Posts from 2004

After I threw out my two cents on ID naming conventions, Andy Clarke revisited the subject and made some more detailed proposals.  As I said before, I think this is a good conversation to be having.  However, the reactions of some people make me think that I wasn’t entirely clear about why.

A standard nomenclature offers the ability to restyle sites, sure.  That’s kind of cool in an übergeek kind of way, like making jokes involving TCP/IP terminology or wearing a T-shirt that says SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue > 0.  That isn’t really the primary reason why I support the exploration of ID naming conventions.  I’d like to see those conventions emerge because they will serve as a useful starting point for beginners in the standards-oriented design field.  It would help reinforce the idea of structural naming, as opposed to presentational naming.

We’re all familiar with presentational naming.  It’s things like id="leftbar" and id="pagetop".  In terms of layout, it’s the equivalent of <b> and <font>.  Structural naming, on the other hand, encourages the author to ask “what role does this piece of the document play?”  Rather than obsess over the visual placement of the navigation links, structural naming gets authors to consider the document structure.  This can’t be anything but good, at least for those of us who want to promote improved structures.  To pick one set of examples from Andy’s recent post:

#branding

Used for a header or banner to brand the site.

#branding-logo

Used for a site logo

#branding-tagline

Used for a strapline or tagline to define the site’s purpose

While #branding is described as “Used for a header or banner…” you may note that the actual ID name has nothing to do with visual placement.  It’s all about identifying the (dare we say it?) semantic role of that bit of the document.  By encouraging that thinking, a structural-naming convention keeps the author in that frame of mind when he has to go outside the common set of names.

I see this as being much like the often-promoted ‘rule’ that link-state styles should go in the order link-visited-hover-active.  I even wrote an article explaining why that order is important.  Here’s the thing: once you understand why the order is important, you can break the ‘rule’ in creative ways.  For example, suppose you want your hover effect to apply only to unvisited links, whereas visited links should get no hover.  No problem!  Just put them in the order link-hover-visited-active, or even link-hover-active-visited if you want visited links to get no active styles, either.

(Side note: if you chain pseudo-classes, such as with a:visited:hover, then the ordering problem goes away.  If Explorer supported that syntax, we could all move on from the LVHA rule.  Too bad it doesn’t.)

Conventions and ground rules exist for a reason: to provide a lower barrier to entry, and to help guide those new to the field.  Once you become experienced, you can break the rules in creative ways.  It’s been said that the key to good jazz improvisation is a thorough understanding of the rules of music.  In other words, once you really know those rules, then you know how to break them.  In order to know the rules, though, there have to be rules.

That’s why I’m glad to see them starting to emerge in blog postings and the public thinking of people in the field.  The development of these rules is not a barrier to creativity, but an enabler of it.

• Structural Naming was published on Saturday, June 26th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Web categories.
• There have been thirty-eight replies.

Yesterday I returned from a whirlwind four days in San Francisco.  The primary reason for the trip was to conduct training for folks at the California Digital Library, but of course all kinds of other things happened.  Here’s the brain dump.

• I can’t believe what great friends we have.  At a Sunday afternoon party at the gotomedia pad, we were joined by college friends from Oregon, others who live a four-hour drive from San Francisco, and another from Cleveland.  You read that right: one of our local friends flew out to the Bay Area to be at the party.  Well, that and to take a vacation in California, but still!  And that doesn’t even count the WaSP folks who also attended, like Simon, Porter, and Molly, who came from Kansas, Washington DC, and Arizona respectively.

  It was at the same party that I finally met Porter’s wife, so I can now stop referring to her as “Porter’s imaginary spouse.”

• If there’s one thing I envy about San Francisco, it’s the BART system.  You can get darned near anywhere, and it makes commuting from the city over to Oakland a snap.  This is particularly true when your hotel is on a stop, and so is the place you’re headed.  Despite this, I still got turned around in downtown Oakland and was very nearly late for the second day of training.  The only reason I was able to find the place at all was that we’d walked over to the training facility the day before, so I was able to identify and use landmarks to reconstruct our path, and thus find the labs.

