Posts in the CSS Category

I wrapped up the three-day speaking and training session at Los Alamos National Laboratory yesterday, and it seemed to go really well.  This having been my first multi-day training session, I was a little bit nervous that I might have problems with pacing, but everything seemed to come together just fine.  The attendees certainly were positive about the material, and how much they learned.

Now I’m off to Albuquerque to catch a flight to San Francisco (by way of Houston) for Seybold.  I’ve been four days from home, and have another five before I return.  Kat and I talk at least twice a day, and it seems like every conversation begins and ends with, “I miss you.”

• …the Weird Get Going was published on Saturday, September 6th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Speaking, and Travel categories.
• There have been no replies.

It’s up, running, and official: Complex Spiral Consulting finally has a Web site.  So far I have up recent news and upcoming events, information about the services I’m offering, ways to contact me, and a publications area that contains a new article: Containing Floats.  If you’re having trouble getting elements to stretch around floats, this article is for you.  Anticipate more such articles in the future, as well as the addition of information on just what I’ve been doing in the past month, and for whom.

Also today, Macromedia announced the impending release of Studio MX 2004, including a major new version of Dreamweaver MX.  I’m happy to say that the CSS support in this new Dreamweaver is pretty darned good, and it comes with a number of CSS-driven templates already installed.  I provided the layout skeletons to Macromedia, and then helped make sure the markup and layout were acceptable once a design firm made the layouts look pretty.  And hey, who are those mugs being quoted in the Dreamweaver MX press release?

There’s also a new layout for the Macromedia Web site, and it uses some relatively sophisticated CSS to create the layout.  I did some CSS optimization and upgrade work for the site, running in parallel with the Dreamweaver MX input I was providing.

• Multiple Launches was published on Monday, August 25th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Consulting, CSS, and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

Everyone complains about Jakob Neilsen’s site design, but nobody ever does anything about it—until now.  Bob Sawyer has announced a “redesign useit.com” contest that’s being held with the blessing of Dr. Neilsen himself.  Dare we call it Designer’s Eye For the Usable Guy?  The contest closes at the end of October, so you have some time to really do a great job.

The trends described in the Time article “Believe It, Or Not” bother me quite a bit.  The last paragraph in particular seems chilling to me.  I’ve no objection to religion, as long as it isn’t being shoved in my face, and frankly I think more people could use a strong moral/ethical core.  It’s the decline in intellectualism and critical thinking, and the view that one can’t be moral without a belief in God, that trouble me deeply.  I can say with absolute certainty the latter is patently false, unless one defines morality to be solely derived from religious teachings, in which case either the term needs to be expanded or we need to ask a different question.  For example: “Is it necessary to believe in God to be an ethical person?  A good person?”

As I looked at this and the last several entries, I see that most of my recent posting has been personal in nature.  The CSS has fallen more or less by the wayside, which also bothers me.  I’m going to take a week off and think about the balance or technical content versus personal commentary, and how I want this site to evolve as I move forward with the consulting business.

• Grand Designs was published on Saturday, August 16th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Culture categories.
• There have been no replies.

Note: I’m having e-mail troubles.  I can currently send mail, but I can’t receive it.  I don’t know if the mail server is accepting messages or not, but if you get a bounce, please wait a day or two before sending again.  If you don’t get a bounce, assume the message will eventually reach me, and that I’ll respond as soon as I can.  The hope, of course, is that this will only be a temporary glitch.

Two days after announcing I’m available for hire, too.  Hey, timing is everything!

Jesse Ruderman has created a nifty little game using JavaScript.  What’s particularly clever about it is that he’s only using a single image, and (with CSS) is shifting that image in the background of each tile to show the appropriate section.

Thanks to Modulo 26, I now have a whole bunch of kanji representations of my name.  I kind of like them.  How does your name look?

• Out On The Tiles was published on Saturday, August 2nd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.

Yesterday’s announcement has generated a fair bit of attention, which is certainly a good thing for a new startup.  My deepest thanks to everyone who wrote words of support and congratulations, through all the e-mail and many a weblog.  Your collective enthusiasm has definitely made today one of the best in months, and eased my mind quite a bit about the step I’ve taken.  And those of you who got in touch regarding contracting my services get extra-special thanks!  (What are the rest of you waiting for?)

