Posts in the CSS Category

This past weekend, the folks at O’Reilly and I wrapped up the final edits and adjustments to Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition.  The in-stock date is near the end of this month, so it ought to be physically sitting on shelves by the beginning of April, maybe sooner.  The page count listed on the O’Reilly page (as I write this) is an early estimate and too high; the actual page count will be closer to 550 pages.  There are a few reasons for this drop in pages:

• The support charts have been dropped.  When the first edition came out, it made sense to include that kind of information in an appendix, so we did.  As I recently wrote on www-style, the world is much different now, and the day of nifty support charts may well have passed.  In the CSS realm, anyway.  To even present a simple yes/no support chart for CSS2 would have been a dozen pages long, and a nuanced chart with notes would easily have run five times that long.  I still have notes and warnings about particularly egregious problems sprinkled through the text, though.
• The “CSS In Action” and “Look Ahead” chapters were also dropped.  There is plenty information available these days on how to actually use CSS, so we decided not to be redundant.  As for looking ahead, even a high-level overview of where CSS3 is headed could be a hundred pages long, and out of date the minute we printed it.  Better to wait and see where things end up than make a lot of ill-informed guesses.
• By rearranging the way information was presented, I was able to cut a lot of redundancies that bedeviled the first edition.  I also cut out some material that seemed important back in 1999, but has long since become irrelevant (like notes about what IE3 does or doesn’t do).
• The figure count has been scaled back.  There are still a few hundred figures throughout the book, but I went to some effort to combine several points into a single figure when I could, and not illustrate every little point I made.  You really only need to see so many examples of “boldface text,” you know?
• The text doesn’t spend time on things that were in CSS2 but aren’t in CSS2.1, and that nobody will likely ever support.  This means that some paged-media properties like marks weren’t described, and I didn’t waste time on the CSS2 marker-styling features since they will almost certainly die out and be replaced by a different approach in CSS3.  I did cover properties like font-size-adjust and text-shadow, but not in major detail.

So the second edition is an update of about 380 pages of the first edition, once you subtract out the stuff that was cut.  Every chapter of the first edition was reviewed and, in most cases, significantly overhauled even if it wasn’t expanded (for example, the Fonts chapter didn’t gain a lot, but it was still reworked to reduce the number of figures needed and to clarify some points).  There are four all-new chapters, five chapters with significant additions or revisions, and five more that were lightly to moderately revised.  So it’s practically a whole new book.

That’s even more true of the book I have coming out in mid- to late April from New Riders: More Eric Meyer on CSS, a sequel to Eric Meyer on CSS.  And when I say “sequel,” I really mean it: this is a collection of ten entirely new projects, so it is not a new edition of the older book.  You can own one without the other, although of course you should buy both!  Baby needs a new pair of shoes, after all.  (Okay, that’s a lie; she’s too little to be wearing shoes.  But you know what I mean.)  I’ll have more details as they become available.

• Making Book was published on Monday, March 8th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Books, CSS, and Writing categories.
• There has been one reply.

I freely admit that I’m kind of a zealot when it comes to words and text—heck, this quiz classified me as a “grammar fuhrer.” (Note: the rating of “M” for the linked quiz may be too weak; “A” might be better.  The results you get may well offend you terribly.  Consider yourself warned.)  I love to read, and wish I could do it more often.  I enjoy writing, for that matter, because there’s a sublime joy in crafting the right sequence of words and creating the right tone as a result.  (Speaking of writing, I’ll have some things to say about that tomorrow.)  In what I regard as an exceedingly rare moment of lucidity on Rush Limbaugh’s part—perhaps he’d been off the drugs for a few days—he once said, “Words mean things.”  I absolutely agree, and not just in the narrow sense.  To me, the right words mean something far more than a string of communicative markers.  They create a meaning that is much greater than the sum of the parts.  The right words at the right time can literally change a life.

I say all that to frame what I’m going to say next.  The Man In Blue recently posted some thoughts on the use of text in Web design—or, more precisely, his opposition to its use for branding purposes.

By utilising run-of-the-mill text to render your identity, it makes it very hard to distinguish yourself from anyone else  delivering a message.  Granted, usage of plain text can itself be an identity, but I think that  Eric Meyer has pretty much cornered the market on that one.

