Posts in the Tech Category

I alluded yesterday to “backstage work”.  One of the things going on back there was my work with the folks at WebAssist to create a tool that allows both novice and experienced web developers to create and alter CSS-driven layouts.

The end result is Eric Meyer’s CSS Sculptor (v1.0.0), a Dreamweaver extension that gives the user tons of options and outputs pretty darned clean markup and CSS.  (Even if you’ve no interest at all in Dreamweaver tools, you should still follow that link.  How many chances are you going to have to see me throw the mëtäl hörns?)

Well you might wonder how much code I contributed to this software.  Well, okay, none.  What I did contribute was guidance on the interface and its organization; on what options to present, and how; on ways to handle things like print styles and the print CSS options; and on the CSS and markup that results, including the optional explanatory comments in the CSS.

One of the primary goals with this project was to create a tool that would expose as much CSS as possible to users without overwhelming them, and that would actually teach by dint of showing all the options.  One of the things we heard a lot in the beta test was users saying things like, “Oh, so that’s what that CSS thingy does! I’d always wondered.”  Which was exactly what we’d hoped to hear, along with “Hey, I’ve never heard of this CSS property before!”.  (We heard that one too.)

There are some things I expect will be improved in future releases, like shorthand value minimization—the simplest example of that being a condensation of 0 0 0 0 down to just plain 0.  We discussed including that feature but decided to postpone it for a variety of reasons, not least of which was working out the logic required to figure out when to minimize, which isn’t as simple a problem as you might first think.  There were a few other things we didn’t get in the initial release; such is the way of software.  We’ve got a list of potential features, of course, and are looking forward to hearing what users suggest.

As for what features did make it in, there’s a fairly large list, so it’s probably best to check out the Features page or take the product tour—with video commentary starring, you guessed it, yours truly.  So if you’ve ever wanted to see me greenscreened over screenshots and being intermittently goofy, then at long last your prayers have been answered!  (Or will be, once we get the load problems resolved.)

What makes this whole thing an especially interesting experience for me is that, for the first time in my life, I’m participating in an affiliate program.  Basically, what I earn from sales of CSS Sculptor depends on affiliate fees earned by referral links like this one here (and also earlier in the post).  That might sound like a rip-off, but it has the potential to be quite the opposite.  The affiliate cut is literally an order of magnitude greater than any reasonable per-unit royalty would be.

This compensation scheme (as they say in the UK) is actually an experiment on both sides: WebAssist has never really worked with an outside individual on a product like this, and so they honestly don’t know if the affiliate approach will pay better than a per-unit royalty, or worse.  So we’re going to try it out and see what happens.  Fortunately, I’m in a position that I feel I can afford to experiment like this, allowing both myself and WebAssist to find out what works best in the long run.

Thus, if you’re planning to buy CSS Sculptor or know someone who is, I’d be grateful if you either clicked through one of the links hereabouts or linked to the product using my affiliate URL.  I’ll have a link in the sidebar in the near future as well.  The sidebar’s due for an overhaul anyhow.

So that’s one of the things that’s claimed my time over the last few months, and I’m pretty excited that it’s seeing the light of release.  I’m even more excited about finding out what people think could be better about it so that we can improve what’s already a pretty darned nifty tool.  If I do say so myself.

• CSS Sculptor Released was published on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Projects categories.
• There have been fifty-seven replies.

Amongst all the travel, there’s been a metric ton of backstage work going on.  This is generally true of me these days, which is why posting has fallen off in 2007.  Unfortunately, it’s meant that I’ve been lax about keeping you folks up to date on what I’m up to—and also to keep you informed about An Event Apart, which is what accounts for most of that backstage work.

For example: last week, we announced publication of the complete schedule for AEA San Francisco, which will be 4-5 October 2007, and I didn’t say a word here.  I should have; honestly, it’s amazing.  I already want to see it.

I know, I say that every time, but it’s always true.  One of the things that makes me proudest about AEA, and that makes me continue to work hard on AEA, is that it fulfills one of the core requirements Jeffrey and I set out: to create the kind of event we’d want to attend.  I’m not satisfied with an AEA show unless I can look at it—and I mean all of it, from the schedule to all the organizational details that aren’t always obvious—and say, “I would pay money out of my own pocket to see this show”.

And so far, I’ve always been satisfied.

So we end the 2007 series with another great lineup and incredible set of talks in San Francisco, and it makes me proud all over again.  I hope you can be there to see it.

• San Francisco Schedule was published on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007.
• It was assigned to the An Event Apart and Projects categories.
• There have been two replies.

