Posts in the Web Category

Last week, I got an interesting inquiry from Velda Christensen:

@meyerweb *wondering just how many of your followers follow @zeldman and vice-versa*

I had no idea.  Furthermore, I didn’t know of a tool that could tell me.  So I built one: Followerlap.

As it turned out, the Twitter API made answering the specific question pretty ridiculously easy, thanks to followers/ids.  All it takes is two API requests, one for each username.  The same would be true of friends/ids, on top of which I suspect I’ll fairly shortly build a tool quite similar to Followerlap.

Since I announced Followerlap’s existence on (where else?) Twitter, I’ve had a few repeated (and not unexpected) bits of feedback.

• Why not list the common followers?  Because followers/ids returns a list of numeric IDs.  Resolving those IDs as usernames would require one API hit per ID.  If there are 15 followers in common, that’s not such a big deal, but if there are 1,500, well, I’ll run out of my hourly allotment of API requests very quickly.  Maybe there’s a better way; if so, I’d love to hear about it, because that would be a great addition.

• Why can’t I find out how many people follow both Stephen Fry and Shaquille O’Neal?  Past a certain number of followers, somewhere in the 200,000–250,000 range, the API just dies.  You can’t even count on getting a consistent error message back.  There are ways around this, but I didn’t want to stress the API that way, so it just fails.  Sorry.

• How can I link to a specific comparison?  At the moment, you can’t.  I hope to make that happen soon, but I decided that a tool this simple should have a similarly simple launch.  Ship early, ship often, right?  Anyway, it’s on the list of things to add soon.  Use the new “Livelink to this result” link underneath a result.  (See update below for more.)

So that’s Followerlap.  Any other questions?  I’ll do my best to answer them in the comments, though for a number of reasons I may be slow to respond.

Update 6 Jul 09: as noted in the edited point above, livelinking of comparison results is now, um, live.  So now you can pass around results like the number of people who follow both God and the Devil (thanks to Paul M. Watson for coming up with that one!).  I call this “livelinking” because hitting a result URL will get you the very latest results for that particular comparison.  “Permalinking” to me implied that it would link to a specific result at a specific time, which the tool doesn’t do and very likely never, ever will.

• Announcing Followerlap was published on Monday, July 6th, 2009.
• It was assigned to the Projects, Tools, and Web categories.
• There have been twenty-nine replies.

There’s something about the Diggbroglio that has left me scratching my head:  how is it that so many people are up in arms about the DiggBar when they’ve had nothing to say about the framing bars of StumbleUpon, FaceBook, etc. etc.?

Now, please note that I’m not saying the DiggBar, or any other framing bar, is cool and we should all love it.  I’m not.  I absolutely, completely, totally get all the reasons why framing bars are bad for breaking bookmarking and navigating and search engines and copyright and hijacking content and so on.  But that’s precisely why I’m so confused, because we’ve known for years now that framing bars are bad mojo—and yet StumbleUpon, for example, is based on bars.  There is a browser extension/plugin StumbleUpon thingy you can install, but there’s also a web-based framing bar thing (see this link, for example) that they offer, and I bet people use.  You don’t have to be a member to use it: I hit that link in a browser that allows cross-site frame loading and I get the bar and the page it’s framing, and I’ve never been a StumbleUpon member.  The source shows it’s using iframes to make it happen.  So far as I can tell, it’s not really different from the DiggBar.

So why do we have people writing JavaScript and PHP and Ged-knows-what-else that specifically busts out of the DiggBar framing, instead of busting out of all framing?  After all, site framing is universally agreed to be objectionable; even yet-to-be-discovered life forms orbiting distant stars think it’s a bad idea.  So why is one instance of it being targeted while the rest are tolerated?  Why are we all not just using if (top != self) {top.location.replace(self.location.href);} and other-language equivalents?  Yes, I know, some of you do just that, but why isn’t everyone?

Perhaps because I have yet to eradicate a stubborn streak of faith in the rationality of my peers, I assume that there’s some technical difference here that I’m missing and that, once understood, would let me understand the source of the outcry.  So can someone please explain to me, or point at an explanation that states, the technical ways in which the DiggBar is worse enough than already-extant framing bars that it’s triggered this outrage?  Again, nobody has to enumerate the complete list of the DiggBar’s sins; I understand.  A list of any different and more egregious sins would be just fine, though.