I’m not sure if that’s meant as a compliment or a criticism, but it actually doesn’t matter.  I took it as a compliment, and I think the things I said above help explain why.  Still, I’m going to speak in some defense of using “plain” text for design.  Not a full defense, because Mr. Blue (a.k.a. Cameron Adams) is quite correct: branding is important, and visual identity is an important part of that branding.  As he says, Coca-Cola spends millions every year on branding.  I’m sure Pepsi does the same, as do a great many other companies.  As they should.  He goes on to say:

Although it might pain the purists, sometimes only an image will do.

He couldn’t be more right.  It makes a lot more sense for me to share a picture of Carolyn smiling at her mommy than it does to try to describe the same thing.    If I were in charge of Amazon.com or Wired or some other branded organization, there’s no way I’d replace the logo with plain text.  Besides, an img with alt text is as accessible as plain text—a little longer to download, but not enough to make a significant difference.

For me, I stick to text because I’m not a visual designer.  I don’t have a CD full of fonts that I can use to make my text look different, graphically or otherwise, and I don’t have the patience to search free font resources to find one.  It doesn’t make sense for me to spend time flailing toward what would probably be an amateurish result when I  can just style some text and move on.

But that doesn’t mean that I settle for the default presentation of text, either.  An example is the “Cut your costs…” text at the top of Complex Spiral Consulting’s main page.  The relevant bits of its CSS are:

font: bold 166% Arial;
letter-spacing: -1px;

Yep, just boldfaced largish Arial—but the negative letter-spacing pulls the letters together just a touch, and significantly alters the visual impact of the text, making it seem weightier than normal.  Conversely, a positive letter-spacing would spread text apart, giving it a more open feel.  Most visual designers grit their teeth over this kind of thing, because it’s the crudest form of kerning imaginable.  True enough, but it still has a desirable effect, and typically one that’s underexploited.

The other reason I stick to text is that it’s almost infinitely more flexible than raster graphics like GIF and JPEG.  If I decide to resize the “meyerweb.com” in the masthead, all I have to do is fiddle with a line of CSS.  For that matter, I do change the size of that text on sub-pages, just as I do the masthead itself.  I can also change the text color to suit the masthead graphic.  For every one of the 26 mastheads I’ve created (this week’s is #6), I’ve changed the text color to blend better with the background.  Doing this was, again, a change of a couple of lines of text.  It would be even better if RGBA color values were widely supported, so I could make the text colored and translucent, but never mind that now.  (Side note to Dean Edwards: how about adding RGBA support to IE7?)

And, of course, the user can resize text, which I regard as a benefit, although a lot of designers regard it with pure horror.  If I had the name of this site as a graphic, then in any browser except Opera, resizing the content display would leave the graphic text unchanged.  That bugs me.  If there were universal vector-graphic support, say for SVG, then I could use it to create any font-and-logo combination I was able to dream up (or hire someone to create for me).  Even with the widespread availability of the Adobe SVG plugin, it’s still not enough.  I know, beyond any doubt, that a Web browser will support text rendering.  I don’t have the same confidence about SVG or even Flash, both of which can be scaled.

So I stick with text.  Realize that this is not what I would tell a corporate client to do.  When I worked with Macromedia, I didn’t tell them that they should replace their logo graphic with plain text stating “Macromedia,” and it wouldn’t even have occured to me.  If I were to work with Adobe or Microsoft or Apple or Red Hat or anyone who’d established a visual identity based around an image, I wouldn’t even consider telling them to replace it with plain text.  I’d agitate for sensible alt text, of course.

But for this site, or for Peter‘s site—both of which are personal sites—I don’t see anything wrong with using text.  (Then again, I guess I wouldn’t, having a corner on this particular market and all.)  In a lot of ways, I think it’s preferable, reducing bandwidth consumption and server hits.

And, y’know… it’s text.  C’mon, everybody, sing it with me:

Text is natural, text is good Not everybody loves it But everybody should

Or, if you groove to an older, smoother beat:

I can tell you, darling, that it’s textual healing Mark up, mark up, mark up, mark up, let’s design tonight Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, text will do it right

Thankyew!  Try the veal.

• Textual Healing was published on Sunday, March 7th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been no replies.

