Posts in the (X)HTML Category

Just a reminder to all of you in the Chicago, IL area that I’ll be talking about XHTML, CSS, and that sort of thing on Thursday, 4 3 November 2005.  I’ll be talking all day long, or close to it, as I delve into details, rebuild a design or two, and answer questions from the attendees.  If you’re interested, check out the Carson Workshops site for more information on this and other workshops.

If you’re in Philadelphia, of course, you’ll want to check out An Event Apart, where Mr. Zeldman and I will trade off talking all day.  Seats have been selling pretty briskly, so if you’re interested, you might want to register soon.

I’d encourage all you Strayans to register for WE05, except it’s completely sold out.  The same is very nearly true of UI10, from what I’m told.  Things are definitely picking up on the events circuit!

Which is a good thing for me… after all, how else am I going to reach Gold Elite status?  (I wonder if I get an energy sword for that.)

• Speaking Out was published on Wednesday, September 21st, 2005.
• It was assigned to the (X)HTML, CSS, Speaking, and Standards categories.
• There have been five replies.

I couldn’t be more proud to announce the launch of An Event Apart.  What is An Event Apart (AEA)?  It’s an all-day seminar, one that moves from city to city, featuring me and Jeffrey Zeldman.  The inaugural event will be held at the Franklin Institute in central Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on Monday, 5 December 2005.  We’ll be taking it to other cities in 2006; keep an eye on the AEA RSS feed for announcements.

Honestly, AEA can be summarized in one sentence: it’s the kind of seminar Jeffrey and I would want to attend.  Hopefully that right there is enough to get you interested, but wait until you hear the details.

• No “intro to X” sessions.  We’re packing the day with as much detail, technical insight, and expert information as possible.  We won’t be taking any time to explain the basics of CSS or XHTML or anything else.  From the first minute to the last, we’re putting the pedal to the metal.
• An intimate look at how Jeffrey and I do what we do.  Most of our material will be drawn from recent projects we’ve done together, such as the web sites for A List Apart, An Event Apart, UNIFEM, and others.  All the nifty tricks, browser hacks, practical compromises and development surprises—they’ll be laid bare for attendees to examine, question, chuckle over, and take back to their own work.
• Going from  comp to complete.  How does one get from a visual comp file to a working XHTML+CSS page?  You’ll find out how we do it as we step through that very process.
• Constant interaction.  This isn’t a rigidly formalized “we talk for 80 minutes and you ask questions for 10 minutes” kind of setup.  Jeffrey and I see it as more of a conversation between us and the attendees.  We’ll probably do most of the talking, and we’ll certainly have all kinds of stuff to talk about, but we’re really looking forward to questions that will take things in a new direction.  We want the attendees to ask tough questions about what we’re showing, and ask us about the tough problems they’ve faced.
• Attendee markover.  For one of the day’s sessions, we’ll take a site submitted by an attendee and give it a markover, turning it into semantic XHTML and CSS without disrupting the visual appearance.  This will make for a great look at practical standards-oriented design for a real-world site.
• Interesting venues.  Jeffrey and I been to a zillion conferences in hotel ballrooms and conference centers, and frankly we’re bored to death with that whole repetitive scene.  So we’re going to aim for places that are a little off the beaten path; venues that have some interest.  As an example, just look at the venue for AEA Philadelphia, the Franklin Institute; it’s one of the most prestigious science museums in the country.

The content of AEA won’t be just markup and CSS, either.  We’re going to talk about how standards-based design speeds up the development process, how we work in a distributed team, and how we approach web design in general.  We’ll share what’s worked for us and what hasn’t, and find out what experiences the attendees have had.

So if you’re in the Philadelphia area, or can reach it fairly easily, I strongly encourage you to take a look at the AEA site—and then ask yourself whether this is an event you can afford to miss.

• An Event Apart Debuts was published on Tuesday, September 6th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the (X)HTML, CSS, Speaking, and Standards categories.
• There have been nineteen replies.

As a followup to my entry about id="tags" causing problems in IE/Win, here are four five test pages for IE/Win:

• IE Keyword Testing (length)
• IE Keyword Testing (item)
• IE Keyword Testing (namedItem)
• IE Keyword Testing (tags)
• IE Keyword Testing (urns)

These are based on Kevin Hamilton’s observation that it’s highly likely the problems are caused by the tags method in IE/Win’s document.all DOM interface.  As he says:

[I]f you have an element with an id=”tags”, then document.all.tags is now a reference to that element, and no longer a method of the document.all object.

Such states would completely shatter any IE DOM scripting that relied on the document.all methods, and at least in the case of tags causes problems like crashing on print (probably because of the aforementioned conflict between the ID value and the DOM method).  The other keywords of concern are chronicled in the test pages listed above.  I’d test IE/Win myself, except I don’t have a printer handy for IE/Win to use, and besides, bug-hunting is best conducted in large groups.

Basically, load up each test page in IE/Win and do anything you can think to do.  Try to print, view source, save a local copy, et cetera, et cetera—the more obscure and offbeat, the better.  Let us know via the comments any problems you run into with said pages (trying to print them is a good first step, since that’s what messed up on tags) and I’ll add notes to each page based on what’s found.

