Posts in the Tech Category

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.

Netscape 7.01 has been released, and there’s a lot more to it than a one-hundredth version number increment would indicate.  The new release includes popup controls, which let you globally block unrequested popups while defining a whitelist of sites where you accept popups; and a way to make a collection of Web sites your home page, with each one opened in its own tab.  If you’re using Netscape, you should definitely grab this release.  Netscape 7.0 had over 12 million downloads, and with these new features I’d bet the update will be even more popular.

At some point in recent weeks New Riders posted an interview with me, and I completely missed that fact until some time last night.  Since it’s a publisher interview I spend a little more time than usual talking about why I write books at all, but it covers other ground as well, including advice for people starting to learn CSS and what I think about tables for layout.

• Releases New and Old was published on Tuesday, December 10th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Interviews 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.

The World Wide Web Consortium‘s Web site has been redesigned, although visually it looks almost the same as before.  The change is that they’ve dropped tables-for-layout and are instead using CSS to set up the three columns and style the content.  It’s nice to see them trying to live up to the motto “Leading the Web to its Full Potential…” or, at the very least, finally catching up with the present.

It turns out they’re using a design approach I personally dislike, where all three columns are floated left (leaving none of them fully in the normal flow), but it’s not an inherently bad approach.  I just prefer other ways of achieving the same effect… but, as David Powers once pointed out to me, CSS is a lot like Perl in that it often embodies the spirit of TMTOWTDI—that is, there’s more than one way to do it.  That may be one of the reasons I find CSS so compelling, even though its open-endedness makes it a bit harder to learn.

• Catching Up was published on Thursday, December 5th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Redesign and W3C categories.
• There have been no replies.

Things are relatively quiet for the first time in several weeks.  Outside, there’s close to a foot of powdery snow covering everything, which was fairly easy to clean off the driveway—it’s light enough that I used a push-broom instead of a shovel.  Inside, Kat and I have been enjoying hot cider in front of our fireplace and reconnecting with each other after all the stress of the last few weeks.  Occasionally I play with Gravity, the household cat.  It’s a markedly more peaceful mode of living, and I’m enjoying it while I can, because it won’t last.

It seems like there were things I was going to post, really cool stuff, but it all got buried while I was off at conferences, memorial services, and so forth.  I did notice that Tantek has redesigned his weblog, and the new look was broken in Mozilla for a few hours.  It’s fixed now, but I wonder if that was due to him working around browser bugs, or just tightening up his CSS?  Knowing Tantek, it could very easily be either one.  Regardless, it’s a very interesting design; very paperish.

I’d dig through my e-mail for more stuff, but the fireplace is softly calling my name, and I hate to disappoint anything that could theoretically burn down my house.

• Digging Out was published on Wednesday, December 4th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Personal and Redesign categories.
• 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.