Back in January, I reacted to Peter Nederlof‘s whatever:hover by musing that it would be nice to see behaviors used to extend IE in other useful ways, like adding generated content support and so on.  Dean Edwards, regardless of whether he saw what I had to say, is doing that and more with his in-progress IE7 behavior suite.  Can you say, “will add support for attrribute selectors, multiclass selectors, and adjacent-sibling selectors to IE/Win?”  Oh yeah… I thought so.  And that’s just the beginning.  He has generated content on his list of things that will be supported, and a whole lot more besides.  The behavior is currently alpha, but it’s everything I could possibly have hoped for and more.  I’m going to be keeping a close eye on Dean’s work, and will be putting it to use as it moves out of beta.

In a similar vein, Dean also created an XBL binding to let Gecko-based browsers use Microsoft behaviors.  I think he just might be a genius.  Thankfully, he’s using his powers for good instead of evil.

Hopefully, I can get one of you XSLT gurus to do the same on my behalf.  I have a problem that’s proven beyond my ability to grasp.  Basically, I have a list of events that include start and end dates; here’s the basic markup that drives it.  I can get a list of upcoming events, no problem; I just pass in information about the current date when I run the XSLT and do comparisons.  What I need is a list of recent events, where “recent” is defined as occuring within the past three months, even if those months straddle a New Year.  I also want to get at least the most recent event even if it didn’t happen within the last three months.  And, of course, I want any results sorted in reverse chronological order.  I cannot figure out how to do all that in XSLT.  Any pointers or takers for this one?  I could really use some help.

(Yeah, yeah, doing it with some database or other would be a snap.  I’m trying to do it in XSLT.  Think of it as a creative design constraint.)

On a totally different note, here’s an interesting pair of articles from SF Gate: Gay marriage momentum stuns both backers and foes and Where Is My Gay Apocalypse?  Thanks to Jeff Veen and Simon Willison for the pointers.

• Hack and Slash was published on Saturday, March 6th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Culture, Standards, and XSLT categories.
• There have been no replies.

Okay, maybe Tantek’s right and the CSS I devised yesterday wasn’t the greatest (note to self: avoid writing journal entries at 4:45am).  And yes, it would be more elegant, at least on the markup side, to use the href values to determine how to style links.  It feels a touch clumsy, for some reason, maybe because the selectors end up being so long and I’m used to short selectors.  Go check out what he has to say and suggestions for better selectors, and while you’re at it go take a look at substring selectors to get ideas for how to do even better.  (I don’t think anyone supports *= yet, so you’re likely to have to use ^= instead.)

Back in high school, my best friend Dave and I devised a scenario where water shortages in the American southwest became so severe that states literally went to war with each other over water rights and access, fragmenting the United States in the process.  It never really went much of anywhere, just an idea we kicked around, and that I thought about trying to turn into a hex-based strategic wargame but never did.  It’s always lurked in the back of my head, though, the idea of climate-driven warfare.

According to Yahoo! News, a Pentagon report asserts that climate change is a major threat to national security; well, actually, to global security.  And that if the global climate crossing a “tipping point,” the changes will be radical and swift.  In such a situation, economic upheaval will be the least of our concerns—we’ll be more worried about adding to the climate shifts with the aftereffects of nuclear exchanges.

I actually read about this on Fortune.com a few weeks ago, and although now you have to be a member to read the full article at Fortune, there’s a copy at Independent Media TV.  The Fortune article characterizes the report as presenting the possible scenarios if global climate shifts occur, but not claiming that they are happening or will happen.  It also says that the Pentagon agreed to share the unclassified report with Fortune, whereas the Yahoo! News article says the report was leaked after attempts to hush it up.  For that matter, the Yahoo! News article makes it sound like the report claims that The Netherlands will definitely be uninhabitable by 2007, and so on.  According to the Fortune article, that was one aspect of a scenario, not a concrete prediction.  This is probably due to the Yahoo! News article being a summary of an article in The Observer, which is a production of The Guardian and claims to be the “best daily newspaper on the world wide web.”  Uh-huh.

So I guess I’m saying read the Fortune article, as it gives more information and takes a more balanced tone—not that it sounds any less disturbing, really.  The fact that the report was commissioned at all suggests that the subject is being taken seriously at the Pentagon, which is not exactly a gathering place for leftist wackos.  I’ll be very interested to see what reaction, official or otherwise, is triggered by this report in the weeks to come.  My fear is that it doesn’t matter any more, that whatever accusatory words might get thrown around will just be insignificant noise lost in the rising wind.

• Gathering Stormclouds was published on Friday, February 27th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Politics, and XFN categories.
• There have been no replies.