• It turns out the BART ticket machines run on Windows.  I found this out by the usual method, of course.

• In a conversation about the presidential campaign and Ohio being considered a key battleground state because of its employment situation and political complexity, one of my hosts opined, “The Bay Area pretty much spans the political spectrum from liberal to extremely liberal.”

• At the WaSP and Friends after-dinner party on Tuesday, Tantek publicly announced his departure from Microsoft.  He refused to say where he was going next, although we’ve since learned that he’s headed to Technorati.  By Wednesday evening, I’d actually come to that conclusion without having seen the post, but of course I didn’t manage to post until now, so I look like a poser instead of eerily prescient… although if you’d take the word of a VP at Macromedia, he could attest to my prediction.

  Like others, in a way I’m sorry to see Microsoft losing such a passionate, intelligent, and committed standards advocate.  We could speculate all day as to whether or not there’s even room for people like him, but one could assume the same about AOL, and they funded a whole standards team for a few years.  In any case, Tantek firmly believes this is the right thing for him to do and seems happy with the life change it represents, so I can’t be anything but happy for him.  I can’t wait to see what he does at Technorati (and really hope the service stabilizes in the near future).

• I spent a goodly portion of Tuesday evening talking, at various stages, with Rebecca Blood about the Web, adoption, growing up in the Midwest, and more.  On my flight home Thursday, I was delighted to discover a mini-profile of her in a Time article titled “Meet Joe Blog.”  It’s kind of a weird feeling to open a national magazine and read about someone you’d talked to just two days before.

• Not only did Metagrrrl spend some time with my laptop at the party, so did Min Jung Kim.  Geez, this thing gets more action than I ever did.

• At one point during the party, someone was copying a movie to his or her laptop.  I observed this activity for a few moments, then turned to Jonas Luster (who managed to get a picture of me drinking some MS kool-aid) and said, “You know, in Soviet America, the movies rip YOU!”

  Okay, maybe you had to be there.

• Bay City Roller Coaster was published on Friday, June 25th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the General and Travel categories.
• There have been no replies.

A while back (so I’m slow), Andy Clark did a bit of digging and compiled a list of the most common ID names used to label pieces of layouts.  I’m out of step on every count except for the footer.  Does that mean I march to a different drummer?  Probably, given my musical tendencies.

Andy’s work interested me quite a bit, not least because he actually sifted through the markup of forty sites (this one among them) to compile his list.  I was also happy to see someone taking a practical approach to the question of naming conventions.  From time to time people ask me about CSS best practices.  While Andy’s conclusions aren’t necessarily the final word on naming best practices, they are a useful starting point for such inquisitors.  Some complained that by listing the ‘best’ (read: most common) names, Andy is stifling creativity, which strikes me as being faintly absurd.  Does the existence of blueprints for ranch houses stifle architectural creativity?  I mean, yeah, maybe sometimes they should, but in general I think the world is safe for Dutch Colonials and skyscrapers.

There’s certainly room for more detailed and extensive work on the subject of naming conventions, as well as other best practices (apparently people are souring on that term, but until I hear something better I’ll stick with it).  I just hope that more people do work like Andy’s, looking at what’s been done as opposed to endlessly theorizing.

Andy also mused:

Is it right to stick to ‘content’ and ‘main-nav’ for the sake of our users’ control or is that just too boring? And do we want to make it easy for others to change our precious designs on a whim?

I’m all for it; giving users the ability to restyle this site on a whim is what led me to propose CSS signatures, and employ one on this site.  Does my site design not serve your needs, or bore you?  Create something better suited to your tastes!  I promise I won’t mind; in fact, I’d like to see what you devise.  If a set of ID naming conventions does firm up, I’ll likely adopt it here so visitors can restyle my site consistently with others that use the same nomenclature.  This is, it seems to me, the least I can do.