Also, if anyone comes up with a way to bust out of the frames while still preserving the bar—that is, correcting the problems framing bars cause while preserving their functionality for the people who want to use them—that would be extra-cool.  After all, people who use those services like the bars.  If we could let them browse the web the way they prefer while fixing bookmark/SEO/etc. problems framing bars can cause, that would be a win all the way around.

Update 14 Apr 09: looks like Porter‘s trying to keep the bar without the framing.

Update 16 Apr 09: in his post about Digg changing the way the DiggBar will work, John Gruber lists (by way of quoting Digg VP John Quinn’s post about it) the two things that made the DiggBar extra-objectionable (at least in his eyes).  Thanks, John!

• Digging in the Mud was published on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009.
• It was assigned to the Questions, Tech, and Web categories.
• There have been twenty-two replies.

At last—at long, long last!—the results of the A List Apart Survey 2008 are available, along with the anonymized raw data we collected.

There are a great many reasons why it took so long to get this out the door.  A big part is that it’s almost entirely a volunteer effort, which means it happens in our “free time” (and there the word “free” has a couple of meanings).  I say it’s almost entirely a volunteer effort because the detailed analysis is actually done by a pair of professional statisticians, who are paid for their time and expertise.  They did a great job once more, and did it in a reasonable time frame.  It just took us a while to get them the data to analyze, and then a while longer to take their report and findings and process them into report form.

The biggest change this year is that we’re publishing the results as HTML+CSS instead of a PDF.  This greatly increased the challenge, because it was important to me that the data be presented using styled tables, not images.  That’s easy like cake if all you’re doing is putting them up as visual tables, and we certainly do that for some of the figures.  In the other cases, where we have bar charts of varying kinds, things got difficult.  I managed to devise solutions that are 99.9% effective, and I’m both proud of and frustrated by those solutions.  Proud, of course, because I managed to wring three-stack bars out of table markup; frustrated because of the markup I had to construct to make them possible.  I think this report represents more than half my lifetime usage of the style attribute, but unfortunately there’s no way (using just CSS) to say {width: content;}.

So why not use JavaScript to do that, or to just replace the tables with canvas-drawn charts?  I did consider both, but decided that I would push as far as I could with plain HTML+CSS. 

A few implementation notes:

• I used HTML 5 in order to step around some previously unrealized limitations of HTML 4—did you know tfoot has to come before tbody in HTML 4?  I didn’t.  I did not use elements like header and footer due to known problems in Firefox 2 and related browsers, which mangle pages containing those elements.  Instead, I took the same path Jon Tan recommends, and classed divs using those names for later, easier conversion.

• The tables which underlie the charts do not have summary attributes.  If a group of civic-minded individuals would like to write useful summaries, please let me know in the comments and I’ll let you know how best to submit them.  Similarly, I did my very best to make sure all the table headers had accurate scope values, but if I botched any, let me know.

• I’m aware that Opera shows horizontal scrollbars on most chapters of the report.  This is due to its refusal to apply overflow to table boxes, which according to my recent reading of the CSS 2.1 specification is the correct thing to (not) do.  Every other browser I tested does apply overflow to table boxes, though, which I found most useful.  I tried applying overflow: hidden to a few other boxes, and that got rid of Opera’s horizontal scrollbars, but it also cut off actual content in some other browsers.  I chose a cosmetic problem in one browser over loss of content in others.  The best fix I’ve devised is to wrap the tables in divs and apply overflow: hidden to those divs, but I didn’t want to rush the fix and botch it, so it didn’t make it in time for first publication.  I expect to get it in shortly after publication.

• In a like vein, there are a few combo charts where a bar goes shooting off the right side of the chart in IE7.  This appears to be due to some kind of width-doubling problem that’s only invoked on elements with a style attribute when the row header goes to two lines instead of being just one.  Googling for an explanation yielded no joy, and a lengthy series of attempts to hack around the problem came to nothing.  If anyone knows how to counteract that problem other than preventing the header text from going past a single line, I’d love to hear it.  (Update: I’ve implemented the “fix” of preventing line-wrapping in the report, so there aren’t any off-the-page bars right now, but you can see an example of the problem on this test page.)

