories.
• There have been no replies.

As I’ve worked on my indoor workspace, I’ve continued to find SVG useful for planning purposes, and putting it to use in my planning has pushed me to learn more about the language.  (That last sentence is actually a play on words, for reasons that I hope will become clear by the end of the post.)

For example, the basement room I’m partially turning into a workspace has a set of exposed framing studs (exposed once I removed a couple of cabinets, anyway) that I wanted to turn into a set of rough shelving, so that I could organize the various bits ‘n’ bobs I accumulate: leftover bolts, extra pullchain, and so on.  These studs are perched on foundation cinderblock, about 48 inches off the floor, and run up to the ceiling from there.

Each stud is 28 inches tall, running from a 2×6 base up to a stacked pair of 2×6 crossbeams.  They also have strips of 2×10 mounted vertically at their bottoms, running between each stud.  (I’m not entirely sure why the 2×10s are there, but I’m not about to start ripping them out now.)

The distances between subsequent studs is also not consistent: they’re mostly close to 16 inches on-center, but not perfectly so, and the last set is only 12 inches apart because the framing ends where a set of stairs begins.  So I created a schematic, including a red box to mark where a 1-gang electrical box. protrudes from the other side of the wall.

The middle stud is taller as a reminder to me that, if not for the crossbeams, it could keep going up past the ceiling joist.  The others are essentially centered on the joists above them (centered within half an inch or so, anyway).

Why does that matter?  Because to make the shelves, I decided to mount 2×6s in front of the framing studs, to allow for shelves 11 inches deep.  So in cases where the studs are centered below ceiling joists, I can run the front-mounted 2×6es up to them.  In that middle case, I’ll actually need a longer 2×6 to run up next to the joist.

This all might sound like a lot of work to deal with odd circumstances, but that was part of the point of this part of the project.  We don’t always get to work in ideal circumstances.  Learning how best to work around the existing limitations is a valuable lesson in itself.

I tried out a lot of different shelf configurations.  At first, I was just using <rect> elements like this.

<rect x="1.5" y="9"    width="14.5" height="0.5" />
<rect x="1.5" y="19.5" width="14.5" height="0.5" />

That’s two shelves, ten inches apart, in the leftmost stud bay.  (The shelves are a half-inch thick.)  That worked okay for a while, but then I decided to show the support rails that would both tie the 2×6s to the studs behind them, and also hold up the shelves.  So that meant more <rect>s, like so.

<rect x="1.5" y="9"    width="14.5" height="0.5" />
<rect x="1.5" y="19.5" width="14.5" height="0.5" />
<rect x="1.5" y="9.5"  width="0.75" height="1.125" />
<rect x="15.25" y="9.5"  width="0.75" height="1.125" />
<rect x="1.5" y="20"  width="0.75" height="1.125" />
<rect x="15.25" y="20"  width="0.75" height="1.125" />

Again, that’s just for the first stud bay: two shelves, and then four supports, two for each shelf.  And I have five bays to do.

Still, it it took deciding to show the storage bins I wanted on the shelves to push to look for a better way.  Basically, what I wanted was a way to define a primitive of a shelf and two support rails, and then just place that.  And then a way to do the same for collections of storage bins, which could be stacked atop each other.

SVG provides for exactly this, through the combination of <defs> and <use>.  I set up a basic shelf set like this:

<defs>
    <g id="shelf">
        <rect x="0" y="0" width="14.5" height="0.5" />
        <rect x="0" y="0.5"  width="0.75" height="1.125" />
        <rect x="13.75" y="0.5"  width="0.75" height="1.125" />
    </g>
</defs>

If you think of that as its own little SVG, it defines a horizontal shelf 14.5 coordinate units wide, and half a unit tall, starting at 0,0.  It then places the two support rails just below, starting half a unit down from the top.

With that in hand, the two shelves I was drawing before collapsed from six lines to two:

<use xlink:href="#shelf" x="1.5" y="9" />
<use xlink:href="#shelf" x="1.5" y="20" />

Suddenly, rather than fiddling with the X,Y coordinates of several pieces just to move a shelf, I could adjust the X,Y of one <use> element.  To say this sped up my workflow would be a monumental understament.  Trying out different shelf spacing and shelf counts went from being a chore to being almost too easy.

