Posts from 2003

When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, “Did you sleep well?” I said, “No, I made a few mistakes.”

The link I posted to the CSS mastergrid now redirects to a registration page (apparently DDJ thinks you need to register with them to have to dig for a resource that isn’t as useful as it was before they got hold of it), so I’ve removed the link from the archive.

Also, I forgot to mention that part 2 of the interview with Mike Davidson of ESPN was posted last Friday.  It gets into the nuts and bolts of redesign a bit, and Mike tosses out some strong opinions on CSS and validation, among other things.

I think I’m the last to find out about this, but BlogShares is kind of interesting.  This site is listed on the exchange, which surprised me no end, and while it isn’t doing as well as scottandrew.com (which is where I found out about all this) I’m amused that there are already people who “bought” shares of meyerweb.com.  If nothing else, it’s an interesting tool to see who’s linking to this site, and I like the overall presentation a little better than Technorati‘s design.

Speaking of which, I went off on an egorati hunt (a term I first heard Tantek use) and found wherearemylegs, which looks a bit familiar.  Cool!  I’m always interested to see how other people adapt my design ideas to their own needs.

Since I was up way too early this morning anyway, I decided to rework some of the Raging Platypus‘ buttons in CSS-styled text.  So you can steal these buttons, too.  The work isn’t an exact copy, nor does it cover everything the Plat created.  That wasn’t really the point.  Oh, and I also threw in a recreation of Dave Winer‘s “XML” button.

I’m wondering if “platypus” is particularly hard to type in general, or if it’s a special challenge to me today because I’m so tired.  Given that it took me four tries to get “challenge” spelled correctly in the previous sentence, I’m thinking it’s the fatigue.  I’m also using annoying sentence construction, like starting out clauses with “I’m wondering” and “I’m thinking.”  As if I remain frozen in those states until you come read this entry.  By the time you get here, I’ll have moved on to something else.  And yet, it makes things sound more personal, doesn’t it?

Yep.  Definitely fatigue.

• Exhausted was published on Friday, April 4th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been no replies.

Last night, for a while I lay in bed having trouble falling asleep.  When I finally did drop off, I dreamed that I was lying in bed and having trouble falling asleep.

That was weird.

Mark Pilgrim has a nice entry on his site about creating a tab interface out of a simple unordered list and CSS.  His approach uses float: left; instead of display: inline;, which has some advantages and drawbacks.  Mark also says, “This CSS stuff is hard; don’t let anybody tell you different.”  Well, I’ll tell you different, although you can always reject what I have to say.  CSS is challenging, certainly, especially if you have old design habits to unlearn.  CSS doesn’t always act in intuitive ways.  Its learning curve sometimes seems too steep a climb for many people.  But CSS is very much consistent, once you dive into it far enough, and once you adjust to its way of doing things it becomes not so much easy as very, very powerful.

Some enterprising soul(s) managed to dig up the URL of the copy of the CSS mastergrid at ddj.com, but I wouldn’t get too used to it being there.  Plus the file isn’t using CSS to style the grid any more, which is really rather funny in its own way, but also makes the charts harder to use.  While I have suspected for a while that webreview.com would go away, the changeover was completely without warning, so I don’t even know who to talk to about fixing the problems.  It’s a touch frustrating.

I also found out, in the process of tracking down the new chart URL, that someone thinks I look like Luke Skywalker.

That was more weird.

• Restless was published on Thursday, April 3rd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.

I’m back from User Interface 7 West, which was a most excellent time; and a four-day vacation at Ragged Point, which was a more excellent time, but in a completely different and much more relaxing way.  Upon my return, my personal e-mail account contained 2,280 messages, of which almost precisely half were spam.  The work account had 1,300+ messages, and I’d already downloaded 500+ while on the road.

I’m a little behind, is what I’m trying to say.

If you sent me a message recently, odds are it will be a while before I respond.  If I don’t respond in the next couple of weeks, your message was probably lost in the spam, so consider resending it after that time.  Yes, I know, Spam Assassin, Cloudmark, blah blah blah.  It’s more fun to complain about the spam, really.  Besides, deleting it manually is a good workout for my speed-reading and snap-evaluation skills.

I did notice a number of messages about webreview.com rerouting to Dr. Dobbs Journal, and the disappearance of the CSS support charts (a.k.a. “The Mastergrid”).  Yes, the charts are now offline, although since they hadn’t been updated in over two years this is not what I’d call a deep tragedy.  Fans of the charts will be glad to know I’d already been working (slowly, ever slowly) toward finding the charts a new home and getting them updated.  I’ll certainly make an announcement here once there is actual news, but for now, let’s pause a moment in silent tribute to the late, lamented Web Review.  They gave me my first paid writing gig and the charts a home, and I’ll always be grateful to Dale, Chuck, Derrick, and all the rest of the staff.