• Surprisingly, the charts mostly work in IE6.  The exception is some of the triple-stack charts, where data points overlap when the rightmost sub-bars get too small, and also the double-width bars mentioned in the previous point.  I don’t really have a fix for this short of upgrading the browser, but if somebody finds one, I’d be happy to test it out.

On that last point, if there are questions or suggestions surrounding the implementation of the report, we can certainly discuss them here.  With regard to the survey and report itself, though—that is, the questions asked and the results we’re publishing—please direct those thoughts to the comments section of the ALA article announcing the report.  I’m hoping that we’ll have the 2009 survey up within a few months, so comments on what we asked and how we asked it, what we didn’t ask but should have, and that sort of thing could well have a direct impact on the next survey.  But please put those on the ALA site, where more people are likely to see them.

It’s done, it’s out, it’s yours—both the report and the data, about which I’ll soon write a little bit more.  Read the report, or produce your own report using the data.  Just always know that when we publish these reports, we do not mean for them to be the final word.  No, what we always mean is for them to be the first words, a starting point, a place from which to grow.  What comes next is as much up to you as anyone else, and I can’t wait to see what you do.

• Findings of the A List Apart Survey 2008 was published on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009.
• It was assigned to the Culture, Projects, and Web categories.
• There have been thirty-five replies.

(This is part of the Feedback on ‘WaSP Community CSS3 Feedback 2008′ series.)

My few thoughts on the “Graphical Effects” part of the feedback document.  A lot of what was mentioned by the community is already in the pipeline, so there’s not a lot to say about those except “hurry ’em up, willya?”.

Gradients — like rounded corners, no surprise these came up.  (All we need is to define wet-floor-reflect and we’ll complete the Web 2.0 design tricks hat trick.)  I’d like to see them myself, and I don’t think defining them is quite as hard as the commentary implies:

Imagine, for example, applying a gradient to the text of a <span> broken across two lines. Do you apply the gradient to each part individually? Glue them together as if they were all on one line first? Draw a rectangle around both parts and apply the gradient to that? (CSS3 Backgrounds and Borders has a control for this.)

I’d say the answer is right there, in the form of background-break, but let’s assume for a moment that said property never existed and we still had to deal with this problem.  I can think of two solutions:

1. Only allow gradients to be applied to non-inline boxes.  This would not be my preference, but it could be so defined.  There’s already precedence with CSS for that sort of limitation:  width, height, text-align, and other properties are restricted to non-inline boxes.
2. Treat gradients the way backgrounds and borders are already treated on inline boxes.  I’d be much more in favor of this.  In other words, lay out the inline box as though it is all on one line and then break it in pieces as needed to fit into the actual text flow.  (This is the behavior of continuous, the default value of background-break.)

But since background-break exists, you just treat gradients as you would any other background in accordance with background-break‘s definitions.

The somewhat trickier problem is how to define the value syntax for background-gradient so that’s both powerful and extensible without being unusable.  I think that’s solvable, but not easily, and probably not in a way that will satisfy everyone.

(Though this would be a fabulous place for the cardinal-point values from pre-CSS1 days, which you can still find in the specification if you look hard enough, to make a roaring comeback, wouldn’t it?)

Unidirectional background repeats — I say yes.  Here, have some values: repeat-up, repeat-right, repeat-down, and repeat-left.  In each case, the image would be repeated in the indicated direction from the origin image (the one placed by background-position).  Ironically, really old versions of IE did half of this by not correctly supporting repeat-x and repeat-y, treating them instead as if they were repeat-right and repeat-down.

There are occasions where this would be very useful, especially if you can combine the values into something like repeat-down repeat-right, and most especially in conjunction with multiple backgrounds.  So you could put an image stripe across the top of the element background, another one down the left side, and then fill in the rest of the background with a repeat-down repeat-right image.  Not a particularly common case, but the only way to handle it at present is with multiple nested elements, each with its own background and possibly a lot of negative margin trickery, and nobody wants that.  (Which may also be why it isn’t a particularly common case.)