If you thought XFN or VoteLinks were the last (or only) word on lightweight semantic link annotation, think again.  Tantek writes about the idea of adding a license value to indicate a link that points to licensing terms.  In his post, the expression of this idea is centered around Creative Commons (CC) licenses, but as he says, any license-link could be so annotated.  Apparently the CC folks agree, because their license generator has been updated to include rel="license" in the markup it creates. Accordingly, I’ve updated my CC license link for the Color Blender to carry rel="license", thus making it easier for a spider to auto-discover the licensing terms for the Color Blender.

Tantek also said of the idea of applying CSS to documents that uniquely styles license-links:

I wonder who will be the first to post a user style sheet that demonstrates this.

Ooo, me, me!  Well, not quite.  I don’t have a complete user stylesheet for download, but here are some quick rules I devised to highlight license links.  Add any of them to your user stylesheet, or you can use these as the basis for your own styles.  (Sorry, but they won’t work in Internet Explorer, which doesn’t support attribute selectors.)

/* simple styles */
*[rel~="license"] {font-weight: bold;}
*[rel~="license"] img {border: 3px double; color: inherit;
  padding: 1px;}

/* add a "legal" icon at the beginning of the link */
*[rel~="license"]:before {content: url(legal.gif);}

Here’s my question: should the possible values be extended?  Because I’d really like to be able to insert information based on what kind of license is being referenced.  For example, suppose there were a c-commons value for rel; that way, authors could declare a link to be rel="c-commons license".  Then we could use a rule like:

*[rel~="c-commons"]:before {content: url(c-commons.gif);}

…thus inserting a Creative Commons logo before any link that points to a CC license.  At the moment, it’s highly likely that the only rel="license" links are going to point to CC licenses, but as we move forward I suspect that will be less and less true.  I hope we’ll soon see some finer grains to this particular semantic extension.

If you don’t like using generated content for whatever reason, you could modify the rule to put the icon in the background instead, using a rule something like this:

*[rel~="c-commons"] {background: url(c-commons.gif) no-repeat;
  padding-left: 15px;}

The usual reason to avoid generated content is that IE doesn’t support it, but then IE doesn’t support attribute selectors either, as I mentioned.  So don’t add any of these rules to an IE user stylesheet.  Use Firefox, Safari, Opera, or one of the other currently-in-development browsers instead.

In other news, I was tickled pink (or maybe a dusky red) to see that for sol 34, one of the “wake-up” songs for the Spirit team was The Bobs’ Pounded on a Rock.  My hat’s off to you, Dr. Adler!  I’ve been listening to that particular album recently, mostly to relearn the lyrics.  I’ve been singing to Carolyn when I feed her, and some favorites of ours are Plastic or Paper, Now I Am A Hippie Again, Corn Dogs, and of course Food To Rent.  It’s awfully cute that she smiles at me when I sing to her, mostly because I know one day she’ll grow up, learn about things like “being on key,” and stop smiling when I sing.

In the meantime, though, she’s perfectly happy to rock on!

• License To rel was published on Thursday, February 26th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Carolyn, CSS, semantic web, and XFN categories.
• There have been no replies.

Okay, so I can’t count.  I claimed yesterday that there were three new XFN tools, and then listed four.  Plus I missed one.  So… among our many XFN tools are rubhub; Rubhub It; Autoxfn; the MT template; Daniel Glazman‘s Nvu, which supports the editing of XFN values on links as part of the UI; and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.

Based on the feedback to my question yesterday, it seems the #1 reason to link to your Amazon wish list is to help out family members who can’t seem to remember what you like whenever a birthday rolls around.  The other reason given was to provide a window into your interests, which is felt to help foster a sense of familiarity in what can sometimes seem an impersonal medium.  Fair enough.  I did something along those lines when I added the “Reading” feature (with archive) to my personal page.  Perhaps the only real difference is that I’m giving a current and backward glace at my interests, whereas the wish list link provides a forward look.

A couple of people also wrote to say that they actually have had random passers-by send them something off of the wish list, sometimes in thanks for a favor they’d done online, and that it was pretty neat.  I’m not sure I’d feel the same way, but I thought I’d pass along their feelings on the matter.

Speaking of passing things along, I promised that I’d summarize the suggestions I received regarding books presenting reasonable arguments for the conservative point of view.  Here’s the summary.