While kicking around some ideas at the CSS workshop I led in London, I ran into some interesting problems with :empty.  If you’re not up on what that one does, it’s a way of selecting elements that have no children, including text.  To quote the formal definition:

The :empty pseudo-class represents an element that has no children at all. In terms of the DOM, only element nodes and text nodes (including CDATA nodes and entity references) whose data has a non-zero length must be considered as affecting emptiness; comments, PIs, and other nodes must not affect whether an element is considered empty or not.

So kindly consider:

*:empty {
   padding: 0.25em;
   outline: 1px dashed red;
   background: yellow;
}

We (re)discovered something very strange right there in the workshop: given the preceding rule, Firefox applies it to the body element—which is, quite clearly, not empty.  You can check out the fun on my bare *:empty test page.  From there, we realized that if you prepend a body to the selector, yielding body *:empty, the problem vanishes, as you might expect.

As it turns out, this is a known bug in Gecko.  It’s been known for about 18 months, in fact.  So that’s why I was confused by Firefox’s behavior.

The other problem is that :empty in Firefox matches img elements, whether or not they cause an image to successfully load.  You can see this happen on the same test page.  While it’s true that img is an empty element, it’s still bringing in content, so from a common-sense point of view it seems that :empty ought not to match.

In re-reading the description from the specification, though, I can’t justify my common-sense interpretation—an img element has neither element nodes nor text nodes, so far as I’m aware.  The same is true for form inputs, even text inputs that have pre-filled value text; but not for textareas that have pre-filled content text.  But then br elements should also be selected by this rule, and they apparently don’t get matched at all, as the test page shows.  Bwuh?

Well, maybe it’s a bug.  What concerns me here is that the definition of :empty basically requires that things like images and inputs always be selected, which strikes me as kind of useless.  After all, if I wanted to select all images, I’d write img into my selector; ditto input for inputs.

My thinking is that the description should change to state that application of :empty is restricted to non-replaced elements.  Alternatively, it could be redefined to only apply non-replaced elements and to empty replaced elements that don’t either cause something to load or have values associated with them.

Which seems a better solution to you, and why?  Or, if you see a better approach than either of those, what is it?

• Running on :empty was published on Friday, August 17th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and CSS categories.
• There have been twenty-three replies.

“This page best viewed in…”

If that phrase doesn’t provoke a shudder of horror and loathing, it should.  It’s the battle cry of the Browser Wars, those terrible and ultimately futile years at the end of the last milennium.  It’s the rallying cry of those who would take the open ubiquity of the web and fragment it into a collection of gated communities, where entrance to each is predicated on running a specific browser.

“Your browser is not compatible and must be upgraded…”

All too often, because developers are too fearful or prideful or just plain lazy, they put up unnecessary barriers to entrance.  They prevent people from using their sites based on choice of browser.  Of course there are situations where the experience will be different—nobody expects Netscape 4 users to be able to see all 2007’s pretty CSS effects, just like table-based sites look beyond bizarre in Mosaic.  That’s no excuse for sites that intentionally lock users out just because their choice of browser doesn’t line up with the developer’s expectations.  It’s regressive, short-sighted, and just plain unprofessional.

“This site is for iPhone users only.”

STOP IT.  Stop it right now.

The fact that optimizing pages for an iPhone makes the development of such specialized pages attractive in no way excuses lockout of other users.  I might be willing to entertain the argument if the iPhone’s browser were some specialized non-web contraption.  It’s not.  It’s a full-fledged XHTML+CSS+DOM browser that happens to lag a bit in some implementation areas and won’t run some plugins.

Besides, if you’ve developed a version of your site (or application or whatever) that works well on the iPhone, then why in the name of Tim Berners-Lee would you deny other people that optimized experience?  You might find that they prefer to interact with the site that way no matter what platform they’re using.  You might find that you don’t need a separate iPhone version after all.  The iPhoned version might be the only version you need.

Designers will argue that pages optimized for the iPhone screen will look bad on a desktop browser.  Maybe, and maybe not, but stop preventing your users from making that decision for themselves.  Nobody says you have to convert your whole site to be iPhoney.  But your lockout of non-iPhone users is worse than rude.  It’s stupid.

We finally learned, after much sweat and a fair number of tears, that “best viewed in” is a fool’s errand.  Are we so eager to rush back into that morass and fight the war all over again?

Please.  Just stop.

• The Veteran’s Charge was published on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, Rants, Standards, and Web categories.
• There have been eighty-nine replies.