• Elemental Nomenclature was published on Friday, June 18th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been twenty-one replies.

I hate (American) sitcoms and soap operas.  That’s a sweeping generalization, a trend that seems to be sweeping the Web of late.  No choice but to continue.

The majority of American sitcoms derive their humor—or, from my perspective, “humor”—from characters getting into embarrassing situations and then trying frantically to get out of them.  The laughs are generated by watching this person be humilated, often at length.  Generally, the humiliatee is receiving some form of just desserts: they got themselves into the situation through selfishness or arrogance or some other form of hubris, and end up paying the price.  In any event, they get to squirm and flail before our eyes and it’s funny!  Only it isn’t.

I dislike American soap operas not because they’re harshly lit and seem like community theater writ large.  I have no issues with the acting, which is actually fairly impressive in terms of the quality-to-quantity ratio.  I dislike soap operas because they’re nothing but sturm und drang, one melodramatic setpiece after another.  The number one rule is, nobody gets to be happy for long.  Anyone who does find happiness is just being set up for a major, major trauma, likely at the hands of whoever is currently making them happy.  (Although death is far less traumatic in soap operas than in real life, as people come back from the dead and aren’t even zombified when they do.  Which I suppose is good news for the power grid.)  There’s only so much of the constant chest-heaving, garment-rending dramatics I can handle before I glaze over and start to closely contemplate my cuticles.

Now why would I be talking about this when everyone else is talking about validation?  It’s a mystery, I agree.

• Valid Concerns was published on Thursday, June 17th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Standards category.
• There have been three replies.

Chris Adamson has an interesting post over at the O’Reilly Network about code in books and articles.  In summation: should code be given a special license, separate from the actual text?

While CSS isn’t code, exactly, the same basic questions apply to the stuff I’ve written.  Let’s take my most recent title, More Eric Meyer on CSS.  It contains a copyright statement that says, in effect, you can’t reproduce the book’s text, in part or in whole, without permission.  There is no distinction there between the explanatory text (“Margin collapsing is an interesting problem in some cases, and here’s why, blah blah blah…”) and the styles.  Taken literally, the copyright statement says that you can’t re-use any of the CSS I created in your own designs.

This is clearly in opposition to what I think most of us would agree is the expectation, which is that you can use styles (or code) as you see fit but you can’t take the ‘narrative’ text and pass it off as your work.  But where’s the dividing line?  Suppose that, for whatever reason, you really like one of the designs in Project 4.  We can agree that you should be able to re-use the styles presented, but a whole design?  Is that fair?  I can imagine many arguments both for and against, many of them variants on the classic slippery-slope argument.

In my particular case, the situation is even less clear.  As anyone who drops by the book’s site will discover, the project files are freely available for anyone to download.  You aren’t even expected to own the book as a condition of using them.  That makes them less protected, I would think, than if they were on a CD that accompanied the book—but how much sense does that make?  Again, I can envision several arguments on both sides of the issue.  The same questions would arise for any author that provided code samples for download, as many do.

There’s also the question of what rights can or should be granted to the reader with regard to code.  I might hypothetically make the styles all freely available to anyone, but only under the condition that attribution be given to the source (either me, the book, or both).  Wouldn’t you, as a reader, find that rather annoying?  I would.  “You mean I have to give Eric credit just to use two CSS rules that create this cool effect?”

I’ve always operated on the principle that any markup or CSS I write about is fair game, because otherwise what would be the point of writing about how to use it?  I can see it now: “use of the CSS presented in this tutorial, including any derivative works, without the written consent of the author is prohibited.”  Yeah, right!  That would be something like a dictionary prohibiting you from using any words you look up, including all modifications and misspellings.