I mentioned that one of my clients is “a major and highly respected name in the industry,” and I’m proud to say that client is Macromedia.  My work is actually in two different areas, both of which relate to CSS, and I’m looking forward to talking about the projects in more detail once they’ve been completed.  For now, let me just say that Macromedia is serious about using CSS well, and in doing the right thing.

I’m hoping that this weekend I’ll get the consulting site material together and ready for launch—I don’t even have a design yet.  What I may do is use a variant of a meyerweb theme as a first look and then, like Zeldman did earlier this year, redesign in public, commenting on my choices and techniques as I go.  I don’t know if a business site has ever done exactly that kind of a redesign before, and it seems like it would be an interesting experiment.  To be honest, I may chicken out and just jump from one design to another instead of evolving it over time, rather than experiment with a business site.  We’ll see what kind of feedback I get on the idea.

Speaking of feedback, I need to pass along some tidbits readers sent in response to my discussion of governments and open standards:

• Bob Sawyer wrote to say he’s created a discussion forums for Webmasters at the fledgling Built For The Future, which looks like it could be just the kind of resource people need.
• Felix Ingram sent in a link to a fascinating Wired article on standardization and its distinctly political nature.
• Rob Lifford pointed out the Texas Governors’ site is accessible, and even has a dedicated statement about the use of W3C standards.  That jostled my memory and I remembered that the City and Borough of Juneau, Alaska‘s site did something similar a while back.
• Paul Martin speculated that, until recently, standards use and accessibility have been almost entirely the concern of hand-coders, the people who know the nuts and bolts that make a page work.  If that’s so, then the WaSP was absolutely right to concentrate on getting tool vendors to clean up the markup they generate.

I’m going to take the weekend to concentrate on responding to e-mail, doing some writing, and fleshing out the new site, and should be back bright and early Monday morning to regale you with more random stuff.  Enjoy your weekend!

• Feedback was published on Friday, August 1st, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Consulting, CSS, and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

Adam Kalsey shares a method for rounding corners that has minimal HTML impact.  I explored the same basic concept (along with several others) in Project 10 of Eric Meyer on CSS, although in my case I used it to provide rounded corners between two differently-sized sections of a document; sort of the visual inverse of what Adam demonstrates, but using the same fundamental techniques.

It’s always interesting to see ideas emerge in different places, mutate, evolve, advance, and generally act like they have a life of their own.  Did somebody say “meme?”

The thing is, of course, that we’d be better off not having to hack in bits of HTML just to get these effects.  CSS3 offers proposals for corner-rounding properties, and that’s a good step forward.  One can also use XBL to dynamically insert the needed bits and style them, without having to clutter up the source document.  Here’s my XBL-based recreation of Adam’s demonstration.  Now here’s a variant employing more complex corner and border effects.  And then there’s blockquote styling with great big background quotation marks and rounding of some corners.

The above examples will only work fully in Gecko-based browsers (as of today, anyway), but what’s interesting to note is that they don’t look bad in non-Gecko browsers.  Take the blockquote example, for one.  In a Gecko browser, you get all the eye candy.  In a non-Gecko browser you get a visually distinct blockquote with less eye candy.  It still looks pretty good, or at least not bad; it could probably use some padding, but these aren’t polished examples.  The document structure is clean, and semantically appropriate.  What’s not to like?  This seems like another aspect of the concept of graceful flexibility—or, if you prefer, progressive enhancement—and one worth further investigation.

• Rounding A Corner was published on Friday, July 25th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been no replies.

I don’t think I mentioned this before, but there’s an aural-CSS supporter besides Emacspeak out there.  It’s called Fonix SpeakThis, and while its aural CSS support is pretty limited, it does exist.  (A tip of the hat to The Literary Moose, by the way, for passing along the information.)  I find the existence of another aural-CSS browser, however limited, to be interesting in light of the aural style sheets appendix of CSS2.1, which says in part:

We expect that in a future level of CSS there will be new properties and values defined for speech output. Therefore CSS 2.1 reserves the ‘speech’ media type… but does not yet define which properties do or do not apply to it.  The properties in this appendix apply to a media type ‘aural’, that was introduced in CSS2. The type ‘aural’ is now deprecated.

