Posts in the CSS Category

Chris Adamson has an interesting post over at the O’Reilly Network about code in books and articles.  In summation: should code be given a special license, separate from the actual text?

While CSS isn’t code, exactly, the same basic questions apply to the stuff I’ve written.  Let’s take my most recent title, More Eric Meyer on CSS.  It contains a copyright statement that says, in effect, you can’t reproduce the book’s text, in part or in whole, without permission.  There is no distinction there between the explanatory text (“Margin collapsing is an interesting problem in some cases, and here’s why, blah blah blah…”) and the styles.  Taken literally, the copyright statement says that you can’t re-use any of the CSS I created in your own designs.

This is clearly in opposition to what I think most of us would agree is the expectation, which is that you can use styles (or code) as you see fit but you can’t take the ‘narrative’ text and pass it off as your work.  But where’s the dividing line?  Suppose that, for whatever reason, you really like one of the designs in Project 4.  We can agree that you should be able to re-use the styles presented, but a whole design?  Is that fair?  I can imagine many arguments both for and against, many of them variants on the classic slippery-slope argument.

In my particular case, the situation is even less clear.  As anyone who drops by the book’s site will discover, the project files are freely available for anyone to download.  You aren’t even expected to own the book as a condition of using them.  That makes them less protected, I would think, than if they were on a CD that accompanied the book—but how much sense does that make?  Again, I can envision several arguments on both sides of the issue.  The same questions would arise for any author that provided code samples for download, as many do.

There’s also the question of what rights can or should be granted to the reader with regard to code.  I might hypothetically make the styles all freely available to anyone, but only under the condition that attribution be given to the source (either me, the book, or both).  Wouldn’t you, as a reader, find that rather annoying?  I would.  “You mean I have to give Eric credit just to use two CSS rules that create this cool effect?”

I’ve always operated on the principle that any markup or CSS I write about is fair game, because otherwise what would be the point of writing about how to use it?  I can see it now: “use of the CSS presented in this tutorial, including any derivative works, without the written consent of the author is prohibited.”  Yeah, right!  That would be something like a dictionary prohibiting you from using any words you look up, including all modifications and misspellings.

So should books contain an explicit license regarding use of the code?  If so, what kind?  I expect readers and publishers will have different viewpoints, although the more clueful publishers probably won’t be too far away from the typical reader perspective.  There’s a part of me that wonders why we even have to be explicit about this at all—after all, there’s been a sort of tacit acceptance of code re-use to date—but in a litigious DMCA world, this is an issue that probably has to be addressed sooner or later.

As I ponder the subject, I’m currently contemplating putting all my code samples under a Creative Commons ShareAlike 1.0 license, both now and into the future, just to make sure the bases are covered.  Then again, perhaps an explicit Public Domain license would make more sense.  Which one would be better, or is there a superior approach I haven’t considered?  Let me know.

• Code Constraints was published on Monday, June 14th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Books, CSS, and Tech categories.
• There have been eighteen replies.

Andrei fired off round two of “Gurus vs. Bloggers”, and good news!  I played on the guru team by proxy, and was defeated by Dave Shea‘s proxy, more or less as I’d hoped I’d have the chance to do after round one was played.  Andrei was nice enough to hem and haw about which one ought to win, but honestly, there wasn’t much contest.  The Zen Garden won two SXSW Web awards including Best In Show, after all, not to mention the awe and respect of Web design folks the world over.  css/edge, at best, earned awe and respect.  In any case, I am honored to have been so thoroughly owned by the man Andrei calls “one of [my] best students.”  Mr. Shea, I bow to you.

In his tongue-in-cheek commentary, Andrei said:

Maybe if Meyer had used orange for CSS Edge, because orange is after all the new black, I would be able to swing the vote the other way.

I don’t know—low-contrast orange doesn’t really seem much better than low-contrast blue, does it?

• Edged Out Of Contention was published on Friday, June 4th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Web categories.
• There have been eight replies.

Through a winding chain of links—it was, of all things, the result of an extended surf on the Web, and who does that any more?—I came across Cameron Moll‘s “80/20 and the design blogosphere“, where he listed the 20 people from whom he feels 80% of vital new media design information flows.  I was deeply flattered to be on the list, although I again feel weird about it.  I don’t give out design information, and meyerweb is certainly nowhere near as well-designed as many sites (including Cameron’s).  Heck, I don’t even talk about CSS all that much any more, despite numerous vows (public and personal) to do otherwise.  I suppose all the books and other writings allow me to coast into these lists, and that’s a nice feeling, but I’m starting to seriously ask myself what I’ve done for everyone else lately.