You could also put an image in the center of your page and then a single stripe that goes only downward from behind it.  Like a golf ball on a tee, say; or a tree trunk below the leafy crowm; or a stem from a flower.

Slanted corners — sure, why not?  The issues are all the same as with rounded corners; the only difference is that you have a flat corner instead of a rounded one.  It makes joins between different borders styles/colors more obvious, but that’s a good thing: any solution that works well for the slant corner should work as well for the rounded corner.  Besides, if we’re already going to the effort of rounding corners, this seems like a pretty easy add-on.

Multiple borders — I think this would be quite useful.  I occasionally fake this with a border and an outline (as in my diagnostic styles) but that only works for two; if you want three or more nested borders (or two or more in IE/Win) you have to start nesting elements.  Also, having multiple borders lets you define your own gradient borders like you were a pixel artist, and who doesn’t like pixel artists?

At the same time, though, I do feel that this should be fairly low on the implementation totem pole.  And, as pointed out in the document, if image borders get implemented then a lot of the need for multiple borders goes away.

Alpha channel image masks — the problem I have here is what happens if you, say, try to use an image to alpha-mask a non-replaced element?  How does it scale?  Or does it?  Will there be a mask-stretch property?  Who really wants to stretch an image over a great big div anyway?  (From a visual-results point of view, I mean.)

Allowing masks might help in figuring out how to do non-rectangular float areas, in that you could use the alpha image to define the area used for float exclusion.  Combine that with a stretch ability and SVG support, so you can draw scalable vector masks, and I think you’re really getting somewhere.  (As does Matt Wilcox; he and I have been chewing this over in the comments on the previous post in the series.)

• CSS3 Feedback: Graphical Thoughts was published on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009.
• It was assigned to the Commentary, CSS, Standards, W3C, and Web categories.
• There have been twenty-seven replies.

(This is part of the Feedback on ‘WaSP Community CSS3 Feedback 2008’ series.)

The portion of the feedback devoted to shapes had two overarching themes, as I saw it.  That makes this entry a bit short, but when I tried to combine it with my feedback on “Graphical Effects“, it quickly got too long.  So, a little amuse cerveau, as it were.

Animations, transformations, and so on — the WebKit team have of course been having a field day in this area, and what they’ve done will likely make is way to other browsers.  Or not.  I don’t know.  I’m not entirely thrilled about the effort that’s gone into those properties when there are so many other, more basic things that need love and care, but there’s no denying the essential coolness of slowly rotating an entire page.  Which I totally need to do the next time I give a presentation.

I’m not going to get into the “these things are behavior and therefore JavaScript!” argument.  CSS already does behavior (think :hover) and it’s going to do more over time.  I don’t see how that historical pressure can be resisted for much longer, short of outright refusing to take on any more behaviors and thus making itself a prime candidate for replacement with something else.  We may as well do our best to make sure CSS does good behaviors well, in ways that makes the most sense to the most authors.

So that’s basically my feedback: since we’re going to do it, let’s do it right.  Apple’s made a start, and unless the syntax they’ve defined in their CSS Animations draft is completely unworkable in other browsers for technical reasons, then let’s just roll with it.  And please note I said the syntax, not the overall concept.  (Ditto for their CSS Transforms draft.)

Stuff that isn’t rectangular — including both polygonal element boxes and polygonal floats.  I’ve wanted these for at least a decade, so it’s little surprise that I’m in favor.  Ragged floats were invented as a hack to make the latter happen, of course, and the basic idea’s been improved upon more than once.

The tricky part, of course, is actually defining polygons.  Regular polygons, as in hexagons and octagons and dodecagons, are not terribly difficult; but creating an irregular polygon requires defining a set of point coordinates in relation to some origin and resolving what happens when the lines cross over each other and… well, yeah.