So should books contain an explicit license regarding use of the code?  If so, what kind?  I expect readers and publishers will have different viewpoints, although the more clueful publishers probably won’t be too far away from the typical reader perspective.  There’s a part of me that wonders why we even have to be explicit about this at all—after all, there’s been a sort of tacit acceptance of code re-use to date—but in a litigious DMCA world, this is an issue that probably has to be addressed sooner or later.

As I ponder the subject, I’m currently contemplating putting all my code samples under a Creative Commons ShareAlike 1.0 license, both now and into the future, just to make sure the bases are covered.  Then again, perhaps an explicit Public Domain license would make more sense.  Which one would be better, or is there a superior approach I haven’t considered?  Let me know.

• Code Constraints was published on Monday, June 14th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Books, CSS, and Tech categories.
• There have been eighteen replies.

Earlier this morning, I obtained a Continental OnePass account for Carolyn.  She’s six months old, and she has a frequent flyer number.  Even if our schedules remain absolutely static from now until the end of 2004, Carolyn will have earned close to 10,000 miles toward Silver Elite membership before she reaches her first birthday.

I can’t decide if this frightens or amuses me.

• Air Baby was published on Saturday, June 12th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Carolyn and Humor categories.
• There have been no replies.

Yesterday afternoon, in a small court room on the twenty-second floor of the Franklin County Courthouse in downtown Columbus, Ohio, Kat and I legally finalized our adoption of Carolyn.  There were just two witnesses to this event: the legal representative for the adoption agency, and the magistrate who conducted the proceedings.  The entire proceeding was recorded using a PC to digitally capture the audio, which I thought was rather advanced for a government agency.

To get to the courthouse, we drove two and a half hours through bursts of rain and heavy interstate traffic.  The hearing took less than twenty minutes.  After taking some pictures with the magistrate, we drove back to Cleveland.  After an hour or so to rest, we celebrated this milestone yesterday evening at our favorite restaurant, Matsu, with a small gathering of friends.  For the first time in my life, I ordered a Big Boat o’ Sushi (I’ve always wanted to do that), and with the help of everyone at the table the decks were pretty well cleared.

Until now, I haven’t said anything here about Carolyn being adopted, although it might have been possible to infer it by reading very closely between the lines of some early posts.  To a large degree, this silence was dictated because the adoption wasn’t legally complete.  In a legal sense, we were just borrowing her from the adoption agency on a six-month trial basis.  During that time, we were regularly visited by a social worker who, I assume, was making sure that all was well, that she was thriving both physically and mentally, and that we hadn’t done anything that might be considered unsafe, such as setting up a crystal meth lab in the kitchen or acquiring a pet grizzly bear or something.

Where it truly matters, of course, things haven’t really changed.  Our love for Carolyn is as deep today as it was yesterday—maybe a little deeper, because as every day goes by it seems that we love her (and each other) a little bit more.  All that happened in Columbus yesterday was that the state officially and irretrievably recognized what was already true: Kat, Carolyn, and I are a family, with everything that implies.  We will share joys and sorrows, work together and play together, overcome obstacles and support each other.  We will love each other for the rest of our lives.

I’m not sure what I did to be granted such a wonderful daughter and wife, but whatever it was, it must have been really, really good.

• Adoption Day was published on Friday, June 11th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Adoption and Carolyn categories.
• There have been three replies.

Okay, Ronald Reagan died.  I got it the first six hundred times.  I grew up in the Eighties; I remember the Reagan years quite clearly.  He did a lot of good things, a lot of bad things, and a lot of ambiguous things while President, just like every other President I can remember, but frankly, at this point I think people are starting to go a little overboard.  As usual, Jon Stewart nailed it squarely (if I may paraphrase): “The ones I pity in all this are Ford and Carter. Because they’re watching this and thinking, ‘When I die, no way am I getting that.’  My advice to them: die while saving a baby.”

Still, I think the way the Liberal Media has totally ignored his death is just a travesty, don’t you?

• Reagan’s Dead? Really? was published on Wednesday, June 9th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Culture and Politics categories.
• There have been no replies.