Posts from February 2011

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been hacking together some CSS3 tests.  I did this to try to figure out what should be included in the upcoming fourth edition of the CSS Pocket Reference (and thereafter CSS: The Definitive Guide) and didn’t plan to do anything public with them, but at this point, I figure what the heck.  Maybe they’ll be of interest to others.

I was especially interested by the results for list-style-type, where I found some small spots of support for various types in various browsers.  In contrast, WebKit supports most of the CSS3 types, so far as I can tell, though in my install several types were apparently mangled by a lack of appropriate fonts.

If you dig in, you’ll discover that the individual tests are all poured through some PHP.  The reason for this is that the base test pages (which are straight HTML; see for example the list-style-type base) include neither navigation links nor vendor prefixes.  That’s what the PHP handles.  It’s a bit clumsy, URL-wise, and that’s why the index page of the tests warns that the tests’ URLs could change in the future.  Not the index page: that will remain cool for as long as I have anything to say about it.  I just can’t swear off tinkering with the URLs of the tests for the time being.  It’s entirely possible that at some point in the future I’ll ice them down, but no guarantees.

I’m tossing these into the public sphere for three reasons.  The first is that they might be useful to other people, and I’m always in favor of sharing stuff that might be useful.  The second is that I may have committed grievous errors of fact, and many eyes make errors obvious.  If you find an error, please let me know.  I prefer that such reports be left as comments here since it lets many eyes evaluate the error reports too, but I’ll accept private mail as well.

The third is that it represents another turn of the wheel.  I started my CSS career building tests to see what browsers got right and wrong, and every so often I come back to that same fundamental act.  The other times I’ve done so, I’ve published what resulted.  This time, I’m publishing a little earlier and little more in the raw, so to speak, but it’s still the same impulse—and by now, it’s Tradition.

So I hope you enjoy, or at least find useful, these tests and whatever other tests get built in the future!

• CSS3 Tests was published on Friday, February 11th, 2011.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been fifteen replies.

I recently decided to create a CSS Editors Leaderboard, which is my attempt to rank the various editors of CSS modules based on the current process status of their modules, how current the modules are, and so on.  It’s kind of a turn of the wheel for me, given that I started out my CSS career with browser support leaderboards.  Now you can see who’s amassed the most spec points, and who’s made the most effective use of their time and energy.  Who knows?  Maybe some editors will try to game the system by pushing their specs along the process track.  That’d be just awful.

One thing of note: I decided to write the leaderboard script so that it directly parses an HTML file to figure out the rankings.  You can see the file yourself, if you like.  At the moment it’s just a bunch of dls, but at some point I suspect I’ll convert it to a table.  The advantage is that it’s easier for other people to fact-check the source data this way: just load it up in a browser.

I thought about just parsing specs directly but it seemed like overkill to load the entirety of the CSS2.1 module just to figure out the process status, publication date, and editor list.  And then do that same thing for every one of the 38 tracked modules.  This way I have the leaderboard and a central summary of the modules’ status, and hopefully the latter will be even more human-readable in the future.

Anyway, it was a fun little project and now it’s loose in the world.  Enjoy.

• CSS Editors Leaderboard was published on Friday, February 4th, 2011.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Standards, and W3C categories.
• There have been seven replies.

Kat and I are now triply parents.  Earlier today we welcomed Joshua David Meyer into our home and our hearts.

We’ve had this name ready ever since we started out to build a family almost a decade ago.  We chose Joshua to honor Kat’s late aunt Judy, an incredibly strong and brave woman who faced adversity with a smile.  The middle name, David, honors Kat’s grandmother Dot and is also the name of one of my best and oldest friends.

Carolyn and Rebecca are both incredibly excited to have a baby brother and are helping take care of him (and us) as much as they can.  I’ll obviously be a bit distracted during the settling-in phase of having a newborn in the house, but with any luck I’ll manage to get a few things out the door during naps.

• Welcome was published on Tuesday, February 1st, 2011.
• It was assigned to the Joshua category.
• There have been no replies.