The build-on-what-exists approach would just adopt the syntax HTML area elements use in the coords elements.  There would be two interesting questions there, which are what happens with negative coordinate values, and what happens if you draw a polygon that cuts through some of the element’s content.  For example, you have a div containing an image, and you define the polygon to be smaller (in places) than the image.  Is the browser obligated to prevent content overlap in such cases?  I would tend to say no but I can see arguments for the opposite view, particularly when it comes to floats.

Then there’s the problem that you’d have to define a separate polygon for every element that needed a non-rectangular float, as Bert Bos notes in his thoughts on the topic from a couple of years ago.  His contour idea is certainly interesting, though I’d then start to wonder how you define a contour point on, say, an irregular faded gradient.

Anyway, I thought about adapting clip to the purpose of defining float polygons, but then I remembered the long, tortuous hell that is the history of clip (and offset-clip) and decided that a new property is the way to go.  Clean break, start fresh, et cetera.  I don’t know what it would be called.  content-shape, maybe, to go with element-shape.  Or not.

• CSS3 Feedback: Animated Shapes was published on Thursday, February 19th, 2009.
• It was assigned to the Commentary, CSS, Standards, W3C, and Web categories.
• There have been fourteen replies.

(This is part of the Feedback on ‘WaSP Community CSS3 Feedback 2008’ series.)

In this round, layout.  Not all of it, but the bits that struck me as either really useful or really, really way too long overdue.

Float containment — yes, we need a property that does just that.  As long as we’re tied to floats for layout—and I plan to rant about that soon—there should be a clear, unambiguous, intentionally defined property that tells elements to wrap themselves around floated descendant elements.  overflow works in most cases but can fall down in unusual circumstances (I’ve seen scrollbars appear where none were actually needed) and anyway, it wasn’t intended to provide the wrapping effect in the first place.  That it does so is a happy side effect, but it’s still a side effect.  The rest of the float-wrapping techniques are even more convoluted.  “There are already ways to do that so we don’t need a property” is rather like saying “we can already do layout with tables so why do we need CSS layout?”.

Positioning by center — yes, please.  The way to center an absolutely positioned element within its containing block is to set the top and left to 50% each and then define negative top and left margins that are half the positioned element’s height and width.  That’s just awful, and requires at least an explicit width, if not an explicit height.  When I did the structured timeline, here’s how I got the version numbers to center below the dots:

#timeline tbody td p {
	position: absolute;
	top: 50%;
	width: 2.1em;
	margin: -5px 0 0 -1em;
}

See that -1em left margin, and the 2.1em width?  Just to get the center of positioned elements’ boxes sit on top of a certain left offset (defined elsewhere in the CSS).  Ditto the negative top margin, to pull it upward just enough so that the elements’ boxes would have the point five pixels down from their tops line up with the vertical midpoint of their containing blocks.

I wanted to do something like this:

#timeline tbody td p {
	position: absolute;
	top: 50%;
	position-anchor: 50% 5px;
}

That would have said that the point in the center of the absolutely positioned element should be placed at the point in the containing block 21.7% down from the top and 44% of the way across from the left.  That would hang the positioned element’s center on that point, regardless of the size of the positioned element—note that I took out the width.  I could stop defining explicit sizes and just let the elements be the size they want to be to show their content.

The problem is that approach doesn’t fit at all well with the way positioning layout is defined.  Suppose I said this:

#timeline tbody td p {
	position: absolute;
	top: 50%; bottom: 0;
	left: 50%; right: 25%;
	position-anchor: 50% 5px;
}

Now what?  I’m not even sure myself.  Maybe define rename it to position-offset and define percentages to be relative to the height and width of the positioned element (not its containing block), so that it doesn’t interact directly with the offset properties like top and right?

All I want is a way to hang elements off of offset points, and not be restricted to the corners of the elements, and have the solution work even when the elements have automatic height and width, and not require extra markup to make it happen.  Oh, and a ponycar.

Box sizing — what in the nine hells of Valeria is taking so long?  We needed that one ten years ago.  I no longer care if it’s done as its own property or as new keywords on height and width.  I just want it.  Someone will make it happen, with or without the WG or implementors—mark my words.

Same-height elements — yes, a way to tie element heights (whether they’re siblings or not) together would be welcome, although I can see how specifying it in an implementable would be tricky; no, display: table-cell  is not the answer.  Soon I will rant about this.  Soon.

