Posts in the Standards Category

After more than a year of sitting bolt upright in a chair whose back was about 20 degrees from horizontal, Kat finally got me to buy a new chair on Saturday.  I assembled it this morning, which anyone who knows me will tell you is astonishing on two counts:

1. I put it together less than a month after I bought it.  Usually I let a project like that sit for a while, to let it come to the proper sense of fullness.  Or else because I’m lazy.
2. I put it together, period.  I’m not what you would call handy with a toolbox.

I did put the armrests on backwards, but I did that on purpose.  They look cooler this way.

Font and text handling seem to occupy more and more of my attention of late.  Here’s another good example of the problems we face: character encoding.  This morning I dropped by the O’Reilly Network and spotted some badly mangled text.  Apparently that’s supposed to be a “ü” in there, since that’s what the referenced article shows.  How did this happen?  No doubt somebody copy-and-pasted the text from a word processor into a CMS interface, and it looked fine on their machine when they previewed the text.  Unfortunately, in my Web browser, no such luck.  (This was in IE5.1.4/MacOS9.1, but a quick check in a recent Mozilla build showed the same problem.)  It may have gone through some XSLT for extra munging, for all I know.

I have a little experience with the encoding problems that can arise when you’re working with XML and XSLT.  If you want to use HTML-style character entities, you have to write a stylesheet that defines every last entity you might use, which is kind of weighty, although I do it for this journal’s XML files.  For the new DevEdge, we wrote a separate namespaced transform based on the old entities.  In our world, a “u” with an umlaut is <ent:uuml/>; an “A” with a ring is <ent:Aring/>.  Of course we also have documents that are encoded for localization (e.g., DevEdge Japan) by their authors, and nobody else can touch them for fear that we’ll break the encoding.  For that matter, when we had an inline JavaScript alert for our printer-friendly links, the spaces in the value were encoded as %20.  Every browser showed those as spaces in the link, except Opera, which showed the raw text (“This%20page%20is%20already…”).  Is it right to do this?  Is it wrong?  I don’t know.  Do I care?  Not really.

In a like vein, I recently found out why recent e-mail message from a certain well-known CSS luminary look like an encoded binary to me, while his responses to other authors’ messages on listservs look just fine: he’s sending out 8-bit text in ISO-8859-1, and something between his fingers and my eyes is munging the text into 7-bit ASCII.  If he sends a message as 7-bit text, there are no problems.  I’m not sure if it’s my aging mail client or a server along the message’s path from him to me.  Again, I don’t care.  I shouldn’t have to care.

It seems that the more powerful our tools become, the more ways we have to break the flow of information.  This to me is exactly opposite of what should be happening.  It’s not that hard to implement character encoding, and it’s not that hard to agree on a character format.  We (as an industry) just haven’t done it to the necessary extent, and there’s really no excuse for this fact.  A character should be a character.  If Unicode is the answer, then great, let’s do it.

As is common for my little technology rants, I don’t have a solution, only questions.  My biggest question is, “How long until we fix this basic problem?”  I don’t even care about how, really.  Just when.

Today is a triple-three, for those of you who care and use two-digit date formatting: 03/03/03.  I wonder if any lotteries will have that number come up tonight.  I still remember when the American Embassy hostages were released by Iran after 444 days in captivity, and that night one state lottery’s Pick 3 came up 444.  Those kinds of coincidences are always fascinating to me.

• Out of Character was published on Monday, March 3rd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

I’m back from Los Alamos and out from under the worst of the e-mail avalanche.  Northern New Mexico is beautiful in its own way, although a touch too barren for my tastes.  But only a touch.  For a landscape junkie like me, the cliffs, river gorges, and mountains were definitely a potent mix.  The far better mix was the conversations with Jeff and Carrie about the Web, the world, and our lives.  Sometimes the best way to discover yourself is by talking to someone else.

The presentations the three of us gave at the Los Alamos National Laboratories seemed to be very well received, and the people there couldn’t be a nicer bunch.  Which seems a little odd, when you think about what they do there.  I subconsciously expected a bunch of white-coated square-jawed men with clipboards and cold eyes talking about the amazing potential of the atom to bring about world peace and the inevitable triumph of American science.  Perhaps I watched a few too many 1950’s-era science fiction movies as a kid.

In a post on Webdesign-L, Karl Dubost has reminded me just how smart Chris Lilley really is.  From a post Chris made to www-html in late May 1994:

As soon as images were allowed inline in HTML documents, the web became a new graphical design medium. Some people will just want to put out text, but some will want to apply graphical design skills and make a document….  If style sheets or similar information are not added to html, the inevitable price will be documents that only look good on a particular browser, at a particular window size, with the default fonts, etc.

