Posts from 2003

All I can say, having been a bysitter to a group of people watching the series finale to Buffy The Vampire Slayer, is this: if there is indeed a Hellmouth in Cleveland, it’s more than likely under the Peter B. Lewis Building.  It makes a certain degree of sense, especially when you consider the Law School is immediately adjacent to the site.  Before the building’s construction, there was an empty field containing a few abstract sculptures that may actually have been, upon reflection, demonic symbols or powerful wards of some kind.  Now they’ve been removed, which probably means creeping evil, lowered bowling averages, and all manner of ickiness.

While we’re on a pseudo-religious bent, the prophetical power of Scrooged continues to be demonstrated, as it was several months ago.  Yea, the words of the most reverend Mitchum shall lead us from the valley of the miniseries, and unto the Kingdom of Schmaltz.

• Scratch One Town was published on Wednesday, May 21st, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Eight years ago today, my life was fundamentally changed by a single sentence.  Ten simple, unexpected words were the gateway to several months of anger, confusion, and grief.  And regret, so much regret.  In the end, it really was all for the best, but it certainly didn’t feel like it at the time.  I learned a great deal, and changed in ways I never would have believed possible.  In retrospect, the benefit was worth the cost, even if I hadn’t been aware I was going to be paying.

One month ago today, my life was fundamentally altered by a single event.  It was somewhat expected, of course, and had been for sixteen months.  That didn’t make it any less final, but it did make it less difficult in many ways.  There was very little unresolved by the end, so there was very little to regret.  Whatever needed to be said was said; whatever needed to be done had been done.  We gave as much love as we could, and had no doubt she knew how much we all loved her.  If there is anything that can ease the path from this world, I have to believe that it’s love.

There will be regrets to come—words and events and feelings we can’t share, tiny pangs when we wish we could tell her what’s happening in our lives and hear the pride in her voice; a feeling of absence when we want to turn to her for comfort or advice and know that it isn’t there.  These are selfish desires, I suppose, but not ones easily put away.  Perhaps the process of healing is really one of substitution, as we find other sources for the same feedback.  Perhaps it’s a slow process of forgetting the details of what we miss so dearly, so that it becomes blurry and shrouded in a haze of elapsed time.  The edges soften, and stop cutting quite so deeply.

I’m just guessing, of course.  It’s only been a month.  Ask me again in eight years, and I might know something.  For now, I just keep moving and keep doing my best to make her proud of me.

• Ghostly Echoes was published on Saturday, May 17th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Regional linguistic variations are funny.  The BBC News UK Web site has an article with this lead paragraph:

US President George W Bush has launched his bid for re-election, filing papers declaring his intention to contest next year’s vote.

Here in America, the usual meaning assigned to “contest,” at least in this context, would be “challenge” instead of “strive to win”—so to us Yanks, the implication is that Bush is already preparing to challenge the results of the next election.  Sounds like an Onion story, doesn’t it?

Speaking of linguistic variations, I now have in my possession copies of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide in Polish, Bulgarian, and Korean.  Two of each, in fact.  The surreal part is that all the examples and screenshots are still in English, while the main text is in something not English.  I have to wonder how that affects the book’s utility for local readers.

So not only will I be speaking at The Other Dreamweaver Conference (TODCON) next month in Las Vegas, I’ll be giving two technical sessions and delivering the conference keynote.  Some other speakers you might know will also be there, including Molly Holzschlag, Murray Summers, Massimo Foti, and Angela Buraglia, among others.  It should be an interesting time, what with me giving talks to all those Dreamweaver power users when I, you know, don’t actually use Dreamweaver.  Haven’t touched it in years, in fact.

We’re headed off to see The Matrix Reloaded tonight, and as expected it’s already causing hugely polarized reactions among those who’ve seen it.  I have pretty low expectations, so I ought to be all right.  As with the first one, I expect a lot of goofy exposition and nonsensical backstory mixed in with some eye-popping special effects sequences.  Hey, it worked well enough the first time, so why not draw from the same well?

