Posts in the CSS Category

There’s a great theme at the Zen Garden: What Lies Beneath.  It’s very non-traditional (hint: you don’t scroll like normal) but very well done, nice and earthy.  There have been several other contributions since I last mentioned the site, all of them quite interesting.  The design process behind one of them has been explained in some detail by its author, Doug Bowman, who knows quite a few things about the power of CSS-based design.

Meanwhile, the Literary Moose has taken advantage of the CSS3 definition of content to show how text can be replaced with an image in a gracefully flexible manner.  If you just see plain text for the headline, follow the link to the screenshot, which was taken in Opera.  If more browsers supported this behavior, we could stop using <span>-based image replacement hacks such as those employed at the Zen Garden and other sites.  I’m not slamming said sites: such hacks are necessary if certain effects are to be achieved in today’s browsers.  It’s still good to have someone pointing out where we might be able to go tomorrow.

As you might have guessed, I’m back from TODCON MX Vegas, which was a real kick on many levels (but not the literal one).  That is one seriously unhinged and fun group of folks, and I’d like to thank Ray West for finally getting me there.  It seems my presentations were all very well received, which is always preferable to the alternatives, especially the ones involving torches and pitchforks.  I hope to get my files online in the next few days, particularly the ones from the “Redesigning” talk.  Pictures from the conference are already appearing over at DWmommy.com, and I’d bet there will be plenty more to come.

I think that of all gifts one person can give another, trust is the rarest and most precious.  In a way that few other gifts do, trust creates a bond that is at once strong and fragile, and that very paradox is part of what gives it so much beauty.  The next time I’m feeling downcast about myself, I need only think of all the people who have trusted me with their thoughts, their feelings, with pieces of their lives.

• Zen, Now, and the Hereafter was published on Friday, June 6th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Speaking categories.
• There have been no replies.

This afternoon I wrapped up an interview with a guy from Radio New Zealand’s Digital Life programme, who was calling me from tomorrow morning.  (They’re eighteen hours ahead of me.)  I noticed almost no lag despite the distance; after watching the one-second-plus pauses in conversations between anchors at CNN Center and field correspondents in the Middle East, I expected a similar effect.  There was a very slight delay, it seemed, maybe a quarter-second or less, but no more.  We were separated by roughly ten thousand kilometers (six thousand miles) of linear distance and probably thirteen thousand kilometers (nine thousand miles) of surface distance as we talked, and yet the conversation was no different than if he’d been sitting across town.  Just wow.  I’ve been promised a transcript of the interview, so I hope I was reasonably coherent.

Yesterday’s entry drew some responses, all of them basically telling me to stop worrying.  I appreciate that.  I think I’ll still fret for a while anyway, just because it forces me to think about what I really want to do.  If I find other things more interesting than CSS, then I need to admit that and move on.  If not, then I need to stop dithering and get back to work.  Probably the latter, but one should take stock every year or so.

On this, the second anniversary of starting at Netscape, Microsoft agreed to settle an antitrust lawsuit by paying AOL a large pile of cash, and furthermore let AOL continue to use IE in the AOL client for the next seven years for free.

Well.  Perhaps the reflections upon my career and its future will come in handy after all.

• Spanning the Globe was published on Thursday, May 29th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Interviews categories.
• There have been no replies.

I’m continually amazed by what interests people.  The most recent examples: Simon Willison’s CSS tutorials and Stuart Robertson’s “The Search For the Missing Link.”  This is in no way a denigration of the work either man is doing—it’s top-notch stuff, and is not only well presented but is obviously striking a chord with readers.  I’m just saying that it never would have occurred to me that people would be interested in those kinds of things, so even if I’d had the ideas, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to write them up.  (Exception: Simon’s CSS makeovers of the Winer and JWZ sites, which I wish I’d thought of first.  Oh well.)

This bothers me, because it hints at a personal failing.  If I’m not talking about the things that interest people, if I’ve lost touch with what people want to know, then how can I be an effective teacher and author?  Why should anyone bother to listen to what I have to say?  For a communicator like me, this is a real problem.  I thrive on the exchange of information, both incoming and outgoing.  Of course I can always consume knowledge, but that isn’t enough.  If I can’t provide it as well, the meal is unsatisfying.  The important thing is the sharing.

