Posts from 2004

You’ve probably already seen the Gurus vs. Bloggers matchup over at Design By Fire; I quite enjoyed it, and not just because it’s funny.  I found it to be gratifying because I took a close look at the designs, and I think there’s very little doubt about it.  meyerweb’s design just screams “guru,” don’t you think?  (David Robarts does.)  I’m kind of hoping that I get into a future round of the matchup, so I can by completely demolished by the likes of Dave Shea or Doug Bowman.

Of course, I can always counter with cute pictures of Carolyn. She’s suffering through another cold, but that doesn’t seem to prevent her from being just too adorable for words.  Now, I know it isn’t the right finger, but I still can’t help thinking, “One billion dollars!”

For some reason, Kat and I like the show $40 A Day, where host Rachael Ray visits a different city each week and goes through a full day without spending more than $40 on all her meals.  One of this past weekend’s episodes had her visiting Cleveland, calling it “one of the most underrated cities in America.”  Kat and I found it fascinating to watch, getting an outsider’s perspective on the city.  We don’t have the time or space for me to enumerate everything great about this city.  Nonetheless, it was still interesting to hear words of praise from a visitor, even one hosting a show that does what are basically puff pieces about the visited cities.

It didn’t hurt that two of the three restaurants she visited were the always-excellent Tommy’s (where the waiter shown on-camera is one of those guys who’s been there forever) and Trattoria Roman Gardens down in Little Italy, not to mention spent some time at the West Side Market.  I thought the show could have done with a few less “___ ROCKS!” jokes—okay, we get it, the only song the rest of the country associates with us is “Cleveland Rocks.”  Thank you.  It’s time to move on.

Of course, I suppose I might be tired of the whole “rocks” thing because it’s a lot like having people always tell you the sky is blue.  After a while, it gets to be a little bit wearying to keep being repetitively told something you already know.

• Guru By Design? was published on Sunday, April 11th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Carolyn, Cleveland, and CSS categories.
• There have been no replies.

I got word yesterday that More Eric Meyer on CSS has already come back from the printers, so it ought to be available within a week or so.  Woo hoo!  I’ve put up a companion site with the table of contents; the project files will be online soon.  And yes—that really is the cover.

Speaking of books, the second edition of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide is now available pretty much everywhere.  Over at Amazon, its sales rank has been hovering around 200 for a couple of weeks now, so that’s pretty cool.  I’ve heard from a few readers who already have their copies, and some errata reports have started to come in.  Joy!  It’s always frustrating to finish a book, because I know that the errors that got missed will immediately be spotted by all the readers.  No matter how hard we tried, some errors are going to slip through.  The perfectionist in me quails at that knowledge.

But then, releasing a new book does afford me the chance to be amused by reader reviews.  Here’s one that had me chuckling:

i understand the basics of css already, i just needed something to outline the syntax and concepts in css2 and then just function as a reference. this book did neither, and i’ve found it to be a complete waste.

Yeah, I guess you probably would.  Say it with me, sparky: “Definitive Guide.”  Not “Reference.”  It’s not an outline, and wasn’t when the first edition came out.  If you need a reference with a quick outline, you could always try the CSS2.0 Programmer’s Reference, which has, of all things, an outline of the syntax and concepts of CSS2 and provides a full property reference.  Amazing.

I know you aren’t supposed to judge a book by its cover, but sometimes you can get a little guidance from its title.

Anyone who reads Italian might be interested in an interview with me conducted by Marco Trevisan.  For those who don’t do as the Romans do, the English version should be available in the near future.

Update: Gini‘s sister is doing better, although she was evicted from the hospital even though still suffering a lot of pain.  Ferrett tells me that it looks like some of meyerweb’s readers did contribute to the support fund, and again, Kat and I both thank you for reaching out.

• It’s On Every Channel! was published on Friday, April 9th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Books, CSS, Interviews, Personal, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

Two of our greatest friends in the Cleveland area (and in our lives in general) are the oddly-named Gini and Ferrett.  They’ve been with us through every triumph and tragedy of the last year; they made the trip to Mansfield for Mom’s memorial service, and also happened to be the first to lay eyes on Carolyn the night she came home.  We’ve come to know that they’ll be there for us when we need them, and have tried to be the same for them.

Gini’s little sister could use a big heap of help.  She’s in danger of dying from unknown causes, and her family is in danger of losing their home while the insurance company plays dice with her life.  Even if you aren’t able or inclined to donate money to help somebody you’ve never met, your thoughts and prayers will be very much appreciated.