• Letters to a Young Conservative by Dinesh D’Souza
• Radical Son by David Horowitz
• The Content of Our Character by Shelby Steele
• The Death of Right and Wrong by Tammy Bruce
• First Principles: A Primer of Ideas for the College-Bound Student by Hugh Hewitt
• The Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the Fall of Man by J. Budziszewski
• A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat by Zell Miller

I also received e-mail from liberals who had been looking at the same issue, and wanted to mention some books they thought were good.  They are:

• Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell (for a look at both sides)
• The 2% Solution by Matthew Miller
• The Politics of Rich and Poor and other books by Kevin Philips

Please note that I have not read any of the books I just listed, and so am neither recommending nor condemning any of them.  Similarly, I’m passing along an unchecked recommendation for The Weekly Standard, not to be confused with The Weekly Standards.

Those of you more interested in the latter of those two links will probably also be interested in the Web Standards Awards, with three awards to be given every month.  You can submit any site for consideration, whether it be your work or someone else’s, but be sure to check the competition criteria first.  The first three winners are already listed on the site.  Check them out—there’s some great work there—and then go check out Wasabicube.  It’s elegant, lovely, and I love the current-page effect in the sidebar.  Now I want to redesign meyerweb again, except if I did it would be a ripoff of Peter’s design.  So I’d probably better refrain.

• Confess! Confess! was published on Wednesday, February 11th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Politics, and XFN categories.
• There have been no replies.

According to a correspondent, the Redesign Watch and Platelets columns don’t actually sit side by side in Linux, but instead the Platelets drop down to start after the end of Redesign Watch.  This is, apparently, consistent across his various Linux browsers, including IE/Win (using crossover).  I’m not sure I can explain this.  The widths of the two divs that contain those modules are set to 9.5em and 5.5em, respectively, and they have neither margins nor padding (nor side borders).  Add them together, and you get 15em, the exact width value of div#extra.  I was going to claim a rounding error, except it’s happening in all his browsers, so now I’m thinking maybe a font thing.  I might suspect that the Platelets float is expanding its width to enclose the content, except explicit-width floats shouldn’t change width even if its content won’t fit.  IE/Win might do that, but I wouldn’t expect it from Firebird/Mozilla, which apparently also has the problem.

As with any experiment, the design here will probably slowly evolve as I run into such things.  As an example, I may adjust the widths of the two modules slightly, perhaps to 9.25em and 5.75em, just to see if it causes more problems or not.  I knew that, in setting widths so closely to each other and to their inherent content widths, I was taking a risk.  I don’t see the risk as any greater than using a table, though: if I did drop those modules into a two-cell table, then the content might push the table to be wider, thus having it stick out of the sidebar entirely.  That would be fairly awful.  So, as usual, it’s all about tradeoffs.  Here, I traded away “always stay next to each other” to get “always stay within the sidebar.”

As silly as this progression of creeping fixes might seem, it’s nothing compared to what Morbus Iff went through in an attempt to make Panther act the way he wanted it to act, and indeed the way Jaguar acted.  I suspect there are similar tales of woe from any major power user of any operating system, or any technology for that matter.  The more you know, the easier it is to get yourself trapped by unexpected changes.

For example, there have been some problems with the CSS validator of late; Mr. Zeldman has all the details.  As a result, there’s been some confusion here and there about the validity of the Box Model Hack.  Let me be clear up front: the hack is valid.  It always was, and always will be unless the CSS grammar undergoes some fairly radical changes.  This is an entirely different question than whether or not you should use it, or any other hack—that’s much less clear.  I’m not saying that the hack is Good or Bad.  I’m saying that it is completely valid according to the CSS grammar.

Historical note: the Box Model Hack was derived from test p.twentyb in section 7.1 of the CSS1 Test Suite.

Here’s the heart of the matter, the part that causes most people to assume that the hack isn’t valid:

voice-family: ""}"";

I know, it looks like a burst of line noise, or maybe a regexp (but I repeat myself).  It’s still quite valid.  It’s an attempt to supply a voice-family value of "}", while quoting that value.  This is analagous to:

font-family: "New Century Schoolbook";

Now suppose we had a font family named Joe "Average" Public, with the quotes being a part of the name.  We’d likely want to quote the name when making it part of a value.  Thus, we’d need to escape the quotation marks that are in the family name itself, like so:

font-family: "Joe "Average" Public";

In order to keep the quotes in the name from breaking the value up, they’ve been escaped using a back-slash.  That’s part of the CSS grammar.  In that light, then, reconsider the name "}".  If it’s to be quoted, then the quotes in the family name have to be escaped.  Thus, highlighted part of the following example is the escaped voice family name:

voice-family: ""}"";

Therefore: a valid hack.  Again, I’m making no claims that using the hack, or indeed any hack, is a good idea or a bad idea.  I just wanted to make clear how this particular hack works, and that it conforms fully to the CSS grammar.

