Posts in the Tech Category

A new look for a new year.  Readers of my next book may notice some similarities between this and one or two of the projects.

If the text is too small for you to read, try the “Advanced setup…” link in the sidebar.  There you can define a default pixel size for this site and have the value stored in a cookie so that for the next year, you’ll see the text at that size.

No tables were harmed, or even used, in the making of this design.

Update: I’ve made a few adjustments to the design to step around bugs in IE6/Win.  Apparently, the MS programmers fixed most of the parsing bugs from the 5.x line, but not too many of the layout bugs.  To make things worse, the parsing bugs are fixed in both the strict and quirks modes, so none of the traditional workarounds (like the “box model hack“) work, and so I can’t hide styles from IE6 at all.  If their layout engine were as good as, say, IE5.1/Mac, then that wouldn’t be a problem.  No such luck.

(Thanks to my father for first discovering the layout problems in IE6, and for helping me figure out that I couldn’t work around the bugs without changing my design approach.)

• Monday, 21 January 2002 was published on Monday, January 21st, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Redesign category.
• There have been no replies.

Here’s something that made me cringe in fear: Microsoft top security officer expected to join U.S. cybersecurity team (ComputerWorld).  Oh boy, I can hardly wait for our national security policies to be as rigorous as those generally found in Microsoft products.

• Friday, 14 December 2001 was published on Friday, December 14th, 2001.
• It was assigned to the Tech category.
• There have been no replies.

John Allsopp wrote to me today: “Now you really can say ‘my middle name is Cascading Style Sheets.'”  I guess so.  Thanks, Amazon!

• Wednesday, 24 October 2001 was published on Wednesday, October 24th, 2001.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Humor categories.
• There have been no replies.

Not much has been going on of late, at least not much that’s worth writing about here.  I mean, I had fun going to a Cleveland Barons hockey game with a friend, but is an account of Eric watching hockey interesting?  Not likely.  (Though Mark and I did have fun playing “What’s That Music On The PA?”)

In the near future, though—that’s something else again.  I’ll be teaching another CSS class for the HWG/IWA.  This one will run a little longer than six weeks because Thanksgiving is right in the middle of the class.  The last session went rather well, I thought, and the next session ought to be even better now that I have a chance to tweak the material and avoid some missteps.  Also because I’ll have a teaching assistant for the first time.  Woohoo!  Now I can foist a portion of the grading on somebody else!

• Saturday, 20 October 2001 was published on Saturday, October 20th, 2001.
• It was assigned to the CSS and General categories.
• There have been no replies.

A new month, a new beginning: I’ve launched css/edge, a place for some personal (yet public) CSS-based design experimentation.  The basic goal: to push CSS as far as I can, and to do things with HTML and CSS that nobody has ever seen before.  The first installment was the complexspiral demo; now, with the launch of css/edge, I’ve added pure CSS popups.  Investigate, share, and enjoy!

In the meantime, Kat and I are giving serious thought to renaming our guest room “Heartbreak Hotel”—not out of any love for Elvis, but because several people we know are suddenly leaving long-time partners, and some of them have dropped by/will be dropping by for a few days’ retreat.  Part of me wonders if it’s post-traumatic stress left over from last month, or if perhaps 9/11 shocked a lot of people into realizing (as one person put it) that life is both too long and too short to be unhappy.

• Monday, 1 October 2001 was published on Monday, October 1st, 2001.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been no replies.

The complexspiral demo is now online.

• Tuesday, 18 September 2001 (redux) was published on Tuesday, September 18th, 2001.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been no replies.

As I crawl back into update mode—last week was Web2001, where I presented quite a bit and met lots of cool folks (and got my picture taken by Heather Champ).  I also got Jeffrey Zeldman’s Taking Your Talent to the Web signed by the man himself, and then discovered that I’m mentioned in the acknowledgments.

Random thought drawn from the show: although I don’t think tables are an evil design tool, I do think they’ve poisoned and limited our ideas of what is possible in Web design.  There is another structure that can be described as a collection of cells: a prison.  It’s time for designers to break out.

If you’re dropping by to see if the complexspiral demo is live yet—no, it isn’t, but it will be soon!  I’ll be doing my best to get it and the material from my talks online in the next week or two.  I beg your patience while I get myself reoriented to life without five simultaneous high-pressure short-schedule projects.  While you’re waiting, you can get an update on nanotech use in military and civilian products from CNN.com and the Associated Press.  Thank you—please pull around to the first window.

• Monday, 10 September 2001 was published on Monday, September 10th, 2001.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been no replies.

Beware the Ides of May!  Beware!

Today did not go at all well.  I had to argue with two major corporations, did a good deal of legwork with two more just to find out if the previous two were smoking crack or not (apparently they were), didn’t receive confirmation of certain actions, and consequently didn’t get some very important stuff done by the end of the business day.  There’s always tomorrow, I suppose, but time’s a-wastin’ and deadlines are beginning to loom.  Add to all of that a failure of will, and it was definitely not a good day.  At all.

On the other hand, I thought there was at least one very interesting potential development in the online realm today.  Slashdot picked up the story, of course, and I realized that Slashdotters were in serious trouble.  The Playstation 2 becomes an access point for what’s been called the lowest-common-denomintor crowd, and in the Slashdot community the X-Box might as well have “Serial Baby Killer” written across its face.  No Slashdotter worth his street cred will be able to admit to owning either console.  So how are they going to play cool games next year?

• Tuesday, 15 May 2001 was published on Tuesday, May 15th, 2001.
• It was assigned to the General and Tech categories.
• There have been no replies.