Posts in the Tech Category

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 W3C‘s HTML validator has a new beta that includes a significant change.  It will now attempt fallback validation if it can’t find a DOCTYPE or character encoding.  In other words, if you run a legacy document through the validator, it will warn you the document is invalid because it couldn’t find the stuff it needed, but make a guess at the right DTD and character encoding to use and try validating against those.  See, for example, the validation run of a “non-DOCTYPE” test page.

Personally, I think this is great.  It makes the validator a lot more friendly without giving people the idea that their invalid documents are okay.  It removes one more annoyance from the path to validation, and that can’t be a bad thing.

I spent the three-day weekend producing a few metric tons of screenshots, pounding my head against the desktop over the inline formatting model (again), blowing up some virtual giant robots, and all the other things that make for a good holiday weekend.  Last night Kat and I went with some good friends to see A Mighty Wind, which we all thought was a hoot.  Or, more properly, a hootenanny.  Eugene Levy’s character, Mitch, was just amazing.

• Valid Relaxation was published on Tuesday, May 27th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Standards category.
• There have been no replies.

Do you still avoid PNG images because IE/Win doesn’t support the alpha channel?  If you’re like most Web designers, the answer is “yes.”  Thanks to Owen Briggs, I came across a petition asking Microsoft to change that.  Will it change anything?  Who knows?  We can but try.  You will have to allow a cookie (to prevent petition stuffing) and give them an e-mail address, but you can withhold your e-mail address from public exposure.  If you want to see real and widespread PNG support on the Web (and any designer should, once they fully understand what PNGs can do) then you should go sign the petition.  It’s quick, it’s easy, and it’s important.

• Be Heard was published on Thursday, May 22nd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers category.
• There have been no replies.

The Color Blender has been updated to be one standalone file, so you can save it to your hard drive easily.  I also put it under a Creative Commons license, which I should have done in the first place.  Feel free to share and enjoy.  Now I’m really going to try to make this my last blender-related post for a good long while.  (Unless I make observations about margaritas.)

Daniel Sternberg has some interesting questions about what makes a computer science teacher.  It’s a question that’s been on my mind as I try to pull together a series of outlines for four-week seminars on standards-based Web design and CSS.  You can guess that this is intended for a community college because they’re willing to let me teach this stuff without a PhD in computer science.  Heck, I don’t even have a CS degree of any kind, unless you count a minor in artificial intelligence, and that was focused on the philosophical aspects of it.  Allow a History major to teach in a computer science department at a University?  Please.  I’d have about as much of a chance to be nominated head of the Congressional Black Caucus.

And yet, am I not qualified to teach students how to assemble a Web design, and about the underpinnings of today’s Web, with an eye to the future?  I certainly think I am, at least from a skills point of view; whether or not I’d make a good teacher of people is another question entirely, of course.  The deepest experts can be the worst teachers, something all of us probably encountered at some point in our educational experiences.

So it’s been interesting to be contacted by people from community colleges and business schools to come speak, but not hear a peep from the CS departments in my area.  Not at all unexpected, obviously, but still interesting.

• Blending and Teaching was published on Wednesday, May 14th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal and Tools 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.