• Advance Planning was published on Friday, May 16th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Books, Politics, Speaking, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

This whole playing-card deck thing is getting way out of hand.  We all know about the US Central Command‘s card deck of Iraq’s Most Wanted; you can even download a low-resolution PDF of the deck, or else buy a better-quality set from one of about a zillion merchants.  Réseau Voltaire is offering Les 52 plus dangereux dignitaires américains, a deck of the “52 most dangerous American dignitaries” in the Bush Regime.  When Texas Democrats fled to Arkansas Oklahoma to deny legislative quorum and kill a redistricting bill, Republicans created a “Most Wanted” deck of cards featuring the faces of their absent colleagues.  I’ve been getting spam for a “Deck of Weasels” featuring American war opponents’ pictures and quotes.  (Which is ironic considering I’d personally like to see a “Deck of Weasels” featuring the pictures and home addresses of the top 52 spammers.)  I’m guessing that in the upcoming election cycle, we’ll see plenty of card decks—most wanted polluters, tax boosters, pork-barrel projects, missing freedoms, whatever.  It won’t be too much longer before we’ll be able to create a deck of the 52 most wanted Most Wanted decks.  For that matter, how soon will someone create a 52 Most Wanted standards implementation changes?

And don’t look at me.  I have way too much on deck as it is.

• All Decked Out was published on Thursday, May 15th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Politics category.
• There have been no replies.

The Color Blender has been updated to be one standalone file, so you can save it to your hard drive easily.  I also put it under a Creative Commons license, which I should have done in the first place.  Feel free to share and enjoy.  Now I’m really going to try to make this my last blender-related post for a good long while.  (Unless I make observations about margaritas.)

Daniel Sternberg has some interesting questions about what makes a computer science teacher.  It’s a question that’s been on my mind as I try to pull together a series of outlines for four-week seminars on standards-based Web design and CSS.  You can guess that this is intended for a community college because they’re willing to let me teach this stuff without a PhD in computer science.  Heck, I don’t even have a CS degree of any kind, unless you count a minor in artificial intelligence, and that was focused on the philosophical aspects of it.  Allow a History major to teach in a computer science department at a University?  Please.  I’d have about as much of a chance to be nominated head of the Congressional Black Caucus.

And yet, am I not qualified to teach students how to assemble a Web design, and about the underpinnings of today’s Web, with an eye to the future?  I certainly think I am, at least from a skills point of view; whether or not I’d make a good teacher of people is another question entirely, of course.  The deepest experts can be the worst teachers, something all of us probably encountered at some point in our educational experiences.

So it’s been interesting to be contacted by people from community colleges and business schools to come speak, but not hear a peep from the CS departments in my area.  Not at all unexpected, obviously, but still interesting.

• Blending and Teaching was published on Wednesday, May 14th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal and Tools categories.
• There have been no replies.

The XBL/Zen Garden thread continues over at Surfin’ Safari, including an interesting (Gecko-only) example of XBL in action and comments from various parties.  Share and enjoy.

I got a bit of feedback on the Color Blender, including a request to make it a downloadable package for offline use.  I’ll probably merge the CSS and JavaScript back into the HTML document, so people can just save the source if they want an offline blender.  I split the styling and scripting out to make development easier, so I probably should have poured them back in before going public.  It’ll be fewer hits on the server, even.  Look for an update in the next couple of days.

Thanks to El Jefe, I discovered that diveintomark.org (whose favicon I may steal) has Eric Meyer on CSS in his “Recommended Reading” section.  I’m blushing!  The book’s sales are actually on the rise, apparently, which is kind of amazing given both the industry and the economy.  It’s the kind of thing that makes me wonder if I should write a sequel quickly, to strike while the iron is hot; or wait until sales trail off to avoid buyer confusion (and to milk the original for all it’s worth).  Hopefully it’s the latter, because frankly I don’t have time right now to tackle a sequel.  Too busy with another writing project (itself a sequel of sorts).

Thanks to Technorati, I found a site that asked if the DevEdge redesign was the “worst use of CSS ever?”  Ah, me public.  It’s okay, though; in reading through the rest of the site, I concluded that if the person in charge didn’t like our design, we’d probably done something right.