I would say that I can’t imagine what Gini is going through right now, except that’s not really true.  I know what it’s like to have a younger sibling who is in danger of dying from a disease that nobody is sure can be cured, to have a family member lying in the hospital while phone calls are made, while worried voices say things like “we don’t know if she’ll make it” and “the next few days will tell the tale.”  I know what it’s like to get a phone call that’s traveled half the continent, distant and blurred, to tell me that someone I love is terribly ill.  It’s a horrible, desolate feeling.

If you can help, please do.  Kat and I both thank you.

• A Charitable Request was published on Saturday, April 3rd, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Gmail appears to be for real, so my idea that it was a joke was flat wrong.  Of course, some would say “flat wrong” has been a recurring theme of mine for the last few days.  (Or longer.)

• No Foolin’ was published on Friday, April 2nd, 2004.
• It was assigned to the General category.
• There have been no replies.

April Fools Day has rolled ’round again, and already the confusion is thick in the air.  Doug and Dave have swapped faces for a day (or perhaps longer), much as newspaper comic artists often do.  The WaSP reports that the use of standards has hitherto unsuspected benefits, and Nature is reporting that stronger trade winds have changed the planet’s rotation enough that today should be 2 April, not 1 April.  Global warming is blamed.

Then there are the edge cases.  Google’s announcement of Gmail has now been reported by CNN, The New York Times, c|net, Wired, and more.  It sure seems like an April Fools Day joke on Google’s part, just like Pigeonrank, but heck, it could be real.  Here’s the thing: just because it got reported by major media outlets doesn’t make it true.

I found this out back at the very beginning of 2000.  You all probably remember the Y2K noise leading up to that point; there were reports that vendors had to certify pencils as Y2K compliant in order to sell them.  It got pretty silly.  In the middle of it all, as we went through month after month of analysis and certification of the systems at CWRU, one of the DMS gang said something like, “Are we sure that Aurora [the CWRU Web server] won’t suddenly think it’s January 1900?”  The response was, “I sure hope not, because then it would insist on using a telegraph to connect to the Internet.”  We started riffing on that idea, kicking around what the page design would look like, what kind of news would be there, turn-of-the-century pictures that should show up, and so on.

So we did it.  My co-worker Pam and I went down to the University Archives and found a number of photos that were of the right era and that were clearly allowed to be used (many of them had no known author and so would not pass into the public domain until 2020), and scanned them in.  I created a wood-grain design for the home page, including a modified badge that proclaimed us the “Yahoo! Most Wired College 1899” site.  We had two places  on the page where the year was listed, and I had to deliberately introduce Y2K bugs in order to make them say “January 1, 1900” on that day.  We set up a cron job to roll the old-timey graphics into place at the stroke of midnight on 1 January 2000, and went off to party.

By eight o’clock on the morning of the first, we had several dozen e-mails in the server contact inbox.  They were about evenly divided into people congratulating us on having a sense of humor, and people insulting us for being so stupid as to have suffered a visible Y2K bug on our public Web server.  (I’d like to think that at least some of those were tongue-in-cheek.)  By the end of the day, Wired had reported it as a real Y2K bug, even quoting our message apologizing that the server “believes that it is January of 1900,” and the next day the story was printed more or less verbatim in The Washington Post.  We ended up issuing a press release about it, and the joke design, which was intended to stay in place for a couple of weeks, lasted 33 hours before the administration said, “Yeah, uh-huh, very funny.  Get rid of it.”

As I write this entry, I have no idea if Gmail is an April Fools joke or not.  (Okay, that’s not true.  I have some idea that it’s a joke, but I’m not certain.)  In a way, it’s kind of irrelevant.  The whole situation has simply reminded me that those in the news media can be as easily duped as the rest of us, and that’s something worth remembering in the current political climate.

• F-F-F-F-Foolin’ was published on Thursday, April 1st, 2004.
• It was assigned to the History and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.