• CSS3 Feedback: Layout was published on Monday, February 16th, 2009.
• It was assigned to the Commentary, CSS, Standards, W3C, and Web categories.
• There have been fourteen replies.

(This is part of the Feedback on ‘WaSP Community CSS3 Feedback 2008’ series.)

Out of all the selector feedback, selector blocks was the part that really caught my attention.  I also see the usefulness of a parent selector, but that one has come up many times before, and it’s always died at the doorstep of implementors, who point out that it’s far too difficult to implement without serious performance penalties and even risk of browser lockup.  See, for example, the comment left by David Hyatt on Shaun Inman’s post on the idea.  Similarly, I think constants (or macros or whatever they’re called) are a great idea and would be very helpful, especially if you’re coding up a Jason Special.  Both are loaded with use cases, so I don’t feel like I can add a lot; besides, constants are already in the WG charter, so there’s once more hope in the land.

So anyway, selector blocks.  To pick one recent example, while working on a project that should very soon see the light of day, I had a situation involving the following chunk of rules.

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, table {
   font: 1em Arial, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, sans-serif;}
h1 {font-size: 275%;}
h3:first-child {margin-top: 1em;}
p.tagline {margin: -0.25em 0 1.25em;
   font-size: 125%;
   color: #7B7960;}
h3 {margin: 1.5em 0 0.25em; font-size: 125%;}
h3:before {font-size: 75%; counter-increment: subhead;}
h4 {margin: 2.5em 0 0.75em;
   text-transform: uppercase; font-size: 125%;
   color: #928F59;}
p {margin: 0 0 1em;}
ul {padding-left: 1.5em;}
ul li {list-style: disc; margin: 0.5em 0;}

Nothing unusual about them, of course, unless you count my use of counters.  These rules had been written early on in development, and the design had evolved around that part of the document.  As more page components were added, I realized that I needed to scope all these rules to one section of the document: specifically, a div with a class of main.  So here’s what I had to do.

.main h1, .main h2, .main h3, .main h4, 
.main h5, .main h6, .main table {
   font: 1em Arial, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, sans-serif;}
.main h1 {font-size: 275%;}
.main h3:first-child {margin-top: 1em;}
.main p.tagline {margin: -0.25em 0 1.25em;
   font-size: 125%;
   color: #7B7960;}
.main h3 {margin: 1.5em 0 0.25em; font-size: 125%;}
.main h3:before {font-size: 75%; counter-increment: subhead;}
.main h4 {margin: 2.5em 0 0.75em;
   text-transform: uppercase; font-size: 125%;
   color: #928F59;}
.main p {margin: 0 0 1em;}
.main ul {padding-left: 1.5em;}
.main ul li {list-style: disc; margin: 0.5em 0;}

This, on the other hand, is what I really wanted to do:

.main {
   h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, table {
      font: 1em Arial, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, sans-serif;}
   h1 {font-size: 275%;}
   h3:first-child {margin-top: 1em;}
   p.tagline {margin: -0.25em 0 1.25em;
      font-size: 125%;
      color: #7B7960;}
   h3 {margin: 1.5em 0 0.25em; font-size: 125%;}
   h3:before {font-size: 75%; counter-increment: subhead;}
   h4 {margin: 2.5em 0 0.75em;
      text-transform: uppercase; font-size: 125%;
      color: #928F59;}
   p {margin: 1em 0;}
   ul {padding-left: 1.5em;}
   ul li {list-style: disc; margin: 0.5em 0;}
}

Or, if necessary, to put the whole original chunk into its own style sheet and then do one of the following:

div.main {@import url(main-style.css);}

<div class="main" style="@import url(main-style.css);">

Interestingly, the latter is theoretically possible, thanks to the more advanced profiles in the CSS module “Syntax of CSS rules in HTML’s ‘style’ attribute“.  I’m not aware of the former having been seriously considered (despite my best efforts, once upon a time), though it’s always possible I missed something.