Karl’s post arose in the context of a conversation about the concept of “graceful degradation,” which is the idea that a properly created document will be usable in older user agents, even if it doesn’t look quite the same.  (Well, okay, it’s a lot more than that, but in the context of Web design, that’s what most people mean.)  Karl rightly points out that the term needs to be replaced with something that doesn’t sound quite so bad.  Of his suggestions, I think the best is “graceful flexibility,” and it’s a term I intend to start using from now on.

I updated the Color Blender to accept three different CSS color value formats (four if you count shorthand hex as separate from regular hex).  Thanks to Steve Champeon and Holly Marie for spurring me to do so.  I can think of two more things to add to it—a swatch-picker as suggested by Roberto Díez, and a color-wheel type picker—but they probably won’t happen any time soon.

• Voices in the Wilderness was published on Friday, February 21st, 2003.
• It was assigned to the History and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

Fabian Valkenburg sent in e-mail letting me know that my comments on Opera 7’s CSS support got used in the talkback to an evolt.org article, and that I’m wrong about Opera 7’s display of the dates on this page being a bug.  As it turns out, the answer to that is “maybe.”

First, a word on how I set up the title and date styling in the basic site theme.  Both are contained in successive h5 elements, each with an appropriate class value (title and date, in fact).  I make the title inline so I can wrap a border around it that “shrink-wraps” the text.  Then, since I want to move it upward, I relatively position it upward two-third of an em.  Since it has been relatively positioned, for the purposes of laying out other elements, browsers should act as though the element wasn’t positioned at all.  (See CSS2:9.4.3 for details.)  So, in that sense, the relative positioning should have no impact on how the date is laid out, and in fact it doesn’t in the browsers I tested; I only brought it up to show that the title wasn’t floated.  On the other hand, I float the date to the right and right-align its text.  Since I’m floating the date to the right from below the place where the date’s h5 would have been (because the date comes after the title), I give it a negative top margin to pull it upward, so that it sits just below the top border on the entry.

Now here’s where things get fuzzy.  According to CSS2:9.5.1, the outer top edge of a float may not be any higher than the top of preceding float or block boxes.  It doesn’t say anything about inline boxes.  Remember that with CSS, it’s possible to have inline and block boxes for sibling elements.  So the effect of that portion of CSS2 is to allow floats to ignore preceding inline boxes when they float.  Or not ignore them, as the case may be.

Let me frame it another way: here’s a testcase that shows h3 and h4 elements in the normal flow, and then with the h4 elements floated.  To my way of thinking, both floats should sit below the h3 elements that precede them, regardless of the type of box those h3 elements generate.  This is because my conception of floats is that they start from their place in the normal flow, and then move to the right (or left).  From there, they move downward if they must, but not up.  Unless I give them a negative top margin to move them up, of course.

The behavior I just described is what IE5.5/Win and Gecko-based browsers do, to pick two examples.  But what Opera 7 (and, in many cases, IE5/Mac) does is not a bug, because it doesn’t violate the CSS specification, so I retract my earlier statement.  I believe that what it does is not what  site authors would want, but it isn’t wrong.  Thanks to the wording in CSS2:9.5.1, neither are the browsers that don’t agree with Opera 7 wrong, although I would accept that they’re further away from the letter of the specification.  Whether or not they violate its spirit isn’t clear, and it’s in cases like this that browsers tend to do whatever their programmers thought best.

So what we have here is a gray area in which I believe the letter and spirit of CSS are pulling in different directions, and browsers are splitting over which path they choose.  Hopefully CSS2.1 will be clarified to address what should happen, and we won’t have to bother arguing about who’s doing what better in which way for whom.

As for css/edge, yes, I hear you.  Opera 7 gets most or all of the demos correct, and may in fact reveal some erroneous assumptions on my part in the pure CSS menus demo (or maybe not; I don’t know yet).  When I get time to actually run Opera 7 through all the demos and evaluate its behavior, I’ll see if I can get the support information updated.  Unless of course I finally decide that the support information is becoming too much trouble to have around, in which case I’ll update it into oblivion.  It never really helped prevent people from misrepresenting what the demos were supposed to do anyway.

Personally, I like Opera 7 (or did once I switched its skin to the classic look), and my comments weren’t meant to cast it into the junkbin of bad browsers.  If I were a Windows user, I’d probably use it a lot more than I do.  There are rough edges, as with any browser, but overall it’s quite good—I think I said that already, but some people don’t seem to have heard that part.  Opera 7 handles a site redesign project I’m working on a lot better than Opera 6 does, I’ll say that much.