• I Can Feel The Love was published on Tuesday, May 13th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been no replies.

For some reason I decided this weekend to crawl into a hole and hack some JavaScript, so the Color Blender‘s gotten an upgrade.  You can use a “waterfall” display of “web-safe” colors to input colors, or type them in as before.  If you have already filled in colors and switch value formats, the colors will stay and the values will be converted in place.  This can be useful if you want to, for example, find midpoints between #AA31FF and rgb(13%,23%,42%).  I think the changes make the tool even more useful, and I hope you do too.

Oh, and yeah, I used a simple table to lay out the page.  I toyed with positioning and floating the three “columns,” but in the end the table approach seemed the easiest, so I went with it.  This was partly because I have a footer and didn’t want to mess with floating and clearing just to get it below everything else.  It was also because, after a day or two of grappling with JavaScript, I got lazy.  I may go back at some point and replace the table with floats.  In the meantime, this works well enough.

CSS2 and the official CSS1 Test Suite both turn five years old today.  I’m not sure if I bring this up in celebration or protest, but in my case, it’s definitely cause for introspection.

A couple of contributed designs have sprouted in the CSS Zen Garden, and I imagine there will be more to follow.  What an incredible resource!  A few weeks back, I said in my close-up* interview:

While an artist is certainly limited by his medium, it’s more often the case that the medium is limited by its artists. Until a Picasso or Serat comes along, you don’t truly appreciate what the medium can produce. As more designers come to use CSS, we’ll see more compelling CSS-driven sites.

Dave Shea and his contributors are doing exactly that:  showing us more of what the medium can do, and creating a compelling site.  Just moving from design to design in the Zen Garden should be ample proof that CSS is capable of more than most of us have ever thought possible—me included.

Meanwhile, David Hyatt posted to say that XBL directly addresses the point I made in Thursday’s post:

You attach XBL to an element through CSS, and XBL can generate a complete anonymous content subtree that can then be styled using a scoped stylesheet applied to those elements. You can even scatter the real content however you’d like within the anonymous content tree…. XBL is a perfect tool for implementing complex layouts at the presentational level and preserving the purity of the main source document. XBL can even execute scripts for fancy animation effects or rollovers, all without the source document being polluted at all.

Sign me up!  I had no idea XBL was capable of this sort of thing; when the “XSLT vs. XBL” thread erupted on www-style a few months ago, I pretty much tuned it out after the fifth message.  Obviously I should have paid a little more attention.  If I can, for example, take a paragraph and use XBL to generate three block boxes and two inline boxes, styling each one independently to create given effects and applying multiple backgrounds, then it seems like the ideal solution.  Except for that whole lack of cross-browser support thing, of course.  Still, a similar lack didn’t exactly stop me from digging into CSS, back in mid-1996.

• Blending Galore was published on Monday, May 12th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Tools categories.
• There have been no replies.

Want to see some wonderful, and strikingly different, designs for the same content?  Want to contribute your own themes?  Then get on over to the CSS Zen Garden.  I have two reactions: delight and jealousy.  As I’ve said before, I don’t have strong visual design skills.  I’ve been working on a new set of designs for meyerweb, and they’re almost ready to go live.  I was feeling rather proud of what I’d done.  Then these guys come along and show me just how fumbling and crayonesque my design efforts have been.

There are quite a few span elements littered throughout the Zen Garden’s source, but as I’ve been finding recently, this is almost necessary.  It’s troublesome to me that really interesting CSS-based visual design should require that we clutter the document structure with gratuitous elements, but there truly doesn’t seem to be a good way around this.  It may be that future CSS, or some other styling language, will allow the author to create multiple layout boxes (or other shapes) for a given element and style them independently.  The syntax would probably be weird compared to what we have now, but it would allow for a lot more design flexibility.

And speaking of design, don’t forget about the Web Design Meetup tonight!

• Zen and the Art of CSS was published on Thursday, May 8th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been no replies.