From my comment queue, possibly the first time I feel a spammer is really speaking to me as a person:
Did u ever heard about CSS…? it will help your site.
Do tell, oh random anonymous stranger whose site URL crudely references the genitalia of older females! I wish to learn.
Among all the other stuff this past week, I let something slip off the radar: an interview with me over at the Lunartics blog. The interview was conducted via e-mail by Amy Armitage, who I briefly met last year at the Webmaster Jam Session in Dallas. It’s not your usual “why is CSS important” kind of interview; Amy likes to keep things fun while still covering serious questions. It’s definitely worth a read.
It also scoops news of a development I’ve never gotten around to mentioning: in October 2006, I was inducted as a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. It’s a pretty incredible honor, given that it’s an invitation-only body of 500 members including “David Bowie, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, Internet inventor and Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vinton Cerf, ‘Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening, Real Networks CEO Rob Glaser, and fashion designer Max Azria”. The fact that my name appears on the same list as those people is jaw-dropping enough. To me, it wasn’t the most stunning part by a long mile.
I’ll admit, though I’d heard of The Webbys, I assumed the IADAS was one of those name-collector groups, like those “Who’s Who in America” books where you pay to be listed. Instead, I found that the IADAS levies no membership fees, and I was deeply surprised and pleased to discover that they invite people based on their actual qualifications. How do I know? Because my welcoming letter didn’t praise my web design work. Instead, it cited my “dedication to promoting Web standards”, my “international recognition on the topics of HTML and CSS”, and proclaims that I’ve “helped inform excellence and efficiency on the Web”.
Yes, the text string “HTML and CSS” was actually in the letter.
It’s a little difficult to express how important this recognition is to me. See, most of the time, I’m introduced and perceived as an influential web designer, which is frankly insulting to actual web designers everywhere. If you aren’t reading this post via RSS, look around. Does this look like influential web design? Hell no. At best, we can call meyerweb’s design minimalist and maybe—maybe—possessed of a certain elegance. And it only took me five years and ripping off ideas from Khoi Vinh to get here!
But I’ve never claimed to be a designer. I think the perception that I am one arises because I get linked to from people who really are designers. I’ve always claimed to be a communicator. I’m someone who’s done his best to explain, promote, and advance the technologies that let designers do their work. I’ve invested tons of time and effort into making good web design easier without sacrificing clean and semantic markup. I wouldn’t say that work is done by any stretch, but there’s been a lot of progress. Sometimes I forget just how much.
And so, to be invited to join the IADAS not for what I’m usually thought to be, but actually for who I am—it’s an indescribable feeling. A fantastically good one, certainly! But not one I could describe no matter how many words I threw at the problem.
It’s a delicious irony, and I do so love my irony: my powers of communication fail me when I wish to express my feelings over being honored for my communicating, over all those years, my love of the web and my passion for getting it right and the inner workings of how to make that happen.
But I can at least say this:
Thank you. Thank you for coming to read my posts, for reading my books and articles, for listening to me speak. Thank you for being the other end of the conversation. Thank you for being open to what I have to say, and for responding with your insights and perspectives, all of which have changed me in untold ways. Thank you for making everything I’ve done and said and written about the web worth far more than what I put into it.
Thank you for making this honor possible.
Last Thursday, I came down from the office to discover a stack of five boxes on the front porch. Three were for Kat, who is one of those annoying people who plans way ahead for Christmas, and two others were my author copies of CSS Web Site Design (formerly “CSS Hands-On Training”). This is a title I did for lynda.com, and published by Peachpit, and it’s most tersely described as “Eric Meyer on CSS, but for beginners”. It’s also the hard-copy version of the video training title “CSS Site Design“, and includes all the videos and exercise files from the video title on a CD-ROM bundled with the book.
After I’d hauled all that into the front hallway, I grabbed my car keys and headed out the back door to run my errand. At which point I nearly fell over two more boxes, these containing my author copies of the third edition of CSS: The Definitive Guide from O’Reilly. This is of course an update of the second edition, which contains some updates based on the latest version of CSS 2.1, expanded selector coverage, updated compatibility notes taking IE7’s improvements into account, and corrected errata from the previous edition. It’s not a major update compared to the second edition, admittedly, but if you don’t already own the second edition, it’s well worth acquiring (if I do say so myself).
