Posts in the CSS Category

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.

The css-discuss archives are back into active and complete form, although the URL changed slightly.  If you’re looking for something in the annals of our little community (1,966 members and counting), go to it.  The archive makes for a handy way to publicly link to list posts… say, if I wanted to point out a post I made about the issues with creating a monthly calendar without using a table. The archive upgrade happened a little while ago, and I’ve been utterly remiss in mentioning it.  I’d like to thank the fine folks at Incutio for their support and services in keeping the archive going and growing.

This is kind of cool: a design generator for CSS columnar layout.  Simon says that it “appears to use Big John’s source ordered columns technique,” which wouldn’t surprise me.  Either way, it’s an interesting tool.

Spring is well underway hereabouts, and the days are once again sunny and beautiful.  Cleveland is an interesting city; through the winter we’re one of the least sunny spots in the country, but during the rest of the year we’re one of the sunniest.  Right now, there’s a flawless blue sky backing up barely-budded trees swaying in the wind, and I wish this spring could last the better part of forever.

• Renewals was published on Sunday, April 13th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.

The CSS1 support chart known as the mastergrid disappeared when Web Review’s servers got shut off, which has apparently caused some anguish in the community.  Anguish no more!  It’s back online now, thanks to Netscape DevEdge.  Actually, there are three charts now, with more planned for the future.

There are also plans afoot to (finally!) get the charts expanded to include browsers that have been released since the end of 2000.  You know, like two three major releases of Opera, three of Netscape, Mozilla 1.0, IE6, and so on.  I don’t know if Linux browsers will be added or not, but I’ll see what can be done.  Also, I’d really like to add Safari, but since I don’t have Jaguar, I’m kind of stuck until I can find time to upgrade my laptop.

The charts are also now licensed under a Creative Commons license (specifically, Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 1.0) so that they can always be available to the community, regardless of what happens in the future.  They can also be extended, should somebody wish to undertake the effort, without removing the extended works from the community.  I’d like to thank the folks at Netscape for not only giving the charts a home, but also for being very supportive of this licensing approach.

• Master of Your Cascade was published on Friday, April 11th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been no replies.

Holy cow, there’s some cool stuff over at Squidfingers.  One of his offered patterns may well find its way into the next redesign of this here site.  And, if you’ll notice, the pages are very structural markup that’s laid out with CSS.  No layout tables for our cephalopodic pal!

(Last week, while watching a video on octopi, it occurred to me to wonder if scientists who study octopi and squid tentacles are called cephalopodiatrists.  Do cephalopods ever get tenticular cancer?  And is it illegal in Georgia to cuttlefish?  Even stuffed ones?  Even if the stuffing is a really nice Gulf shrimp stuffing?)

I’m currently reading a book called Conspiracy, which is actually an exploration of people’s readiness to believe in conspiracy theories and the roots of such theories.  For a couple of days, though, I couldn’t find the book anywhere in the house.  I began to wonder if it had been stolen by the Illuminati or something, but then it turned up on Kat’s desk.  Very suspicious.  Maybe she’s actually an agent of the Illuminati, keeping an eye on me to ensure that I don’t uncover the real truth.  Yeah, that seems reasonable.  I’ll need to look into making some tin hats to block out their mind-control rays.

The book I read before Conspiracy was James Gleick’s Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything.  Ironically, it took me almost a month to finish.

As I was working on something late last night, FX showed a program called “UFOs: The Best Evidence Ever (Caught On Tape) 2.”  Leaving the odd punctuation aside, how is it that there was more than one of these shows?  I mean, once you’ve shown the Best Evidence Ever, then shouldn’t the next show be called something like “The Next-Best Evidence Ever?”  Then I saw Denis Leary doing a Quaker State commercial, which seemed really sad somehow.  That was immediately followed by a double shot (sorry) of ads for a “natural male enhancement” product.  As if I don’t get enough of that kind of spam in my Inbox—now I’m getting it on TV as well.  So when do we get mainstream-media spam for breast enhancement products?  It would only be fair.

• Tentacle Alert was published on Monday, April 7th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.

When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, “Did you sleep well?” I said, “No, I made a few mistakes.”

The link I posted to the CSS mastergrid now redirects to a registration page (apparently DDJ thinks you need to register with them to have to dig for a resource that isn’t as useful as it was before they got hold of it), so I’ve removed the link from the archive.

Also, I forgot to mention that part 2 of the interview with Mike Davidson of ESPN was posted last Friday.  It gets into the nuts and bolts of redesign a bit, and Mike tosses out some strong opinions on CSS and validation, among other things.

I think I’m the last to find out about this, but BlogShares is kind of interesting.  This site is listed on the exchange, which surprised me no end, and while it isn’t doing as well as scottandrew.com (which is where I found out about all this) I’m amused that there are already people who “bought” shares of meyerweb.com.  If nothing else, it’s an interesting tool to see who’s linking to this site, and I like the overall presentation a little better than Technorati‘s design.

Speaking of which, I went off on an egorati hunt (a term I first heard Tantek use) and found wherearemylegs, which looks a bit familiar.  Cool!  I’m always interested to see how other people adapt my design ideas to their own needs.

