Posts in the Tech Category

Yesterday, Jeffrey Zeldman was nice enough to point people toward meyerweb’s redesign, and also to say some kind words about yours truly that he’ll probably regret some day.  I know I have already, because when goofy rendering errors were reported in IE6/Win, I kind of felt obligated to do something about them instead of just shrugging and saying, “Eh, not my problem.”  Curse you, El Jefe!  I shall be revenged!

Two days ago, I got an e-mail message that had me falling out of my chair, I was laughing so hard, and I simply can’t resist sharing it with you.  I’ve edited the text a bit for clarity, and the name has been removed to protect—well, the guilty, really.  In a legal sense, I mean.

I’ve spent some time reading and working with several CSS books….  and I have to tell you that Eric Meyer on CSS is the best…. if I want to know how to do something and refer to the pile of books near my left hand, it is the one that most easily produces the answer.

It has one other great advantage over all the others as well:  it is by far the best book to roll a joint on.  Shape, size, thickness, glossiness, flexibility, and color are all excellent and [far] ahead of the competition.

It’s amazing how a well designed book serves all purposes.

Well.  Glad I could help out.

A day or two before that fascinating bit of e-mail arrived, I was standing in clothing store located in a brand-new shopping mall just recently built a couple of miles from our house, when the following lyrics came over the store speakers:

Don’t it always seem to go That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone? They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

…and I thought to myself, “Is someone trying to be ironic?”

• We Live To Serve was published on Wednesday, June 11th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Books, CSS, Humor, Redesign, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

Yep, I finally did what I’ve hinted at for some time now and updated the site design.  Behold: Eos.  It’s sort of an in-joke, one that I would expect exactly four other people to get straightaway, along with perhaps a few others who happened to see the pictures.  Checking the styles might help those who are really curious to unravel the mystery, but trust me, it’s not really that interesting if you weren’t there in the first place.

So anyway… the new design is based around positioning, as opposed to the old one, which was based on floats.  The underlying structure of the site has barely change, with one exception.  The navigation/presentation portion of the pages is now found at the end of the document, instead of the beginning.  This seems more accessible to me.  If you want to see what the raw, unstyled page looks like, pick the theme “void(style);” from the menu.

Note that not every theme is guaranteed to work in your browser.  I stuck to the CSS standards as much as possible, and I did do cross-browser testing.  This uncovered some weird whitespace-sensitive bugs in some browsers.  It also showed that not every technique works well in all browsers.  I’m open to hearing about workarounds for broken displays in browsers, should you find them, so long as they’re based on standard CSS and don’t break the display in too many other browsers.

A few other notes:

• Unlike the old design, the new themes are intended to have notably distinct layout approaches.  Almost all of them put the sidebar on the right, but that’s just because I prefer righthand navigation.  With the old themes, each one was basically a different set of colors and backgrounds for the same layout.  This time, I wanted to be a little more original.  I’d credit the CSS Zen Garden with prompting this, but I’ve been slowly working at this change since last fall.
• The cookies that store the theme name and base text size (if you change it) changed their names to be a little more verbose.  You can of course deny said cookies; the site will be completely navigable without them.  The theme switcher won’t work, that’s all.
• Only one of the themes uses pixel-sized text: “Classic MW.”  Since the theme is intended to reproduce the old design as closely as possible, I figured I’d leave its 11px baseline text.  You can always override it with text-zoom features, or else on the advanced setup page, like before.
• Some themes use ems or percentages to set the body element’s text size to be smaller than the user’s default.  I did this to prevent the sans-serif fonts employed in those themes from looking stupidly big in default browser installs.  If you object to this approach, then pick a theme that doesn’t override text size—the default theme, “Eos,” is one of these—or set your preferred base text size on the advanced setup page.  Or both.
• When switching from one theme to another, you may run afoul of bugs in various browsers that let styles leak from one theme to another.  If you see a totally horked display, reload the page to see if that fixes it.
• Although I was tempted, I didn’t end up using any PNGs to create the translucency effects in various themes.  I didn’t use background-attachment: fixed, either.  It was a lot more challenging to figure out ways to let IE/Win users see the translucent effects with scrolling backgrounds and regular old JPEGs.  I may write a tutorial on how I managed this, but anyone who can’t wait is free to tear into my CSS and figure it out for themselves.  And to copy the technique, if they so desire.
• Despite it not being the default theme, I think my favorite is Aware.  The name is not necessarily the English word meaning “having knowledge or cognizance,” but is instead a Japanese word meaning “the sense of poignant beauty arising from an ephemeral thing.”  Since I think the latter is only possible with the former, I find this to be a wonderful intersection of cross-linguistic meaning.  Thus you can take the title to mean whichever of the definitions appeals to you most.  For me, it changes back and forth over time.

There may be adjustments to the themes in the future as I find techniques I like better, or as I fix up oddities in and add extra visual frosting to the more experimental themes (like “Matrix”).  Meanwhile, please feel free to share and enjoy.

• Eos Rising was published on Tuesday, June 10th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Redesign categories.
• There have been no replies.

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 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.