• The Silence of the Fat Lady was published on Saturday, February 8th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, CSS, and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

I’m feeling better, thanks.  About most things, anyway.

If you’re seeing layout or other rendering bugs on this site in Safari, as some people have said they are, please use the bug icon in the browser to report the problem.  I can’t run Safari or else I’d report problems myself.  Apparently there are some weirdnesses with the navigation links in the sidebar, if nothing else.  Whatever problem you see, it’s worth reporting, so please do.

Most of you probably already know that Mark Pilgrim is upset with XHTML 2.0, and many of you may be aware that Tantek and Daniel Glazman are in agreement.  I’m broadly sympathetic with their frustrations, but since I was never that thrilled with XHTML in the first place, I can’t get too worked up about the breaks between 1.x and 2.0.  I never really got why HTML had to be reformulated as XML.  Yes, I’ve read all the arguments about later ease of conversion and all that.  I suppose there was some good in easing authors into XML authoring habits using a language they mostly recognized.  That just didn’t seem like enough.  This site has been, and continues to be, HTML 4.01 Transitional for a reason.

I do broadly agree that XHTML 2.0 is way too unrealistic for its own good.  It outright drops too many things authors find useful, like the style attribute (although I admit I’m biased there) and heading elements.  For that matter, yes, Virginia, there is a difference between abbr and acronym, so dropping either one seems like a mistake.  On the other hand, if this stuff was deprecated instead of eliminated, I’d have many fewer points of concern about XHTML 2.0.  I’d be worried that the deprecated stuff would be dropped in the next version of XHTML, but XHTML 2.0 would bother me less.

Then again, given that you can take XML and CSS and create your own documents out of whatever markup language you can invent, and use XSLT to bridge the gap between old browsers and new ones, I find XHTML to be of minor import.  If it gets too ivory, then it will be ignored, and some other XML-based language will take it place.  Or, more likely, lots of markup languages.  Either way it will be interesting, and the XHTML 2.0 advocates won’t be able to blame anyone else for the explosion of non-interoperable languages.  Which, I suppose, is the point of all the sturm und drang of late.  If XHTML 2.0 were interoperable with XHTML 1.1, people wouldn’t be nearly so upset.

Wow… all this concern over making things work together.  Can it be that the Web is getting all growed up?

• Agony and Ivory was published on Tuesday, January 14th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, Standards, and Web categories.
• There have been no replies.

Earlier this afternoon, I was seriously thinking about smashing my forehead through the monitor of my Windows machine.  Why?  I was trying to do some standards-based scripting for IE5.5.  You’d think I’d know better by now, but no.  It’s a very simple little routine, and yet IE5.5 just silently fails at one point for no good reason (and, I’m told, so does IE6).  I have script debugging turned on and it still doesn’t tell me anything.  It just stops the routine.

In another area of the page, I have a block-level element set to 100% the width of its parent element, which is also 100% the width of its parent, with none of them having any margins or padding.  The expected result is that the “innermost” element will be as wide as its parent, and that element as wide as its parent.  Does IE5.5 do this?  Of course not—that would be too easy.  Instead it leaves a roughly-one-em gap to the left.  Oh, and the links in about half the lists simply fail to respond to user interaction of any kind.  The link text becomes plain old ordinary text for no apparent reason.

I’m really beginning to loathe IE/Win.  Sure, sure, NN4.x is worse, but I’ve stopped worrying about how it renders pages (by dint of hiding most styles from it) and I don’t even try to script for it.  Thus IE/Win now occupies the “most unforgivably broken browser” slot in my life.

I should learn not to talk about music until I’ve had a chance to listen to it a few times.  My opinion of Gravity has sharply improved in the past week.  I really started to like it when I told iTunes to always skip track 9.  Gravity still hasn’t grabbed me the way Spiritual Machines did this time last year, but it’s still darned good.

The Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan in your life is likely to find the Buffy Sex Chart amusing on some level.  I found myself remembering the relationship charts that were drawn up in an attempt to map the emotional landscape of Twin Peaks—which was, let’s admit, only possible if you extended the chart into several more dimensions than the usual three.  I was also reminded of an analysis of the show’s vampire population ecology I spotted recently.  It’s  a population-dynamics paper with equations and graphs and everything, although it’s written specifically to be understandable even if you don’t follow the math.  Now that’s über-geekitude for you.  I love it.

Speaking of television, last night Kat and I saw a commercial for Domino’s Dots™.  These are, it would seem, fried dough balls with cinnamon-sugar coating and a white icing.  They sound like donut holes to me, and they seem like a half-step from the Cinna Stix®, which are themselves a half-step from breadsticks.  So here’s my theory: Domino’s is very slowly evolving into a national-chain version of the typical local neighborhood Italian bakery.