So while I was off indulging in the extravagance of an extended vacation/family reunion/road trip, seats went on sale for a two-day CSS workshop in London, starring yours truly and run by the fine folks at Carson Workshops, which will run 13-14 August.  The seats are something like half-sold already, so if you want in, don’t wait.  Sorry I didn’t say anything sooner, but, you know.  Family time!

To those who do decide to attend, I make this pledge: I will not wear the blue-shirt-with-tan-slacks combo again.  This I swear.

• London Workshop was published on Thursday, July 19th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Speaking categories.
• There have been five replies.

I don’t know about you, but I keep a “staging” file for my posts here.  It’s a text file on my hard drive where I can write posts offline, and can also keep a list of things I want to write about.  Right now, that list is longer than a typical short entry.  I suppose two weeks’ vacation (photos from which are slowly going up on Flickr) will do that to a schedule, especially with all the driving that was involved.  (And may I express my deep and unbounded loathing of the usually ambiguous and often misleading road signage in the New York City/New Jersey area?  Yes?  Thank you.  I needed that.)

So, to begin the jamcracking: AEA Chicago‘s early bird deadline is fast approaching; it’s just nine days away as I post this.  As we start gearing up for the show, we’ve re-started (and rebooted) an AEA feature called “Better Know A Speaker”.  Originally, these were testimonials from Jeffrey and me, but that turned out to be more than our schedules can accommodate.  So we’ve redone them as short interviews with speakers, which I think is far more interesting anyway.  The first of these new BKAS pieces, with Dan Cederholm, went up last week.  This week we’ve got Jeremy Keith.  In the weeks to come, we’ll cover the rest of our Chicago speakers.  The AEA news feed is of course the best way to keep up with these tidbits and other AEA info, but I’ll probably either blog or linkblog them here as well.

• Better Know was published on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the An Event Apart and Travel categories.
• There have been six replies.

For them what might be interested, this Monday (July 2nd) I’ll be the guest on Off By One, a half-hour technology radio show originating from the studios of WCSB in sunny downtown Cleveland and is available on iTunes as well as via the station’s streaming audio.  Locals can, of course, catch it at 89.3 MHz on their FM dials.  The show starts at 12:30pm EDT and runs a half-hour, so it will be, y’know, off by 1:00pm.  (Hee hee!)

This will be my first time on the air since Your Father’s Oldsmobile ended back in 2005 (unless you count my talk radio call-in earlier this month), and the first time I’ve done a live on-air chat about my professional work and life in about seven years.  Bart, the show’s host, and I haven’t discussed any specific topics to be covered, so if you’ve ever wanted to find out what I’m like in an almost totally unrehearsed environment, well, now’s your chance.  I’m looking forward to it.

Update [4 Jul 07]: a recording of the show is available via the “Off By One” weblog.  Apparently I say “fractional update” a lot.

• ‘Off By One’ On 2 July was published on Saturday, June 30th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Interviews and Tech categories.
• There have been four replies.

Because the world needed another browser/platform combination to test, Apple has released a beta version of Safari for Windows.  Why?  Arguably, it’s to make sure that Windows developers have access to the browser in the iPhone, so they can make sure that their Web 2.0 sites work on the iPhone without having to buy new computers.  (Though this also robs them of the primary justification for getting an iPhone on the company dime.  Haven’t they suffered enough, Steve?)  On that note, I hope this new foray will expand the pool of people contributing ideas to Greg‘s post about cool new apps for the iPhone.  (There’s already a truly brilliant idea in there, albeit with a name I can’t use here due to readers behind content filters.  Who’s going to make it happen?)

It will also be interesting to see if the presence of another highly standards-compliant browser (joining Firefox and Opera) on the Windows platform spurs more Windows-based web developers to pressure Microsoft to maintain their momentum on the issue, so as not to see IE fall behind all the competitors.  As you might expect, I certainly hope so.

Remember: this is a beta!  There’s going to be weirdness.  PPK, for example, ran into layout problems that may or may not be related to the video card in one of his systems.  Other people are reporting crashes; though many of them are reporting crashes on CNN‘s site, which crashes my OS X copy of Safari from time to time.  Interesting to see that kind of cross-platform crash consistency.

The beta’s certainly worth checking out if you’re interested, but—as with the IE7 betas—do not start reworking your site to address layout problems in this beta.  Report them to the WebKit team instead.  When the final version (or a feature-frozen RC version) is released, it’ll be time for testing, charting, and possible reworking.

Interesting times indeed.  If you’ll excuse me, I have to go make some changes to my browser-release timeline slides.

• Windows Safari was published on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Browsers category.
• There have been forty-three replies.