Am I bored with CSS, and having that stunt my abilities?  Is this a lurking fear of being eclipsed by newer (and generally younger) contributors to the field and eventually forgotten?  Have I just been in the game too long to stay in touch with the audience?  I’m sure people out there would be happy to tell me that I could still see what the audience wants if only a massively swollen ego weren’t blocking my sight, and for all I know they’re correct.  Maybe it’s time to move into a different area of study, and see what happens.  I hear they’re taking applications at that truck driving school.

It was two years ago tomorrow that I started work for Netscape, by the way.

• My Dull Surprise was published on Wednesday, May 28th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

The XBL/Zen Garden thread continues over at Surfin’ Safari, including an interesting (Gecko-only) example of XBL in action and comments from various parties.  Share and enjoy.

I got a bit of feedback on the Color Blender, including a request to make it a downloadable package for offline use.  I’ll probably merge the CSS and JavaScript back into the HTML document, so people can just save the source if they want an offline blender.  I split the styling and scripting out to make development easier, so I probably should have poured them back in before going public.  It’ll be fewer hits on the server, even.  Look for an update in the next couple of days.

Thanks to El Jefe, I discovered that diveintomark.org (whose favicon I may steal) has Eric Meyer on CSS in his “Recommended Reading” section.  I’m blushing!  The book’s sales are actually on the rise, apparently, which is kind of amazing given both the industry and the economy.  It’s the kind of thing that makes me wonder if I should write a sequel quickly, to strike while the iron is hot; or wait until sales trail off to avoid buyer confusion (and to milk the original for all it’s worth).  Hopefully it’s the latter, because frankly I don’t have time right now to tackle a sequel.  Too busy with another writing project (itself a sequel of sorts).

Thanks to Technorati, I found a site that asked if the DevEdge redesign was the “worst use of CSS ever?”  Ah, me public.  It’s okay, though; in reading through the rest of the site, I concluded that if the person in charge didn’t like our design, we’d probably done something right.

• I Can Feel The Love was published on Tuesday, May 13th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been no replies.

For some reason I decided this weekend to crawl into a hole and hack some JavaScript, so the Color Blender‘s gotten an upgrade.  You can use a “waterfall” display of “web-safe” colors to input colors, or type them in as before.  If you have already filled in colors and switch value formats, the colors will stay and the values will be converted in place.  This can be useful if you want to, for example, find midpoints between #AA31FF and rgb(13%,23%,42%).  I think the changes make the tool even more useful, and I hope you do too.

Oh, and yeah, I used a simple table to lay out the page.  I toyed with positioning and floating the three “columns,” but in the end the table approach seemed the easiest, so I went with it.  This was partly because I have a footer and didn’t want to mess with floating and clearing just to get it below everything else.  It was also because, after a day or two of grappling with JavaScript, I got lazy.  I may go back at some point and replace the table with floats.  In the meantime, this works well enough.

CSS2 and the official CSS1 Test Suite both turn five years old today.  I’m not sure if I bring this up in celebration or protest, but in my case, it’s definitely cause for introspection.

A couple of contributed designs have sprouted in the CSS Zen Garden, and I imagine there will be more to follow.  What an incredible resource!  A few weeks back, I said in my close-up* interview:

While an artist is certainly limited by his medium, it’s more often the case that the medium is limited by its artists. Until a Picasso or Serat comes along, you don’t truly appreciate what the medium can produce. As more designers come to use CSS, we’ll see more compelling CSS-driven sites.

Dave Shea and his contributors are doing exactly that:  showing us more of what the medium can do, and creating a compelling site.  Just moving from design to design in the Zen Garden should be ample proof that CSS is capable of more than most of us have ever thought possible—me included.

Meanwhile, David Hyatt posted to say that XBL directly addresses the point I made in Thursday’s post:

You attach XBL to an element through CSS, and XBL can generate a complete anonymous content subtree that can then be styled using a scoped stylesheet applied to those elements. You can even scatter the real content however you’d like within the anonymous content tree…. XBL is a perfect tool for implementing complex layouts at the presentational level and preserving the purity of the main source document. XBL can even execute scripts for fancy animation effects or rollovers, all without the source document being polluted at all.