In other words, aural is a dead end, and speech will be used in the future.  At some point.  Really.

Fans of complexspiral‘s visual groove might also appreciate Atlantis, which looks a whole lot more professional.  As is to be expected.

Raffi Krikorian raises some long-term problems arising from URL-shortening services that are worth pondering.  It isn’t the case that absolutely everything has to be preserved for all time, but how many links would suddenly break if a popular shortening service disappeared?  I already don’t like such services because they hide the ultimate destination, which robs me of an important piece of information in my quest to decide whether or not I should follow a given link.  How many times have you seen a post that says, basically, “This is interesting!” followed by a shortened link?  It could be a political story from the BBC, a collection of Battlestar: Galactica fan fiction, the official site of the Malaysian legislature, or an outrageously disgusting fringe-porn site.  How can you tell?  By following the link.  It’s like Web roulette.  Place your bets!

I guess it’s also true that shortening services irk me because they should be utterly unnecessary.  In the first place, there’s almost no excuse for URLs to be so long that they need some kind of shortening service.  Okay, maybe mapping programs have some excuse, but that’s about it.  The kind of enormous cryptic URLs that most database-driven sites generate is just sloppy and wrong.  In the second place, as for putting URLs in e-mail and newsposts, you can contain the URL in angle brackets—<http://like.this/>—and any client worth running will understand that the whole string is a single URL, and ignore any line-wrapping that might occur within the brackets.  If your program can’t handle that, especially if it tries to interpret the bracketed text as an HTML tag, then it’s time to get another one.

Incidentally, the title of today’s entry is a hand-shortened form of “Speech, Shells, and Shortening.”  Which is better?  Granted, it’s kind of cool having an entry title that sounds like a door on Star Trek, but it isn’t what I’d call particularly useful for determining the contents of the entry before you actually read it.  See what I mean?

• SpShSh was published on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Tech categories.
• There have been no replies.

Apparently I’m a desirable emigrant.  In response to yesterday’s comment-in-passing that Kat and I had been kicking around the idea of moving to another country, I’ve had three people write encouraging me to emigrate to Canada, and one other person recommend the United Kingdom.  The Canada people actually make a pretty good case, since apparently there’s a plan afoot for Canada to make the Turks and Caicos Islands their eleventh province.  That sounds pretty sweet, even if I would have to spend the whole year encased in zinc oxide.

Personally, I’ve always liked Toronto as a city.  Their weather isn’t significantly different than what we experience here in Cleveland, plus I know a number of very cool folks who already live there.  I can’t comment on places in the UK, since I’ve never actually been there (although I hope to fix that within the next year or so).  For the record, the country we had in mind was Norway.  I also gave some thought to the Bahamas, but then we’re back to the prospect of me resembling a lobster on a semi-continual basis.

There’ve been a whole lot of XHTML-and-CSS redesigns announced in the past ten days, and I’ve been remiss in pointing them out.  Here’s a list of the ones I noticed: The Open Championship, Quark, Message Digital Design Ltd., Phish.com, Lawrence, Kansas Weather, Adaptive Path, and Inc.com.  There were some others, I think, but the URLs seem to have escaped me.

On that last one, Dan talks a bit about the particulars of the Inc. redesign, and Doug points out that the markup size reduction for Inc.com’s redesign was just about the same as that for the redesigns of Adaptive Path and Wired News.  I’ll add that it’s very close to the markup size reduction seen when ESPN.com redesigned.  So yes, Doug’s absolutely right: there’s a trend here.  Old-school table-and-spacer designs can be visually recreated using lean, structural markup and CSS, and the process cuts page size by about half.  Some sites will see less savings, but some will see more.  As an example, my off-the-cuff guess (having peeked at the source of a typical page) is that eBay could drop its page weight by 66% or so.  They could probably reduce their annual outgoing bandwidth by several petabytes.  Tell you what, eBay: I’ll show you how to do it and do it right, and you can pay me five percent of your savings over the next five years.  Deal?

• Moving and Shaping was published on Friday, July 18th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.