So I’ll throw it open to the crowd: what kind of information, new media design or otherwise, would you like to see from me?  What do you feel would earn me the right to stay in Cameron’s 80/20 list?  Post and ping, or contribute a comment.  Your choice!

(I have to shoot down one potential request now: I’m not going back to browser support charting.  Westciv does a decent job already, and as I wrote a while back on www-style, going any further is a massive undertaking.  And, to be honest, it’s mind-shatteringly dull and incredibly time-consuming.)

• Earning A Spot was published on Monday, May 24th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Web categories.
• There have been twenty-six replies.

Just in case you haven’t seen it yet, John Allsopp posted a nostalgic note about the early days of CSS.  If you want to know who I hung out with back in the day, John’s got most of the names right there for you, and links to many of them.  There’s even a link to the CSS Samurai page, which I thought was long dead, and was greatly amused to read.

To John’s recollections, I would add Chris Lilley, who’s since been much more involved in SVG and other things; and Susan Lesch, who’s now at the W3C but back then was at macvirus.com.  (There’s a reason I didn’t link to that address, by the way.  If you go, make sure you can block popups.)

A more recent event of note is that it was a year ago today that the CSS Zen Garden opened its gates to the world.  Congratulations on an incredible first year, Dave.  I’m honored to have been able to contribute to the Garden in that time, and eternally grateful (and a little jealous) that you created such an awesome resource.  It opened a lot of doors, and a lot more eyes and minds.

• Look Back In Awe was published on Friday, May 7th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS, History, and Web 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.

Oh, sure, Kat and I have a baby and suddenly everybody wants to get in on the act.  I mean, honestly, how unoriginal can you get?

Okay, all kidding aside: our deepest and most joyful congratulations to the Zeldmans and their soon-to-be-larger family.  I can personally attest that, as many people told me, becoming parents is one of the hardest and most amazing things they will ever experience.

Carolyn’s in the range of four and a half months old now, and appears to be developing very nicely.  She discovered her hands a couple of weeks back, and is now busily trying to sample the taste of every object she encounters.  She’s almost to the point of rolling over; she can get onto her side for a minute, and then she rolls back onto her back.  She’s also a stander: she’ll stand upright for ten or fifteen minutes, if someone’s willing to hold her steady for that long.  We put up the “bouncy seat” a couple of months early, and she absolutely loves it.  She doesn’t even sit upright yet.  The pediatrician was actually kind of impressed by the strength and head control she has at her age.

Of course, we know of a baby two weeks older than her who already has two teeth, and another that’s rolling over constantly and getting close to sitting up on his own.  So it’s not as though we have a super-baby (though she is, obviously, a super baby).  She’s just ahead of the curve in some respects, and no doubt behind in others, the same as every other baby.

All I know is, whenever she looks at me with her gray-blue eyes and she breaks into an enormous smile, I can’t help but think she’s the most perfect baby in the history of the universe… the same as any other parent.

Congratulations again to Jeff and Carrie!

• Little Bundles was published on Friday, April 16th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Carolyn, CSS, and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.

One of the great privileges of writing More Eric Meyer on CSS was having two wonderful technical reviewers: Porter Glendinning and Dave Shea.  Even better was the chance to have Dave create a CSS Zen Garden design, give it to me as a graphic comp, and creating the CSS needed to make it work.  I describe that process in detail in Project 10 of the book, but as a preview, the design is now available as—and here I take a deep breath to avoid giggling like a celebrity-struck schoolgirl—the one hundredth official Zen Garden design.  The photographs used in the design were all taken by me at the Cleveland Botanical Gardens, but the design itself is all Dave, baby.  Interestingly, I never told Dave where I’d taken the pictures, so the faint thematic echoes of 15 Petals and the Garden’s web site are coincidental.

I will say here and now that design #99, Wiggles the Wonderworm, is an utterly fantastic and delightful concept.  If I could, I’d switch his design with mine, so he could have the #100 slot.  Wiggles rocks my world.

As you can tell, the syndicate hasn’t yet silenced me.  In fact, I got a message from an operative deep inside their organization who says that his boss has met both Mallett and Watterson.  Obviously his boss is a part of the conspiracy.  I’ve let him know that he needs to be extra careful.  Trust no one!  I mean, look at today’s strip.  How much more C&H does it get?  Until next time, courage.

• 15 Petals was published on Wednesday, April 14th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Humor categories.
• There have been no 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.