It’s a bit funny that both sets of books arrived on my doorstep the exact same day, considering that the two projects started out well separated, and gradually synched up. At first I was going to write one and then the other, but various complications set in and they started to interweave. I finished their final reviews with a whole lot of overlap—that was a fun couple of weeks—and now, the waves have fully amplified.
What really cracked me up was that the next day, I got packages from both Peachpit and O’Reilly, each containing a single copy of the respective books, and each containing a note along the lines of “Here’s your advance copy; the rest should arrive in a few weeks!”.
Cripes. In preparing to mention some upcoming appearances, I realized I’d never gotten around to mentioning a couple of events in the recent past; specifically, AEA Seattle and the Webmaster Jam Session. I’ll get to those in the next couple of posts, and then fire off a couple of reviews.
What I called you all here for, though, was to pass along news of an upcoming two-continent microtour. Yes! You can almost feel the white-hot spirit energy of this global adventure, can’t you? I know I can, and unless I’m very much mistaken, I see it in your eyes too.
It’s a special thing we’ve just shared. Don’t tell anyone else.
The festivities will start with my return to London (UK, not Ohio) for a two-day Carson Workshop on December 7th and 8th. You can learn more at the Carson Workshops site, of course. I hear tell that a goodly chunk of the limited seating has already been claimed. In the course of the two days, I’ll be leading an expedition into the very heart of CSS. From the darkest, thorniest jungles to the spectacular hidden vistas glimpsed only by a few lucky souls we will travel, and those who emerge alive will truly be a band of brothers and sisters.
Since I’ll already be in London on the date, might there be a stop by the BBC Backstage Bash? Could be. Could very well be.
From the sun-kissed shores of wild England, I’ll wing my way to verdant Boston for Web Design World. It will be there that I will spend half a day—said day being December 11th—presenting a condensed version of some parts of the content covered in London, an overland flight giving us an idea of where the previous week’s group blazed a mighty trail. Yes, I’d like to present it all, but since I have not (yet) fully asserted dominance over the flow of time, I have no way to fit two days into half a day. It would be like trying to fit a Danish prince inside a nutshell. No matter how you or he may espouse theories of some fabled infinite space to be ruled within that diminuitive husk, homey just won’t fit.
My work in Boston having been completed, I will make my way homeward at last, nearly a full week and many thounsands of miles after leaving it, tired but triumphant, ready to face the New Year and all the changes it will bring.
So now you know. And as well we know, knowing is half the battle.
(For those who might be in the know, a bonus prize to anyone who can identify the web site and author I was homage-ing in this post. Not parodying! No no! I’m not sure such a thing would be possible in any event.)
This morning I got word in my RSS feeds that Google has launched what they call “customized search engines” through Google Co-Op. As a test, I created a CSS search engine. Go ahead, try it out.
There are two ways to configure a custom search engine. One is to search the whole web but emphasize the sites you list. The other is to search only the sites you list. While the second might seem to be overly restrictive, the first doesn’t really seem very useful, at least for a CSS search engine. When I compared the “CSS search” to “Web search” results, they really didn’t differ all that much—in some cases, having the same ten results on the first page, but in a slightly different order. On occasion, the “Web search” ordering was actually more useful.
So I set up the CSS search to be restricted to the sites I listed, which I thought seemed relatively useful. Only whenever I run the search from meyerweb instead of within Google, I get the “whole Web” search instead of the “only my sites search”, which either means I’m doing something wrong or I’m just too early an adopter. Hopefully it’ll work as intended for you. (Update: it seems to be working as intended now.)
Anyway, I’m not about to pretend that the six sites I included constitute the entirety of sites with useful CSS information. Thus, I’ve set up the CSS search to be open to any volunteers. If you have a Google Co-Op account (which I think is just any old Google developer account, such as you might have created for Google Maps) or want to create one, you can add sites to the ‘approved’ list without any say-so on my part. Though I do have the power to boot sites that aren’t relevant, or too far out of date, or that look at me cross-eyed, or whatever. To do so, I think you click the “Edit this seach engine” link on my CSS Search home page and then click on “Collaboration” to volunteer. Or you might be able to go directly there. I have to accept volunteers, so kindly be patient if it takes me a day or three. And I’m going to simply reject any anonymous volunteers—sorry if that’s you.
For those that don’t have or want a Google account, feel free to suggest sites in the comments here. In terms of getting them actually added, you’ll be at the mercy of my free time; but then again, so am I.
