Posts in the Writing Category

The new weekly web-design ‘zine Vitamin (a.k.a. Yet Another Major New Project From The Carsons) launched earlier this week to generally positive notice from the design community.  I was glad to see this for three reasons.

1. I wrote one of the launch articles, “Making Popular Layout Decisions“.  Although now that I think about it more, maybe that should have been “Making Unpopular Layout Decisions”.  Anyway, it’s a commentary piece that will probably annoy a few hard-core purists.  That always makes for a success in my book.
2. I’m a member of the Advisory Board, so I have some stake in seeing it do well.  I’d hate to have things go badly due to my being a bad advisor!  Especially since I’m kind of new to the advisory game.
3. It demonstrates that there’s plenty of room in the web design community for such resources.  Not that there’s anything wrong with what we have—after all, I love A List Apart so much, I wrote the markup!—but it’s a sign of renewed health and interest in the field.

Oh, and speaking of Carson projects, I hear this May’s Professional CSS XHTML Techniques workshop is almost sold out—so if you’re interested, better get cracking.  (The same is true for AEA Chicago, as it happens.)

• Taste the Vitamin was published on Thursday, April 20th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Web and Writing categories.
• There have been seven replies.

Once was lost, now is found: “Images, Tables, and Mysterious Gaps” has been resurrected from the Great Bit Bucket Beyond and given new life on Mozilla.org.  In fact, it looks like just about all the technical articles written by me and the other members of TEDS are available.  Look through the full list of CSS articles, for example.  You can dig into any number of topic areas from the main page of the Documentation section.  (Scroll down to the “Mozilla Developer Center Contents” headline.)

Some other popular articles from my Netscape days gone by:

• Consistent List Indentation
• Defining Cross-Browser Tooltips
• Issues Arising From Arbitrary-Element Hover
• Understanding Underlines
• Liberty! Equality! Validity!

So far as I’ve been able to determine, some of the less technical pieces, like the interviews with Doug Bowman and Mike Davidson, are not available.  Not now, anyway.  Perhaps one day that too will change.

• DevEdge Content Returns was published on Thursday, March 2nd, 2006.
• It was assigned to the History, Standards, and Writing categories.
• There have been six replies.

You asked for it, you begged for it, you demanded it: A List Apart is sporting a working print style sheet for the articles.  Want to know more about it?  Read “ALA’s New Print Styles“, my new article over at ALA.

Believe it or not, that’s only my second ALA article ever, and the first one was the classic “Going To Print“.  Maybe one of these days I should write an ALA article that doesn’t involve ink on dead trees.

Of course, if I stick to the interval established by my first two ALA articles, the next one won’t appear until 2008 early 2009… so I guess I have some time to think about it.

• ALA’s New Print Styles was published on Tuesday, September 20th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Writing categories.
• There have been four replies.

I was recently honored with a request to contribute to Design In-Flight magazine, and so the latest issue contains a piece titled “Stripped Down Style”.  The article is an expanded version of Really Undoing html.css, accompanied by some screen shots and containing a copy of Tantek’s undohtml.css.  The magazine also includes an article from Jon Hicks about his icon design process, focusing on the icons he’s created for NetNewsWire 2; a piece from Keith Robinson on public speaking; a how-to guide for mapping out the structure of your style sheets by Yasuhisa Hasegawa; and a good deal more.

It does cost a few bucks to get a copy the magazine, but they really are a very few—certainly several less than you’d spend on a comparable magazine in print.  You can also get a yearly subscription of four issues for ten bucks.  Having read the first two issues of the magazine, I’m definintely feeling an urge to subscribe.  Editor Andy Arikawa has proven a master at pulling together some great content from interesting authors, and at covering a diverse set of topics.

I must also admit to some amusement at how the title of this issue, “Not Your Father’s CSS”, echoes (most likely coincidentally) the title of my radio show.

• Stripped Down Style was published on Sunday, October 17th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

Andy King, author of the excellent Speed Up Your Site and purveyor of fine content at the new Optimization Week, has posted a very nice review of More Eric Meyer on CSS.  I think this might be the first official review of the book, and if he posts it over at Amazon it will very likely be the first review there as well be one of the first few reviews over there (someone posted the first review some time today!).

According to Andy, Jeffrey Zeldman (who just launched a superfine redesign over at The Daily Report) and I “actually make standards sexy.”  Oh, yes, big boy… mark up my content, you style stud, you…

Okay, I promise never to do that again.

If there are other reviews out there and I’ve missed them, please let me know!

• MEMoC Under Review was published on Monday, May 3rd, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Books, CSS, Standards, and Writing categories.
• There have been seven replies.

I got my first paper copy of More Eric Meyer on CSS this morning, so I had to accelerate my update process for the companion site; the project files are now online.  Apparently on many machines, the cover and site colors are a startling dark pink, which isn’t the intent.  On my machine, the color is a deep red, as is the actual book.  Imagine a fire engine made out of tomato soup—that’s pretty much the shade of red.

Either way, it’s still fairly startling.

It’s kind of a weird feeling to have two books come out at almost the same time.  CSS:TDG, Second Edition, arrived just two weeks ago.  Now here’s MEMOC, forming something of a weird acronym duet.  So now I have this small stack of two new books.  The covers are still shiny and creaseless.  They have that hot-off-the-presses crispness.  I almost hate to open them.  I’m always afraid I’ll break their spines, and then I won’t be able to move them any more.

• Wow, Is My Book Red! was published on Monday, April 12th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Books, CSS, and Writing 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.

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.