This was only magnified when I wrote the definitions for storage-bin primitives.  At first, I drew them the same way I had the shelves, down and right from 0,0, but that was difficult in a number of ways.  Different bin sizes meant I had to do different math to get the bins to sit on the shelves.  And then I remembered that SVG is unbounded on both axes — which meant I could draw the bins up from 0,0, meaning I could give them the same y coordinate as the shelves.

Wait, what?  Let me show you.  Inside <defs>, I wrote:

<g id="bins4">
    <rect x="0" y="-4" width=".15" height="4" />
    <rect x="4" y="-4" width=".15" height="4" />
    <rect x="0" y="-1.5" width="4.15" height="1.5" />
    <rect x="4.2" y="-4" width=".15" height="4" />
    <rect x="8.2" y="-4" width=".15" height="4" />
    <rect x="4.2" y="-1.5" width="4.15" height="1.5" />
    <rect x="8.4"  y="-4" width=".15" height="4" />
    <rect x="12.4" y="-4" width=".15" height="4" />
    <rect x="8.4"  y="-1.5" width="4.15" height="1.5" />
</g>

Everything is drawn starting from above the y=0 line, and reaches down to y=0.  So that first <rect> with height="4" starts at a Y coordinate of -4.  -4 plus 4 equals zero.

That allowed the following:

<use xlink:href="#shelf" x="1.5" y="9" />
<use xlink:href="#bins4" x="2.5" y="9" />
<use xlink:href="#shelf" x="1.5" y="20" />
<use xlink:href="#bins4" x="3.0" y="20" />

See how the y coordinate is the same for both shelf and associated bins?  If I decide to move a shelf up an inch and a half, I just take 1.5 off the y value for the shelf’s <use>, and then use that same value for the y attribute on the bins’ <use>.

Could I have made this even better by combining shelves and bins into a single primitive definition, and only having one <use>?  Yes, if there would only be one set of bins per shelf.  That’s how I dd it in this particular arrangement.  (In this case, the brown vertical studs are actually the 2×6s mounted in front of the wall studs, so they’re taller and based lower.)

However, I also considered stacking bins on each other between shelves, as in this configuration.

That wound up being pretty close to what I did, in the end.

There were a couple of things I wished I could do (or wish I had figured out how to do) in SVG.  The first was a way of varying the width on the <use> elements.  The rightmost stud bay is 12 inches wide, not the 14½ inch bays the others have.  I ended up defining a separate primitive definition for those shelves.

<g id="shelf-sm">
    <rect x="0" y="0" width="12.5" height="0.5" />
    <rect x="0" y="0.5"  width="0.75" height="1.125" />
    <rect x="11.75" y="0.5"  width="0.75" height="1.125" />
</g>

I guess I could have done X-axis scaling transforms on the regular #shelf primitive.  Actually, looking back on it, that probably makes a lot more sense than what I did.  It would have squished the support rails a tiny bit, but not enough to throw off precision cuts or anything.  (There really were no precision cuts in this project — this is carpentry at its roughest.)

The other thing I wanted was the ability to draw “backwards” by giving negative height and width values.  So as an example, I’d have liked to write the rightmost support rail like this:

<rect x="14.5" y="0.5" width="-0.75" height="1.125" />

I know, I know, a negative distance doesn’t really make sense when talking about physical units.  I still wanted to do it.  I mean, it made sense to me in my head.

Just like the idea of hand-authoring SVG to plan out workshop projects made sense to me.  I’m sure I could have done it a little faster and a little more intuitively in a vector editor, but I’d have had to buy one (my copy of Illustrator no longer runs on my Mac, more’s the pity) and if I’d gone that route, I wouldn’t have learned a lot more about SVG and its capabilities.  Either way, the end result is pleasing to me… at least for the time being.

• Woodshop SVG: Studs and Shelves was published on Monday, January 20th, 2020.
• It was assigned to the Projects, SVG, and Woodworking categories.
• There have been four replies.