Oh, and for those interested in my RSS feed, you can pick the flavor you like best from the Eric’s Archived Thoughts page.

• Deluged was published on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Personal, RSS, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

So here I am, sitting in Rockin’ Java in the upper Haight, surfing on the free wifi.  All kinds of cool people are (and have been) here, including Matt Haughey, Tantek Çelik, Erika Hall, Scott Andrew, Doug Bowman, Michael Leung, and Merlin.  Some other people have drifted through but I didn’t catch their names.  Sooner or later I ought to buy something.  Or not.

As is always the case for San Francisco, the weather is beautiful and the driving horrendous.  Tight parking I can handle, but the restrictions on turning, one-way streets, and general vehicular topography are a nightmare.  It makes Cleveland Heights look like nothing.  I can well understand the impulse to be a biker in this city, and I’d almost certainly be one if I lived here.

Regardless, it’s a thrill to be sitting with smart folks and talking about whatever comes to mind.  I’m looking forward to more of the same over the next few days.

• Rockin’ WiFi was published on Sunday, March 23rd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal and Travel categories.
• There have been no replies.

This week on Netscape DevEdge is part one of a two-part interview with Mike Davidson of ESPN, who talks in depth about their curent redesign efforts.  On the ESPN home page they’re currently using CSS positioning to lay everything out.  That means they’ve dropped tables as a layout mechanism and, in the process, about 50KB of page weight.  Mike has some very strong opinions, and I imagine they’ll be controversial in certain circles, but he speaks from the perspective of a designer in charge of a commercial site that serves close to a billion page views every month.  His is a thoroughly practical point of view, and he’s not shy about it.  I highly recommend it, and not just because I wrote the questions.

Through the O’Reilly Network, I came across a link to an English-language blog called Where Is Raed?, written by a resident of Baghdad.  This past Sunday, he posted a rant against war and for democracy that should be read by anyone who wants to get insight into how the events of the past year and decade are viewed by those who had to pay the price.  A tiny exceprt:

how could “support democracy in Iraq” become to mean “bomb the hell out of Iraq”? why did it end up that democracy won’t happen unless we go thru war? Nobody minded an un-democratic Iraq for a very long time, now people have decided to bomb us to democracy? Well, thank you! how thoughtful.

Before you dismiss this as obvious propaganda, go read the piece in its entirety.

Note to those in the San Francisco area: I’ll be hanging out with some very cool people (like Doug and Tantek) at Rockin’ Java this Sunday at 2:00pm.  All are welcome for discussion, open wifi, and caffeinated drinks.  Be there or be, um, elsewhere.

• Through Another Pair of Eyes was published on Friday, March 21st, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Politics categories.
• There have been no replies.

Thanks to Tantek, I found out that Christine accused CSS of making her eyes bleed while at SxSW.  I can’t say that’s ever happened to me, although maybe it has to Joshua Davis.  (After all, we only have his word about the red food coloring.)  Also thanks to Tantek, I read that the subtle evilness of CSS gives Natalie headaches, and in surfing further onward I found that it apparently also makes Dave’s head explode.  I’m sure there are similarly colorful stories of CSS-inspired pain and suffering out there.  I wonder if anyone’s accused it of giving them some horrible disease.

Between amused chuckles, I feel a touch of concern.  There seems to have been a real failure to communicate with developers the benefits and perils of CSS; or at least, that’s what I assume is causing all the pain.  After all, from my point of view, it’s font tags and nested tables with three hundred shim GIFs that inspire eye-bleeding.  If there’s evil in design, it’s needing more markup than content to create a layout, as was the case for years.  Compared to all that old-school HTML design crap, CSS is like the breeze off a mountain pasture filled with blossoming wild flowers on the first warm day of spring.

It does require something of a conceptual leap to use CSS well, there’s no question.  But it seems that there’s a more important question, which is this: why do people find working with CSS to be so painful?  Is it simply because it’s new, or is there something more critical happening here?

I’ll freely admit that I’ve had times where trying to understand aspects of CSS made the veins in my forehead throb.  In fact, the worst such period was when I was trying (with a great deal of help) to decipher the line box model.  I spent a week of evenings wanting to drive my head through the monitor because it just didn’t make sense—but then, when I finally got it, everything seemed very clear.  (Not that my summary document does anything to reflect that clarity.)  I still think the line box model is flawed in certain important ways, largely because it works well to replicate legacy behaviors, and of course I’ve already complained about the deplorable state of typographic styling.