While I knew I was staking out a position that was likely to cause some controversy, I’ve been rather surprised at the response to my post on Weblog Weirdness.  I got several e-mailed responses, some in support of and others disagreeing with my views.  Matt Mullenweg went to some length to describe just how wrong I am, and I threw out a few responses in the comments.  Chris Vincent responded to my post by keeping the reverse-chronological (or, as Michael Hanscom put it, chronoillogical) order for his weblog, but implementing a “Welcome Back” feature which tells you what’s new since the last time you visited the site.  The News Goat put forth some ideas on how to handle chronological posting as well; the ideas are similar to what Chris did and close to what I had in mind (more on that in a moment).  And the aforementioned Michael wrote an entire post in chronoillogical format, with the paragraphs running last to first.  The interesting part is that it made almost as much sense that way as forward, which is either a testament to Michael’s writing skills or else an indication that I’m wrong about the nature of writing.  (Hey, why not give my critics more ammo?)

Speaking of critics, I did have my mental state questioned a few times, and more than one person has wondered why I’m so angry about this subject.  Angry?  Apparently I’ve managed to build up an image so mild and inoffensive that strongly stating my views looks like anger.  Time to start correcting that image.

Other commentary and ideas: Robert Scoble, Bob Congdon, Roger Benningfield, Richard Allsebrook.

Meanwhile, I took a crack at setting up my primary idea, and discovered that I just don’t have the programming skills necessary to make it work in a reasonable time frame.  (Hell, I couldn’t even figure out how to get MySQL running on OS X, and spent a couple of curse-filled hours before giving up.)  So I’ll describe it, and hope that one of you bright coders can make it work.  Although I’m using ordered steps here, this isn’t a flowchart or anything; it’s just the way I envision the system working in my head.

0. The posts are in chronological order.  (Yeah, I know, that probably seems obvious given what I’ve been talking about.)
1. When the user first arrives, the site sets a cookie that records the date and time.  This is updated on every subsequent visit so that the cookie always knows the last time the user visited the weblog.
2. On subsequent visits, any post was previously seen shows only its title and date; the entry text is collapsed (hidden).  Any posts that are new since the last visit are shown in full.  Some sub-thoughts to go with that:
   • The collapsed posts might not be totally collapsed, but show an abstract, or the first sentence of the post, or something that gives a little more context than just title and date.
   • The most recently-viewed post (that is, the post that was most recent the last time the site was visited) could also be shown in full, in order to give some sense of continuity.
   • For those who like to have a ton of posts on the front page, there might need to be a “skip to first expanded” link.  Or else you could offer an option, also set by a cookie, regarding whether old posts should even appear at all.
3. Next to each of the collapsed posts’ title is a button that lets the user show the text of that entry.  Next to that button is another button that means “click me and I’ll expand this post and all of the posts that follow it.”  No, I haven’t figured out how to turn that into an icon yet, but I bet somebody out there can.
4. Similarly, expanded posts have buttons that mean “collapse this post” and “collapse this post and all posts that precede it.”
5. If you visit the page and there’s nothing new, then collapse all but the most recent; in other words, make sure there’s at least one post open.  If all of the posts are new, well then, of course you have them all open.  The system might even indicate that there are archived posts that haven’t been seen, and offer a link to the least recent of them.

In general, this approach allows for a compact display of posts in chronological order while making it easy for the user to get right to the new stuff.  It doesn’t make the page any heavier than normal, either.  I can even envision in my head the general markup and scripting needed to drive this system, but I’m too clumsy with JavaScript to make it work any time this week (or next, I expect).  Maybe one of you can show ol’ gramps how it’s done.

Matt actually proposed a very similar idea to me, except I think what he was envisioning was server-based:  there’s a cookie that records the last visit time, and the server reads that and returns just the content for the new stuff.  Though I see no reason why a server-side plugin couldn’t offer the kind of functionality I just described.  It would require more roundtrips to the server as posts are expanded and collapsed, I suppose.  It would still be worth trying.

• First-Order Solutions was published on Wednesday, March 31st, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Web category.
• There have been no replies.

As I write this entry, Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition is #3 on Amazon’s Computers & Internet Bestsellers list, and the book itself has a sales rank of 144.  Sweeeet.

• Leaping Fish was published on Monday, March 29th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Books, CSS, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

Weblogs are temporally broken; the question I have is whether or not they’re temporarily broken, or if we’re going to manage to fix them.  I do not completely exempt meyerweb from this statement, either.  As of this writing, the front page of meyerweb is as broken as every other weblog I’ve ever read.  The archives are not, but the problem is that there’s an inconsistency between the front page and the archives.  That’s a different kind of broken, but I’ll get to that in just a bit.