Sign me up!  I had no idea XBL was capable of this sort of thing; when the “XSLT vs. XBL” thread erupted on www-style a few months ago, I pretty much tuned it out after the fifth message.  Obviously I should have paid a little more attention.  If I can, for example, take a paragraph and use XBL to generate three block boxes and two inline boxes, styling each one independently to create given effects and applying multiple backgrounds, then it seems like the ideal solution.  Except for that whole lack of cross-browser support thing, of course.  Still, a similar lack didn’t exactly stop me from digging into CSS, back in mid-1996.

• Blending Galore was published on Monday, May 12th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Tools categories.
• There have been no replies.

Want to see some wonderful, and strikingly different, designs for the same content?  Want to contribute your own themes?  Then get on over to the CSS Zen Garden.  I have two reactions: delight and jealousy.  As I’ve said before, I don’t have strong visual design skills.  I’ve been working on a new set of designs for meyerweb, and they’re almost ready to go live.  I was feeling rather proud of what I’d done.  Then these guys come along and show me just how fumbling and crayonesque my design efforts have been.

There are quite a few span elements littered throughout the Zen Garden’s source, but as I’ve been finding recently, this is almost necessary.  It’s troublesome to me that really interesting CSS-based visual design should require that we clutter the document structure with gratuitous elements, but there truly doesn’t seem to be a good way around this.  It may be that future CSS, or some other styling language, will allow the author to create multiple layout boxes (or other shapes) for a given element and style them independently.  The syntax would probably be weird compared to what we have now, but it would allow for a lot more design flexibility.

And speaking of design, don’t forget about the Web Design Meetup tonight!

• Zen and the Art of CSS was published on Thursday, May 8th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been no replies.

This morning’s Penny Arcade just floored me (it makes more sense if you read the preceding comic first).  Say, did you know the Pants Association encourages you to wear your pants at least three times a day?  Yes, that’s a quote.  You get major geek points if you can identify the source, and about a million times more geek points if you know the exact episode name.

Some time later, I chuckled quite a bit at this joke:

Look inside a typical CSS flamer house.  What do you see?  Chairs, only chairs.  No tables.

That was followed by a post asking for realistic experts to explain how to use CSS effectively.  Hey, that’s me!  It’s what I strive to be, anyway, as I have for quite some time.  I hope it shows in my work.

I’m still trying to get a handle on this whole “CSS flamer” thing, a term I first encountered only a few days ago.  I can’t quite tell if there are people running around using CSS advocacy as a way to pummel others because it’s fun, or if strong advocacy of the use of CSS is interpreted as flaming, or what, exactly.  I mean, yeah, I think that if you can design without tables, then you should definitely do it.  Is that being a CSS flamer?  Even though the reasons are good things like reduced page weight, simplified page structure, and better accessibility?  I also think that if you need to do something CSS can’t handle, then use the next best tool—tables, Flash, public radio, whatever.  Is that some sort of betrayal of the Holy Path of CSS?  Help me out here, people, I’m trying to understand.  Are technologies forever dead because they aren’t perfect?  Did visual styling become a war?  How?  When?  Why?

I thought about ranting a while longer, but frankly everything I wrote sounded whiny (as if the above didn’t) and it was getting pointlessly angry, so I decided to stop.  Maybe I’ll come back to it later.  Summary: technologies are tools, not religions.  Use the best tool for a job.  Show other people how to better use a particular tool, if you can.  No matter how skilled you are with a tool, please don’t hit other people with it.

Every now and again, a little anger does indeed leak through.  I might be grouchier than usual today because of the spam I’ve been getting over the last few days.  Here’s one I got just this morning: “Remember Mom on Mother’s Day!”

Well gee, Mr. Spammer, thanks so much for reminding me that I can’t really do anything else.

• Laughter and Sorrow was published on Monday, May 5th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.

When you withdraw for a couple of weeks, all kinds of stuff piles up—in the house, in the Inbox, in life in general.

During our Passover seder on April 17, I spotted a label on a bottle that cracked me up.  Since I’d acquired a digital camera just the day before in hopes of taking pictures of both our families at one table, I couldn’t resist capturing the label for posterity, so I’ll share it with you. Somebody really needed to think a little harder about their domain name choice.  Then again, had they done so, I’d have been deprived of a good laugh.  Hey, maybe they’re going back to their original recipe!  Wouldn’t that be fun.