But either one of those approaches would be a last resort, in my opinion.  I’d much rather just wrap the whole chunk in .main { }, like I showed previously, and be done with it.  That capability would also simplify certain annoyingly repetitive patterns, like the very first of those rules.  I think it’s pretty obvious which of the following is easier to write and maintain:

body.home #content .entry h2, 
body.home #content .entry h3, 
body.home #content .entry h4, 
body.home #content .entry h5, 
body.home #content .entry h6 {...}

body.home #content .entry {
   h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {...}
}

I mean, just look at the former, and imagine what one goes through to write it in the first place.  Copy, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste… maddening.  And that’s just for a small block of CSS like this one.  Imagine the tedium of doing this for a block of 50 rules, or 150.  (Also, this is the the same thing that was requested in the feedback as “Grouped Alternates“, albeit with a different syntax.)

One objection to this sort of pattern is that it increases dependence on descendant selectors, which are computationally inefficient.  But it doesn’t: I had to create a whole bunch of descendant selectors as it was, and did so far more clumsily.  And had I missed a command-V somewhere, I’d have had styles that applied outside their intended subtree.  Introducing a way to nest blocks like this doesn’t change anything except make it easier and more maintainable to do what we already do.  Honestly, it’s pretty much impossible to increase dependence on descendant selectors.  The best we can do now is make them less difficult to write.

I realize that the syntax I depict would cause backwards-compatibility problems, as in older browsers would not behave as intended when exposed to this sort of thing, but I’ve also stopped being concerned about that.  We can’t keep holding ourselves hostage to decisions made a decade or more back.  Provide the capability and authors will use it when they can.  Over time, its use will become more prevalent—kind of the same way authors adopted CSS in the first place.

I also realize that this case has been made time and again by many, many other people.  This isn’t even the first time I’ve made this case, though I think the other times were within the WG and therefore off the public record.  The fact that it keeps being made is a strong indicator that the need exists, and dismissing the idea because the same end effect can be achieved with existing selector syntax (as shown above) isn’t acceptable.  That’s like saying that complex selection effects can be achieved with JavaScript or XPath, so there’s no need for advanced CSS selectors.

So that’s my use case.  I actually have a bunch more, but they all follow the same basic pattern: the desire to group rules together into subsections of a document, or to otherwise simplify the writing of CSS.

• CSS3 Feedback: Selector Blocks was published on Thursday, February 12th, 2009.
• It was assigned to the Commentary, CSS, Standards, W3C, and Web categories.
• There have been thirty-eight replies.

Back before holiday season hit, Elika Etemad—better known as Fantasai—published WaSP Community CSS3 Feedback 2008.  I gave it a read and came away with a number of things I wanted to say.  So many things, in fact, that I’ll need to split them up into a series of posts.  This here post will serve as introduction and hub, with links to the follow-on entries added as they’re published.  All very Bray-ny, no?  (Go ahead, groan.  It only encourages me.)

Here you go:

1. Selector blocks
2. Layout
3. Wanted: Layout System
4. Animated Shapes
5. Graphical Thoughts

I want to make clear up front that I’m not going to address every single point in the feedback document: it’s just too incredibly huge.  I did think about making my own copy and then just filling in my reactions to each point, but that didn’t scale very well.  Not only did it seem really overbearing and maybe just a touch egotistical, but some of my reactions were based on related topics in separate areas of the original.  Besides, I know what it’s like trying to read a really, really long article, so breaking it up and just focusing on the parts that got me fired up made way more sense.

There is one thing I want to address before I start serving up the follow-on installments.  At the end of Fantasai’s post, there’s a link to my 2006 post about the benefit of having a community liaison, someone who bridges the gap between the WG and the public.  She then asks if anyone is interested in volunteering, but personally, I don’t see the need.  The WG already has a community liaison:  it’s you, Fantasai.  It has been for some time now, thanks to your regular and informative CSS WG blog posts and other outreach work such as “WaSP Community CSS3 Feedback 2008”.  The job is being done, and being done very well, I don’t think there’s any doubt that the Working Group is much, much better for it.

• Feedback on ‘WaSP Community CSS3 Feedback 2008’ was published on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009.
• It was assigned to the Commentary, CSS, Standards, W3C, and Web categories.
• There have been five replies.