This is at any rate better than the recent FrontPage ad that’s making the rounds of standards-aware folks.  I’ll just point to Dave Shea‘s post, which contains both a link to the ad in question and a useful hint to understanding why it’s so funny.

• It’s Always Something Else was published on Saturday, February 7th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

Anyone visiting the main page of meyerweb with IE6 in the last fifteen hours (it’s now about 1300 EST) may have noticed the sidebar was intruding into the main content column, and generally looking icky.  The problem has now been fixed.  It happened thanks to, of all things, a bug in IE/Win’s rendering engine.  (Gasp! No!  How can this be?)

Here’s what happened.  I added the “Redesign Watch” and “Platelets” lists to the sidebar, which is actually marked with an id of extra in the source because it’s what I regard as extra material; it comes after the page’s content in the source.  I wanted the two lists to be side by side, and here’s how I originally did it:

#extra #redesigns {float: left; width: 9.5em;}
#extra #platewatch {margin-left: 9.5em;}

Simple enough, or so you’d think.  Instead, this caused IE6 to push the sidebar about half an em to the left, which is what led to the overlap.  The (previous) link at the bottom of the Platelets column was also way out of joint.  If I removed the two lists, then everything went back to normal.  So clearly IE/Win was having trouble with the floats, or perhaps with floats inside a positioned element.  At any rate, it was the new material that was triggering a bug.

I seriously considered doing this:

#extra>#redesigns {float: left; width: 9.5em;}
#extra>#platewatch {margin-left: 9.5em;}

By using the child-selection combinator (>), which IE/Win doesn’t understand, I could have entirely hidden both rules from IE/Win.  That would have meant the Redesign Watch and Platelets lists would simply follow one another, as Destinations does Navigation, because none of the floating or margin-modification would have been allowed to confuse Trident (IE/Win’s layout engine).  This solution, while practical, didn’t really satify me, so I decided to try another approach.  Perhaps floating both elements will be sufficient, I thought.  So:

#extra #redesigns {float: left; width: 9.5em;}
#extra #platewatch {float: right; width: 5.5em;}

It worked: the two lists ended up side by side as I wished, and the sidebar was no longer pushing its way into the main content column.

This should not have been a real surprise to me, as I’d been aware that IE/Win has trouble with floats overlapping the margins of normal-flow elements that follow them in the document source.  I just forgot, which I seem to do pretty regularly—it’s the one IE/Win bug I can’t seem to permanently store in long-term memory.  I have some hopes that writing it up will help affix it in my brain, in addition to helping out anyone who’s had similar problems with their layouts.

Thanks to The Ferrett for pointing out the layout problem, so I could track down and fix it.  I hadn’t sworn at IE enough this week anyway.

I also rediscovered Explorer’s lack of support for the keyword inherit.  So the “previous” link in the Platelets column will use a monospace font in IE.  Other browsers will properly see it in the site’s default font (Arial, as of this writing).  I could write a rule or two to make the display more visually consistent, but I decided against it.  In this case, I’ll accept the visual evidence of limitations in IE over needlessly complicating my CSS.

Oh, by the way… did you notice that I added HTML+CSS redesign and license-plate information to the sidebar?  My personal page also has a new sidebar feature, one which will be of particular interest to anyone who wants to know what I’m reading in my few spare moments.  These are all the result of my working on creating “blogmark”-type data structures and pushing them live via XSLT (<shudder />).  I haven’t bothered to set up individual RSS feeds for them, but it wouldn’t be difficult.  I may extend this to a real “blogmark” area where I point at stuff that I find interesting, but don’t want to spend time writing about.  Most of the things I’d be likely to link I’d be getting from other people’s blogmarks anyway, and somehow the process of taking someone else’s blogmark and turning it into a local blogmark just seems silly.

• It’s Always Something was published on Thursday, February 5th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Redesign categories.
• There have been no replies.