The day after Mom’s death, Netdiver published a close-ups* interview with me.  You’ve probably already seen it, but if not, there you go.  It’s long, but that’s mostly due to it having a lot of questions, some of which were actually difficult to answer.

Chris Casciano updated his PNH Developer Toolbar to fix some typos, add more links to useful tools, and make the toolbar work in Phoenix/Firebird as well as Netscape/Mozilla.  I don’t think I mentioned the toolbar here before, so let me just say it’s insanely useful and thoroughly awesome.  I’m already becoming addicted to it, especially in conjunction with the DevEdge Sidebar Tabs, which lets me drill into various W3C specifications quickly and easily.

Everyone got all upset at Dave Winer, who in turn got upset with everyone; things were said, mistakes were made, meanings were imposed and decomposed.  If it hadn’t started with a post about designers and CSS, I wouldn’t even bother to mention it.  My reaction: everyone over-reacted.  Dave didn’t say in that particular post that there was anything wrong with CSS, although he did make some interesting statements about what works and what doesn’t.  Of course the advantages of using CSS are fairly self-evident to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention, and (to my eye) far too compelling to ignore or eschew.  There are indeed flaws and omissions both in browser support and the CSS specification itself, but that’s never stopped anyone.  Meanwhile, anyone who’s using CSS as a political club of some sort needs to cut it out.  CSS is a technology, and a good one that promises to get better.  It’s not a religion, despite the odd quasi-religious titles people keep affixing to my name (“CSS Pope” being one of the funniest).

On an oddly related note, Jeffrey and Tantek and Matt batted about thoughts on RSS, syndication, hand-rolling a weblog, and so on.  This particular journal (as I call it) is basically hand-rolled, and for a long time I manually updated the current entries and archives: when I added a new entry to the home page, I’d cut the least recent entry and paste it into the archive page.  That worked so long as I posted weekly and didn’t want to do anything else with the entries.

But then I started hearing from people who said that without an RSS feed, they couldn’t keep track of a site.  I write these entries so that people can see them, and I was sort of interested in RSS anyway, so I decided that I needed a way to set up a feed and automate the process of managing the entries.  As long-time readers will recall, I accomplished this by teaching myself XSLT and using it to create a very minimal content management system of my own.  Entries are written in an XML format I derived from RSS itself, and I run the XML file through a series of XSLT recipes to produce the most recent entries on the home page, the archives, and the RSS feeds.  I suppose I could also create messages to e-mail to people who signed up for them, but I’m not up to that yet.

So anyway, I agree with what Jeffrey says about pouring an entire site’s contents into an RSS feed: why would I bother?  Part of the experience of reading a personal site is how it looks, the way the words are arranged, the layout of the content.  So I’ve been doing basically what Jeffrey is now doing, and dropping the first sentence of each entry into the feed.  That keeps the feed small, it allows people to know when I’ve posted something new, and gives them enough information to decide if they want to go read the new entry.  It also forces me to think about writing good lead sentences, since an entry description of “I just had a thought….” isn’t nearly is interesting as “I was pondering the relationship between XSLT and CSS, and had an idea I think is pretty cool….”

(Incidentally, those of you chastising Jeffrey for “selling out” need a serious perspective check.  Try some deep-breathing exercises while you’re at it.)

Matt observed that I should drop the plink class on the permalinks and use a contextual selector to style them, and that I should add rel="bookmark" to the permalinks.  The latter I’ll implement in my next XSLT update, as I should have done long ago.  The former, however, I’ll probably not do just because I like having a class that applies only to the permalinks and nothing else.  I might decide in the future to move the permalinks from one element to another, and I don’t want to have to juggle a bunch of selectors when I do.  The structure and design of the site are always in a slow state of evolution, so I try to plan for future mutations as best I can.

That’s one benefit of hand-rolling the whole system.  I can plan ahead with the greatest possible clarity because I know exactly how everything is put together, and how changes to the structure will affect the layout and experience.  I can also make sure the site’s markup is as lean and relevant as possible, because the most advanced document optimization tool ever devised is still the human brain.

• Randomatters was published on Friday, May 2nd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Interviews, Personal, RSS, and Web categories.
• There have been no replies.