There are also certain behaviors which CSS does not make easy, although that’s more the fault of CSS still being young in terms of development than anything else.  It’s true that the box model doesn’t allow you to make an element stretch around a floated descendant, but that’s because in most cases you don’t want such stretching.  When you do, of course, it becomes very frustrating that there’s no simple solution.  There’s been a property proposed for CSS3 that would give the author the power to choose how such situations are handled.  There are also proposed properties that would let authors choose how line boxes are laid out, how element boxes are sized, and more.

That’s where my concern starts to grow into a certain species of dread.  People are already complaining that CSS is too difficult for them to grasp.  What will happen when, in the name of giving designers the layout control they want, CSS becomes so complex that nobody can learn the whole thing?  What good will it do to have a compact, human-readable styling language if nobody actually understands what it says?  I mean, it would still be an improvement over XSL:FO, which almost nobody can fully understand or read, thanks to its incredibly clumsy syntax.  But not much of an improvement; if you know all the words but can’t speak complete sentences, it’s still hard to ask for directions to the nearest coffee shop with an open wireless network and a customers-only bathroom.  If you catch my drift.

Problem is, I don’t see a way to avoid this over the long term.  It seems like any layout language will, eventually, become too complex to fully grasp.  Perhaps the best we can hope for is to have a language that humans can read, and let people specialize in different areas—Joe becomes an expert in typographic styling, Jane in element layout, Jerry in font descriptors, Jolene in selector construction, and so on.  It saddens me to think this, but there it is anyway.

In the meantime, I wonder what authors most need to know about CSS right now, and how that knowledge can be communicated to them.  How can the pain be eased, if not completely removed?

• AAAAA! My Eyes! was published on Thursday, March 20th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been no replies.

I’m trying to find out if there’s a country or other region in this world whose annual, monthly, or daily bandwidth consumption is in the vicinity of 700 terabytes (5.6 petabits).  Searches for this type of information have so far come up empty; I was pointed to the Internet Traffic Report but its figures are too abstract to be useful to me, plus they seem to be based on ping times instead of actual bandwidth.  Anyone have a pointer to freely available information along those lines?

Yesterday’s mail contained a copy of the shiny new book Cascading Style Sheets: The Designer’s Edge by Molly Holzschlag.  It’s very, um, red.  It’s also in full color throughout, chock full o’ information, presents some case studies of CSS-driven design, and talks about CSS and design as if they go together, which of course they do.  I did technical editing and wrote the Foreword, where I said:

…CSS is a visual language, one that was meant to be used by designers from the beginning.  Books aimed at that particular audience are long overdue, frankly, and I’m thrilled to see them emerging at long last.  I’m even more thrilled that we’re getting one from Molly Holzschlag.

Personally I think Molly’s a really truly wonderful person and my wife agrees with me, so if you’re particularly worried about bias, there’s mine.  One of them, at any rate.  I also have a fondness for hot chai drinks, in case anyone’s keeping track.

Dear God, but this is just so wrong.  That damn song they sing is still stuck in my head, which I’m sure was the point, but the visuals are even more vividly seared upon my memory.  Requires Flash to actually see the full extent of the wrongness.  Also requires that you not be at work or some other place of propriety, or in the presence of people who are easily offended, or be easily offended yourself.

Then again, far worse things are looming in the real world, and it won’t be cuddly cartoon characters who pay the price when the storm finally breaks.

• Close to the Edge was published on Wednesday, March 19th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Politics categories.
• There have been no replies.

Kat returns from San Francisco today, five days after we parted ways in Houston.  Then, on Saturday, I leave for… San Francisco (!).  I’ll be speaking at User Interface 7 West with Molly H. (someone totally different than Molly S., who I finally met last week in Austin).  The full-day session we delivered last October got great reviews from its attendees, so we’re doing it again, only with a better pace and less boring stretches.  Our short talk, on the other hand, is new to the UI7 series and is based on some of the stuff I’ve been talking about recently.  You can get more information from my Talks page, or else from the UI7 site itself.

I laughed pretty hard at some of Perry Hoberman‘s “OK/Cancel” series, but the “Infringement” series made me chuckle uncomfortably before thinking about it.  The series reminded me rather strongly of the Bang Interface Neologue by Natalie Jeremijenko (search her project page for that title if you’re curious).  I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Internet society as compared to physical-world societies, how they influence each other, and how they could improve each other.  In the process, my appreciation for what we have online has increased.  The challenge is in migrating what I see there into the “real” world.

It’s a beautiful day outside, and I have a window open to let in the clean scent of spring.  Birds are cheeping quietly to each other, as if asking in hushed tones if winter is finally over, afraid they’ll jinx it.  This is perhaps my favorite time of year, and one of the reasons I’ve stayed in a region that has a seasonal cycle.  The fresh scent carried on the breezes of spring, still chilled from leftover snow but bursting with life all the same, is one of life’s truest joys.

• O Lucky Day was published on Monday, March 17th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.