Posts in the CSS Category

Remember the redesign competition I mentioned (along with a lot of other people) a while back?  They’ve announced the prizes up for grabs, and I was very pleasantly surprised to find that the Grand Prize package includes a copy of Eric Meyer on CSS.  I do have to wonder how much use it will be to someone who can successfully restyle another person’s site with CSS… but hey, no complaints here!  Good luck to all the entrants.

Contrary to what Zeldman has to say, I generally don’t wish I were not writing a book.  When I’m writing a book, I enjoy it because it’s something I like to do and because I wouldn’t have agreed to do it if I weren’t excited about the project.  When I’m not writing a book, I enjoy the time off, but usually get back to the authorial keyboard within six months or so.

Rewriting a book, though… that’s a whole other story, and one with distinctly fewer comedic overtones.  I hate having to revise my own work, because my deep-seated impulse to tinker usually drives down the quality of the text.  The dread spectre of endless revision is tempered by the glimmer of needed new material, but to me, it’s like mixing chocolate syrup into a thick vanilla milk shake: the end result isn’t as awful as it could have been, but Lord, it sure isn’t good.

(It may help your understanding of the previous paragraph to know that I loathe chocolate.  No sympathy is necessary, because believe me, I’m not missing out on anything.  Call to mind a food that you truly despise; something that, if you accidentally got a mouthful, you would instantly spit out and then try to scrape off your tongue.  That’s what chocolate is like for me.  Kat couldn’t be happier, because I never try to steal her dessert.)

Reviewing other people’s work isn’t bad.  I’m currently reviewing two books, and this morning I started getting severe dèjá vu.  The chapters I was reviewing for both books referred to the same sites, and even had screenshots of those sites that were taken on the same day.  I’m about 98% certain it was all just a big coincidence.  Either that or the computers that run the Matrix are getting less creative.

• Getting Mixed In/Up was published on Saturday, January 4th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Books, CSS, W3C, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

For most authors, Amazon.com is the closest we get to a stock market for book popularity.  Despite their apparent randomness, tracking the rankings can become an obsession; in fact, I’m not really sure why else Junglescan exists.  The reader reviews are also a source of potential obsession.

That’s why I’m unaccountably pleased that Eric Meyer on CSS has just completed the “Dash to One Hundred Stars”: since publication, twenty reader reviews have been posted, and every single one is five stars.  I’ve been rooting for this to happen ever since it passed a dozen five-star reviews, actually, which sounds stupid even to me.  After all, what this proves is that twenty people who use Amazon really liked the book; it’s not a conferment of sainthood or anything.  The book won’t be a five-star experience for everyone, which is one reason I wrote some material explaining the target audience.  Maybe that really did help the book get into the hands of those who would like it, and keep it away from those who wouldn’t.

Other books of mine haven’t fared as well.  The CSS2.0 Programmer’s Reference has recently picked up two one-star Amazon.com reviews, but both of them gave me an arid chuckle.  So far as I can tell, in both cases a person thought they were buying some sort of tutorial or guide, and when they discovered they had something else, they decided that was my fault.  One guy even looked through the book in a store, bought it, and then discovered the book was of no use to him… and then decided to go post a review on Amazon where he admitted to his mistake in the course of blasting the book.  It reminded me a lot of the guy who blasted CSS:TDG for being a “light tutorial” and “not a reference at all.”  (Maybe they should just swap books!)

I admit to feeling a certain regret that these people spent money on my books that could have been better invested in something else, but at the same time I can’t help but be amused.  Caveat emptor, if you prefer, but I think of it more as, “A lack of intelligent buying on your part does not constitute an authoring failure on mine.”

Anyway… one hundred stars in twenty reviews!  That feels pretty darned good, no matter how irrelevant the yardstick might be.  Somehow I feel like Will Smith in Men in Black: “Still, that was a pretty good shot, though.”

• Under Review was published on Thursday, December 12th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Books, CSS, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

After having outgrown the resources of its current home, css-discuss is moving to a new site, hopefully for the last time.  You can now find it at www.css-discuss.org (or .com), where a paltry few pages of information about the list accompany the subscribe interface.  The site is really just a front end for the list, but since it was moving to its own domain anyway, I figured what the heck, let’s put up some pages.  I heard this whole Web thing is all the rage with the kids, you know?

This change of address would not have been possible without the incredibly generous support of evolt.org, which is donating the server space, technical support, and bandwidth needed to keep a 50-messages-a-day list going out to its 2,000-plus subscribers.  I feel good about this, because evolt has long been an organization I admire, and also because they have experience running high-volume mailing lists.

The move to the new list should be complete by Monday.  Hopefully I catch up with my personal e-mail shortly thereafter.  I’m only about two weeks behind at the moment, although responses to mail about my latest book and css/edge are unfortunately further behind than that.  That’s the danger of dumping things into folders… you tend to ignore them once they’re out of the Inbox.  Or I do, at any rate.

• Moving On was published on Friday, December 6th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been no replies.