Since I was up way too early this morning anyway, I decided to rework some of the Raging Platypus‘ buttons in CSS-styled text.  So you can steal these buttons, too.  The work isn’t an exact copy, nor does it cover everything the Plat created.  That wasn’t really the point.  Oh, and I also threw in a recreation of Dave Winer‘s “XML” button.

I’m wondering if “platypus” is particularly hard to type in general, or if it’s a special challenge to me today because I’m so tired.  Given that it took me four tries to get “challenge” spelled correctly in the previous sentence, I’m thinking it’s the fatigue.  I’m also using annoying sentence construction, like starting out clauses with “I’m wondering” and “I’m thinking.”  As if I remain frozen in those states until you come read this entry.  By the time you get here, I’ll have moved on to something else.  And yet, it makes things sound more personal, doesn’t it?

Yep.  Definitely fatigue.

• Exhausted was published on Friday, April 4th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been no replies.

Last night, for a while I lay in bed having trouble falling asleep.  When I finally did drop off, I dreamed that I was lying in bed and having trouble falling asleep.

That was weird.

Mark Pilgrim has a nice entry on his site about creating a tab interface out of a simple unordered list and CSS.  His approach uses float: left; instead of display: inline;, which has some advantages and drawbacks.  Mark also says, “This CSS stuff is hard; don’t let anybody tell you different.”  Well, I’ll tell you different, although you can always reject what I have to say.  CSS is challenging, certainly, especially if you have old design habits to unlearn.  CSS doesn’t always act in intuitive ways.  Its learning curve sometimes seems too steep a climb for many people.  But CSS is very much consistent, once you dive into it far enough, and once you adjust to its way of doing things it becomes not so much easy as very, very powerful.

Some enterprising soul(s) managed to dig up the URL of the copy of the CSS mastergrid at ddj.com, but I wouldn’t get too used to it being there.  Plus the file isn’t using CSS to style the grid any more, which is really rather funny in its own way, but also makes the charts harder to use.  While I have suspected for a while that webreview.com would go away, the changeover was completely without warning, so I don’t even know who to talk to about fixing the problems.  It’s a touch frustrating.

I also found out, in the process of tracking down the new chart URL, that someone thinks I look like Luke Skywalker.

That was more weird.

• Restless was published on Thursday, April 3rd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.

I’m back from User Interface 7 West, which was a most excellent time; and a four-day vacation at Ragged Point, which was a more excellent time, but in a completely different and much more relaxing way.  Upon my return, my personal e-mail account contained 2,280 messages, of which almost precisely half were spam.  The work account had 1,300+ messages, and I’d already downloaded 500+ while on the road.

I’m a little behind, is what I’m trying to say.

If you sent me a message recently, odds are it will be a while before I respond.  If I don’t respond in the next couple of weeks, your message was probably lost in the spam, so consider resending it after that time.  Yes, I know, Spam Assassin, Cloudmark, blah blah blah.  It’s more fun to complain about the spam, really.  Besides, deleting it manually is a good workout for my speed-reading and snap-evaluation skills.

I did notice a number of messages about webreview.com rerouting to Dr. Dobbs Journal, and the disappearance of the CSS support charts (a.k.a. “The Mastergrid”).  Yes, the charts are now offline, although since they hadn’t been updated in over two years this is not what I’d call a deep tragedy.  Fans of the charts will be glad to know I’d already been working (slowly, ever slowly) toward finding the charts a new home and getting them updated.  I’ll certainly make an announcement here once there is actual news, but for now, let’s pause a moment in silent tribute to the late, lamented Web Review.  They gave me my first paid writing gig and the charts a home, and I’ll always be grateful to Dale, Chuck, Derrick, and all the rest of the staff.

Oh, and for those interested in my RSS feed, you can pick the flavor you like best from the Eric’s Archived Thoughts page.

• Deluged was published on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Personal, RSS, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

This week on Netscape DevEdge is part one of a two-part interview with Mike Davidson of ESPN, who talks in depth about their curent redesign efforts.  On the ESPN home page they’re currently using CSS positioning to lay everything out.  That means they’ve dropped tables as a layout mechanism and, in the process, about 50KB of page weight.  Mike has some very strong opinions, and I imagine they’ll be controversial in certain circles, but he speaks from the perspective of a designer in charge of a commercial site that serves close to a billion page views every month.  His is a thoroughly practical point of view, and he’s not shy about it.  I highly recommend it, and not just because I wrote the questions.

Through the O’Reilly Network, I came across a link to an English-language blog called Where Is Raed?, written by a resident of Baghdad.  This past Sunday, he posted a rant against war and for democracy that should be read by anyone who wants to get insight into how the events of the past year and decade are viewed by those who had to pay the price.  A tiny exceprt:

how could “support democracy in Iraq” become to mean “bomb the hell out of Iraq”? why did it end up that democracy won’t happen unless we go thru war? Nobody minded an un-democratic Iraq for a very long time, now people have decided to bomb us to democracy? Well, thank you! how thoughtful.

Before you dismiss this as obvious propaganda, go read the piece in its entirety.

Note to those in the San Francisco area: I’ll be hanging out with some very cool people (like Doug and Tantek) at Rockin’ Java this Sunday at 2:00pm.  All are welcome for discussion, open wifi, and caffeinated drinks.  Be there or be, um, elsewhere.

• Through Another Pair of Eyes was published on Friday, March 21st, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Politics categories.
• There have been no replies.