Here’s what I mean: the most-recent-first format is broken.  No other form of written communication works that way, and in fact almost no form of human communication works like that.  There’s a reason why.  Reading a weblog is like watching Memento, which I agree was a cool movie, except all weblogs are like that so it’s as if every single movie released in the past seven or eight years was structured exactly like Memento.  If conference presentations about weblogs were true to the form, the speaker would start with the conclusion, work backwards through his points, and end with the opening statement.  (I’d love to see someone actually do that.)  If weblog entries were ordered like the weblogs themselves, this would be the next-to-last paragraph, and the one above would be below it instead.

“But Eric,” you cry, “we want to see the most recent information first!  Newer is better!”  Wrong.  What’s most important is catching up with the content you haven’t seen before.  If weblogs could run off of telepathy, the site would determine the most recent post you’d actually read, and then present you with all of the posts since that one, listing them in chronological order.  (It might also show you the most recent post you’d already seen for a sense of continuity, but that would be the very first post you saw.  You could skim through it quickly and get to the new stuff.)

It’s frequently the case that I’ll drop by a weblog and the most recent post will refer back to a two-days-ago post, or maybe to three posts scattered over the previous week.  In some cases, the most recent post makes no sense without having read the older stuff.  So I have to skip to the older material, read it all (making sure I get it in correct order), and then come back to the newest post.  For me, that means opening up the older posts in separate tabs.  Others might open new windows, or just skip around.  Another alternative is to find the least recent post that I’ve read and start reading from there.  And that’s when things get really annoying, because it means scrolling downward to read the post, then scrolling up past what I just read and the entire body of the next post, then scrolling slowly down as I read the newer post.  Lather, rinse, repeat, regret.

None of these solutions are at all intuitive.  In fact, our collective behavior when it comes to reading weblogs is a stunning example of an entire community adopting hugely counter-intuitive behaviors in order to conform to a received truth (that weblog entries should be ordered most to least recent).  I bet many of those people are the same ones that carp about the CSS definition of width being counter-intuitive.  Yet if you read a twenty-chapter book the way you read weblogs, you’d start at the beginning of chapter 20, read it, skip back to the beginning of 19, read that, and so on until you finally worked your way back to chapter 1 and finished the book.  How much sense does that make?  Close to none.

I admit that for weblogs where most entries are two paragraphs or less (*cough*Scoble*cough*), this doesn’t matter as much—you just scroll up instead of down.  But your eyes are doing the same counter-intuitive thing by scanning up, then reading down, up, down, up, down.  After a few minutes of that, my eyes start to get tired, and that makes me grumpy.

It’s also true that in syndication aggregators, you can order the feed entries however you want, but you can get true chronological order only if the posts have a sortable publication date (many don’t), and you can only read chronologically in the aggregator if full posts are being syndicated.  On many sites, that isn’t the case.  I send out a summary feed in both RSS 0.91 and RSS 2.0, and that’s it, because otherwise I’d noticeably increase my outgoing bandwidth consumption.  And yes, bandwidth still matters.  Besides, saying “yeah, weblogs are backward but you can fix them with an aggregator” is in my mind functionally equivalent to saying “yeah, weblogs are broken but with a completely different method of representing the data and a new piece of standalone software, we can hack around the problem.”  So either weblogs are broken and we’ve chosen to invent a whole new branch of technique rather than solve the problem for the Web, or else the Web is not the correct medium for logs/journals and we need to get them off the Web altogether.

I don’t believe the latter is the case, so that leaves me looking hard at the former.  And yes, syndication is incredibly useful for telling you when there’s new stuff on your favorite sites.  I’m talking about the problem with weblogs themselves.  Anyone who’s gone into my archives will have discovered that they’re in chronological order, so you only have to scroll down when reading.  A post is immediately followed by the next-most-recent post.  No up-down-up-down scrolling required.  It’s completely inconsistent with the main page, of course.  People have complained to me that going into the archives messes them up, because they go from the usual reverse-chronological-order posts on the main page to a page of chronologically ordered posts.  I agree that’s entirely too confusing, and things need to be consistent within the site.

So the solution I’m pursuing is to fix the main page to be in chronological order while still being easy to use.  I’ve been toying with ideas on ways to do this, and I hope to test some of them out in the next couple of months.  In the meantime, if anyone knows of a weblog where the author has taken a crack at doing chronologically ordered posts, I’d like to see it, regardless of whether you think they did a good job or not.

• Weblog Weirdness was published on Monday, March 29th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Web category.
• There have been no replies.