Posts in the History Category

Yesterday, I finally cleaned out my old desk, which is now Kat’s desk, so she could make use of the drawers.  More than a decade’s worth of mementoes, knick-knacks, toys, scraps, and other oddities were there to be sifted.  It was like digging back through my own past, a sort of temporal archaeology.  There were even pieces of other men’s lives, like my father’s old Zeiss-Ikon camera, still in perfect working order, lent to me years ago and never reclaimed.  Since the desk itself originally belonged to a great-grandfather of mine, the sense of history surrounding the whole process was even heavier.

Not that it wasn’t fun to dig back into the past!  I threw out a whole bunch of stuff, of course, but all my old Animaniacs fast-food toys went to a good home, and I salvaged a number of wall signs whose origin is murky indeed.  So too I rescued some college-era photos, a box of stationery, assorted shoulder patches, and old conference passes.

And then, in a medium-size blue notepad with the name “Lysa” inexplicably written across its front in thick black marker, I found several pages of handwritten notes regarding HTTP 1.1, HTML 3.2, PICS, and several other technologies.  These were the notes I took sitting in the W3C track at WWW5—and there, in the middle of it all, were the notes I took as I encountered CSS for the very first time.  I checked the agenda for that conference, which was still with the conference pass, and discovered that the date for the presentation “Cascading Style Sheets and HTML” was Wednesday, 8 May 1996.  That was a good seven months before CSS1 was made a full Recommendation.

It’s a distinctly odd feeling to hold this loosely bound collection of paper in my hand and think about all that sprang out of that one, simple little page.  I was also amused to see that my notes, as minimal as they are, don’t validate (can you spot the error?)

There were other things rescued from the desk cleaning yesterday, of course.  There’s a box of memories sitting in a corner of my office now… but this one notebook made the whole experience worthwhile.  Just for a minute, as I flipped to that page, I remembered once more what it felt like to be completely blown away by a new technology and to know, beyond any doubt, that it was going to change my entire life for the better.  At the time, I just thought it would make my Webmastering job both simpler and more interesting, but even then, it was enough.  There was an incredible promise there, and I wanted more than anything to see where it led.

I still want that, even today.  For all that’s been learned, and all the things that have been done to make CSS the important piece of Web design it’s become, there is still a vast amount of uncharted territory.  I haven’t added anything to css/edge in quite some time, but the statement made there is still true.  We haven’t figured out everything CSS can offer us, even today, and as support improves and the specification is enhanced, we’ll be able to do still more.

I can hardly wait to see what’s next!

• Out of the Past was published on Monday, September 15th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS, History, and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.

I’m back from Los Alamos and out from under the worst of the e-mail avalanche.  Northern New Mexico is beautiful in its own way, although a touch too barren for my tastes.  But only a touch.  For a landscape junkie like me, the cliffs, river gorges, and mountains were definitely a potent mix.  The far better mix was the conversations with Jeff and Carrie about the Web, the world, and our lives.  Sometimes the best way to discover yourself is by talking to someone else.

The presentations the three of us gave at the Los Alamos National Laboratories seemed to be very well received, and the people there couldn’t be a nicer bunch.  Which seems a little odd, when you think about what they do there.  I subconsciously expected a bunch of white-coated square-jawed men with clipboards and cold eyes talking about the amazing potential of the atom to bring about world peace and the inevitable triumph of American science.  Perhaps I watched a few too many 1950’s-era science fiction movies as a kid.

In a post on Webdesign-L, Karl Dubost has reminded me just how smart Chris Lilley really is.  From a post Chris made to www-html in late May 1994:

As soon as images were allowed inline in HTML documents, the web became a new graphical design medium. Some people will just want to put out text, but some will want to apply graphical design skills and make a document….  If style sheets or similar information are not added to html, the inevitable price will be documents that only look good on a particular browser, at a particular window size, with the default fonts, etc.

Karl’s post arose in the context of a conversation about the concept of “graceful degradation,” which is the idea that a properly created document will be usable in older user agents, even if it doesn’t look quite the same.  (Well, okay, it’s a lot more than that, but in the context of Web design, that’s what most people mean.)  Karl rightly points out that the term needs to be replaced with something that doesn’t sound quite so bad.  Of his suggestions, I think the best is “graceful flexibility,” and it’s a term I intend to start using from now on.

I updated the Color Blender to accept three different CSS color value formats (four if you count shorthand hex as separate from regular hex).  Thanks to Steve Champeon and Holly Marie for spurring me to do so.  I can think of two more things to add to it—a swatch-picker as suggested by Roberto Díez, and a color-wheel type picker—but they probably won’t happen any time soon.

• Voices in the Wilderness was published on Friday, February 21st, 2003.
• It was assigned to the History and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.