A couple of weeks back, I was hanging out in a New York hotel lobby with Tantek, who was either working on his AEA slides or enhancing the overall usefulness of the web in his spare time; I’m not sure which. On the far wall, a plasma display ran CNN continually, softly, offering up such choice crawl text as “N. Korea Missile Test Fallout”. One of the stories running was about alleged plagiarism on the part of Ann Coulter.
We got into a brief discussion over whether such people should be rebutted or ignored. Tantek took the former position, whereas I took the latter. My stance is probably a holdover from my long years of Usenet and mailing-list participation, where one of my most iron-clad rules is “Don’t feed the trolls”. Better they starve for lack of attention, that’s how I see it. Perhaps this is a defensible strategy in the “real world”, and perhaps not, but I will freely admit that it’s one of my default behaviors.
Thus, my first instinct was to completely ignore John Dvorak’s screed about CSS. Mr. Dvorak is an admitted troll, and so my default tendency is to simply ignore him. But “troll” is, in my world, an alternate spelling for “fool”, and as Winston Churchill reminded us, one of the great lessons of life is to know that even fools are sometimes right.
So is Mr. Dvorak right? Not in what he has to say, no, but there is still something there worth hearing.
It turns out that none of his complaints about CSS are really valid, even when you consider only the ones that have a factual basis. Sure, he can complain about the cascade being confusing, but that’s like criticizing Windows because of all those stupid windows that open up everywhere and get in the way of the desktop wallpaper. It’s an inherent feature of the system: either accept it and move on, or reject it and walk away, but don’t waste your time complaining about it. The best part, of course, is where he blames CSS for inconsistent browser implementations, which is rather like criticizing Microsoft because Windows doesn’t run properly on a computer whose processor isn’t compatible with Intel’s architecture.
But step back and let your eyesight blur a bit, and the shape of a worthwhile point begins to emerge. The closest Mr. Dvorak gets to expressing it, possibly by accident, is this sentence: “Can someone explain to me exactly what kind of ‘standard’ CSS is, anyway?”
I could do so, of course, as could most of you, but that’s not the issue. What we’re seeing here is the initial reaction of a CSS newbie, not too different from many others when they first begin to style, and all brought closer to home by the high-profile nature of the newbie. (Whatever you may think of Mr. Dvorak, he has prominence in the industry.) CSS is not as hard as some make it out to be, but it isn’t easy as cake, either.
A good part of that problem is the natural expectation that all browsers should act the same. It’s a strange thing to expect if you’ve been in the field long enough, since browsers have never really been consistent on anything, from HTML error handling to PNG support. But someone who’s coming in fresh is almost certainly going to expect that if they do things a certain way, the result just works. Why would one expect anything less?
That’s why the Web Standards Project was founded, of course; and its existence, history, and current efforts put paid to Mr. Dvorak’s assertion that nothing is being done. As I’ve said, none of his individual points are on target. What his outburst does is remind us of the problem to which so many have grown numb, and which we still—for all the progress that has been made—face on a daily basis. Consequently, it reminds us to keep advocating for greater consistency between browsers, to praise the efforts of browser makers in that direction, and to help them correct their course when they move in the wrong direction—and to do so constructively, not destructively. For while we may gain insights from the rantings of trolls, we should never be so foolish as to adopt their tactics.
I’ll get back to the whole IE7 thing in a day or three. Sorry to start the conversation and then go silent, but I’ve recently learned two things.
So of course we’d set things up to have both happen the same week. With another conference on my schedule for the end of the same week as AEA Atlanta.
Anyway, as I say, I’ll get back to the blogging Real Soon Now. In the meantime, I have two new appearances to announce (in chronological order).
27-28 April 2006 – Iceweb 2006 – Reykjavik, Iceland
I’ll be presenting “The One True Layout?”, which will be a detailed look at the pros and cons of techniques debuted in Alex Robinson’s article. A bunch of other big names will be there as well, despite which I got top billing on the site’s speaker list. Ha! Take that, Mr. Dave “I’m Too Sexy For The Web” Shea!
12 May 2006 – Carson Workshops – London, England
This will be an updated version of the full-day seminar “Professional CSS XHTML Techniques”. Seating on these is quite limited, so you might want to register early and often. Or at least early.
That’s it for now. I hope to be back soon.