It’s so crazy, it just might work.

• Head Banging was published on Friday, January 3rd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Humor and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

Tantek muses: “I wonder who is going to write the ‘”Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful’ essay.”  It’s always a weird feeling when I share a brain with someone other than my wife.  I almost wrote that essay a few months ago, when I’d been sent one too many “considered harmful” links, and that was going to be pretty much its exact title.  Guess I’d better jump on the idea now, before someone else does it.  If I had to make a guess, I’d say look for something to show up tomorrow.

Fly the really friendly skies: Hooters adds airline wings (CNN).  I can’t decide if this a highly creative way to bankrupt a restaurant chain or a brilliant move.  I suppose if the airline is repositioned as high-end CEO charter service, with prices to match, it could be a hugely profitable business.  Maybe I shouldn’t have used the word “hugely” in the previous sentence.  Sorry.

Speaking of odd commercial news, it would seem the Segway is a popular item (CNN) after all.  I’m having trouble believing this isn’t just more hype, since Amazon doesn’t want to give out sales figures, and I’ve never really understood why anyone would want to spend a large chunk of money on a really high-tech scooter.  Then again, I don’t understand people spending large amounts of money on sporting-event tickets and memorabilia, so what do I know?

Well, at least somebody finally did what I’ve been expecting, and decided Eric Meyer on CSS was picking up too many five-star reviews.  It managed to collect 23 top ratings in a row before the backlash started, so I feel pretty good about that.  I won’t even try rebutting the three-star review, as it makes some reasonable points.  The book is not a cure-all; no book ever is, which is why I wrote the “Should You Buy This Book?” text.

Meanwhile, the United States may or may not be going to war with one or more members of its self-created “Axis of Evil.”  Not that I think those were countries with our best interests at the forefront of their minds—and why should they have?—but throwing around labels with a level of sophistication not too far above fourth-grade recess just doesn’t seem like a good way to manage foreign policy.

I should talk.  My Christmas gifts included an XBox game where you can use a giant robot to blow up everything around you, including buildings, a so-so rock album, a comic-book movie, and a truly deranged comedy cult classic.  Too bad I couldn’t come up with anything personally meaningful to request for the holidays this year.  At least I found out that my family does in fact know me well, as I was given quite a few Eeyore-themed items.  The slippers were an especially nice touch.

Over at his own journal, The Ferrett comments rather directly on the sexualization of pre-adults in the movies.  I agree with him in a generic sense, although I disagree that the “Harry Potter” cast was destined to be over-eroticized.  Just because an author does a remarkable job of making characters real (for certain definitions of the term “real”), that doesn’t force an eroticization of the same characters on film.  No, I think that’s just the evolution of video storytelling over the last several decades—and it’s been happening for longer than most of us realize.  The Major and the Minor is a movie about a young woman posing as a 12-year-old who falls in love with a man who thinks she’s, well, twelve.  Of course he has no interest in her other than semi-paternal, but by the end of the movie they end up together, depsite his being engaged at the movie’s outset.  It stars Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland and was written by Billy Widler, so that will give you a hint regarding its age.  My parents weren’t even born when it was filmed.  So making sexual objects out of minors is not exactly new.

• Harmful Considerations was published on Friday, December 27th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Books, Standards, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

The standards/design community has taken notice of the new Hotbot, and with its bold design statement being carried out in XHTML and CSS, it’s certainly worthy of comment.  Unfortunately, there’s a slight problem with it.  If you visit the skinning preferences page in Mozilla, Compuserve 7, or AOL for OS X, you get the following message:

To choose a new skin for HotBot, you must download a browser that supports Web standards.

Visit the same page with Netscape 7.x and you’ll have no trouble at all.  All of these browsers use, essentially, the same rendering engine.  They have the same standards support, give or take a few bug fixes.  The source of this roadblock seems to be a poorly written detection routine on the server itself.

Fortunately, this is a problem that’s easy to fix.  All the HotBot folks have to do, as my co-worker Arun wrote so cogently, is spot the Gecko, and here’s hoping that they do so soon.  If you’re doing UA detection of any kind, either client or server side, then you ought to read his excellent explanation of how to detect the whole Gecko family at once, rather than client by client.  It’s liable to let you avoid a whole lot of headaches.  You’d avoid even more if you did object detection instead of UA detection, but one thing at a time, I suppose.

It’s just occurred to me to wonder if anyone’s written an AmIHotOrNotBot.  The search parameters in the advanced interface would no doubt be very interesting.

• ScatterShotBot? was published on Tuesday, December 17th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Standards category.
• 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.