As I work my way through an enormous backlog of e-mail, I found a message from last month telling me about a utility called pngslice.  Apparently J.J. Green‘s girlfriend was really impressed by the Ragged Float demo but didn’t want to spend her time slicing stuff up in Photoshop.  So, in the manner of good boyfriends everywhere, J.J. stepped up to help out by writing a Unix utility and then released it to the world.  Better than flowers, I tell you.

Ooh la la: “Faites bonne impression avec les CSS,” a translation of “Going to Print.”  Thanks to Stephanie Booth and Samuel Latchman for helping my work get en Français!

• Slice ‘n’ Dice was published on Saturday, November 23rd, 2002.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

Meryl Evans has recreated the missing WebNouveau list of tableless CSS site on her own Web site, and is looking for other CSS resources.

Security through obscurity never really works; when I use it, I at least know what I’m doing, and that it could bite me.  I had thought any halfway informed administrator knew that same thing.  Apparently, some folks still don’t get it.  Let’s see… a company puts a file on its Web site that isn’t in any way protected except in the sense that there are no links to the file, and someone else figures out the URL, which leads to advance publication of the information.  That’s not breaking into your site, it’s being smarter than you.  From Intentia’s own press release: “The incident has severely damaged confidence in us as individuals and in Intentia as a company,’ says Björn Algkvist, CEO of Intentia International AB.”  That’s almost certainly true.  I know I wouldn’t trust my company’s data to a firm that made so obvious a mistake.

• A Rescued Resource was published on Wednesday, October 30th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

The W3C has released a public beta of a major upgrade to their HTML validator, and authors are very much encouraged to try it out—I did!  It adds a lot of new things to the service, including better handling of document MIME types (like application/xhtml+xml) and more.  One of the validator’s lead developers e-mailed me about it, and then dropped this comment in at the end of the message:

The new CSS is loosely inspired by your stuff (well, that’s probably true for most CSS these days I suppose).

Pardon me while my ego starts beating its chest and howling.  (And Kat’s not home to keep it under control, either.)

• (X)HTML Validator Upgrade in Beta was published on Wednesday, October 23rd, 2002.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Personal, Standards, and W3C categories.
• There have been no replies.

Wired News has redesigned their site, and not just the front end, either: the really important stuff all happened behind the scenes.  Using no tables to lay out the page, but instead applying CSS to XHTML, the site is a stunning example of how standards can be made to work today.  They have an article with some details (and a few quotes from yours truly).

There are a few flies in this ointment, but they’re fairly understandable.  The pages don’t always validate, in part because of third-party advertisement code (which is notoriously horrible) and in part because converting seven-plus years of pages isn’t a simple task.  Actually, most of their validation errors seem to involve unencoded ampersands in URLs, which ought to be easy enough to fix.

The Web Standards Project calls this a gutsy move, and I agree.  A site with their kind of traffic has to make a big commitment to do something like this and stick to it.  The management of Wired is to be applauded for approving this move, and the men behind the scenes deserve even more applause for their work.  Look for a DevEdge article soon where we interview Douglas Bowman, the point man on the Wired redesign.

• Wired With Standards was published on Friday, October 11th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

In all the head-pounding over learning XSLT last week, I let some things slide by without comment, so I’ll try to cover them all in a single post.  (And remember, if you have an RSS aggregator, you can syndicate these posts via my RSS feed!)

In early November, I’ll be appearing at Meet The Makers New York on a “standards mini-panel” with Jeffrey Zeldman, so I’d better get around to calling Moishe.  There will also be a San Francisco Meet The Makers where my co-worker Arun will be on a panel with Tantek Çelik of Microsoft.  You might be able to score a free VIP ticket to either event if you hurry (and are willing to fill out the questionnaire).

I’ve added more information to the upcoming events on my Speaking page, including promotional codes for events that have them.  I disclose when using a code will make me money, and have been thinking about ways to turn those into community-building exercises.  Maybe I’ll take everyone who used my code(s) to a group dinner, assuming I can come up with a way to verify code use.

Last week, we published a CSS2.1 Quick Reference sidebar tab for Gecko-based browsers, and French translations of the CSS2 and DOM2 sidebar tabs, to the Sidebars area of the DevEdge Toolbox.  I also published a technical note on fixing list-item marker size in the NS6.x series.

Over the weekend, I not only dug into more XSLT (which almost made me pound my head against a wall, again), but I wrote some Javascript bookmarklets to help manage the administration of css-discuss.  It’s been a while since I thought of myself as a programmer, and I certainly am no expert—but it’s been good to stretch those mental muscles again, after so long.  The neural paths needed for exploring and using CSS and structural markup aren’t the same as those needed for programming.  The sense of achievement I felt when I figured out how to do what I wanted to do was a welcome change of pace.

It’s really cold in our house right now, but at least the shaking and banging of workmen dismantling our 82-year-old boiler has stopped.  Kat and I are sort of sad to see the old beast go, but since it had suddenly started leaking enough carbon monoxide to form its own atmospheric system, we don’t exactly regret replacing it.  The replacement boiler is almost ridiculously smaller than our old boiler.  I have trouble believing that it can heat the basement, let alone the whole house.

• Catching Up was published on Monday, October 7th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Speaking, Standards, and Travel categories.
• There have been no replies.