In the meantime, I’m personally going to avoid using any of those words as ID values, and heartily recommend the same to you.

Update: I’ve added a test (for length) to the above list, and have another that’s not on the list due to its unfinished nature.  It’s a test of id="all"; the problem is, I don’t really know how to test it, or if it’s likely to be a problem at all.  Suggestions are welcomed in the comments.  I added some JavaScript links to some of the test pages as a secondary test, but I’m not sure how much good they do, to be honest.  As with suggestions, your feedback is welcome.

For those in search of more background, or trying to find new ways to test possible conflicts, or whatever, feel free to look over Microsoft’s documentation of the “all Collection”.

• Reserved ID Values? was published on Monday, August 29th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the (X)HTML, Browsers, CSS, and DOM categories.
• There have been forty replies.

Here’s a fascinating little tidbit: on some users’ machines, attempts to print out Joe Clark‘s ALA article “Facts and Opinions About PDF Accessibility” would crash Internet Explorer.  The error message mentioned a script error in line 1401: “Object doesn’t support this property or method”.  Funny thing: we weren’t doing any scripting.  The error was actually occurring shdoclc.dll/preview.dlg, which is of course a piece of the operating system.

Jason did some sleuthing and traced the crash to this line of markup:

<h2 id="tags">Tags and structure</h2>

Honestly, that was it.  So Jeffrey renamed the ID to read:

<h2 id="structure">Tags and structure</h2>

So far as we know, no more crashing in Explorer.

Ain’t browsers a slice?

(And yes, we’re aware of the clamor for a print style sheet.  More on this later.)

Update: Marten Veldthuis from Strongpsace points out that 37signals ran into a very similar problem in Backpack.  Details can be found in Jamis Buck‘s June 3rd post ie-is-teh-3v1l.  Spread the word: “tags” is effectively a reserved keyword, even though no such concept exists in (X)HTML.  Use it at your (users’) peril.

• When Printing Kills was published on Friday, August 26th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the (X)HTML, Browsers, and DOM categories.
• There have been forty-six replies.

Remember how, back in July, I ventured across the Atlantic to give two full-day workshops on XHTML and CSS in London?  Well, this November the workshop is crossing the ocean: announcing “Professional CSS XHTML Techniques” this coming November 3rd in Chicago, Illinois.

Ryan Carson, one of the two founders of BD4D, is putting together a heck of a workshop series, as you can see by visiting the Carson Workshops home page.  There you’ll find my workshop listed, as well as seminars from Cal Henderson, Joe Clark, and Molly Holzschlag and Andy Clarke.  So far, they’re all headed to London, but given the past history of Ryan’s efforts, I think it’s a good bet some or all of them will be headed Stateside in the future.

As in London, your registration gets you a copy of the “XHTML / CSS Survival Kit”, a disc containing all kinds of examples, articles, tools, and so forth.  You’ll also get a whole day of high-tempo, practical instruction in CSS-driven design, with plenty of opportunity to pose questions and get answers.  I had a great time in London, and the attendees seemed to have just as good a time.  I’ll be doing an updated version of what I did there, so if you wanted to attend the London event but couldn’t swing the transoceanic airfare—well, here’s your chance to make up for it!

Addendum: you know, I was so excited to tell you that the workshop was going to happen that I completely neglected to mention that registration is already open!  So get yerself on over to the Carson Workshops site, click on through to my seminar, and sign up already!

• Workshopping in Chicago was published on Wednesday, August 10th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the (X)HTML, CSS, and Speaking categories.
• There have been fourteen replies.

I think that, overall, the workshops went very well indeed.  Probably the most frustrating thing was that the hotel lacked net access for the entire time I was there.  Oh, they had a network, with drops in the rooms and a first-floor wifi cloud.  It’s just that the network was completely broken for the entire five days, save a two-hour window in the middle of one of the days.

But that annoyance aside, everything else was great.  The attendees asked a lot of interesting questions and soaked up the firehose of information I was blasting their way.  There was some good (and good-natured) give-and-take on the subject of tables versus CSS for layout, with plenty of examples of where each approach might be better or worse than others.  And hey, I wore a tie!  Both days!  Ryan has the picture to prove it!

He also has the British spelling of “favorite” to prove that he’s been away from Colorado for too long.

Anyway, I’d like to send a huge thank you to everyone who attended for making it a great experience.  I had fun, and I think you did too.  Now for two bits of trivia about the attendees:

• The quiet, bearded man who sat house right in the third or fourth row on Saturday was none other than Michaël Guitton, a significant and early contributor to S5, the slide show system I used to present the morning notes.  I didn’t find this out until the end of the day, or else I’d have made him stand to take a bow.  (Which might be why he waited until the end of the day to introduce himself.)

  He was also the only person at lunch to order the salmon, although I came very close to doing so myself.

• On Friday, as a number of us headed up the street for social hour, one of the attendees mentioned he’d been in Cleveland and Columbus many years ago.  I asked what had brought him there, and he said he’d been touring with a band.

  “Oh, really?” said I.  “That’s cool.  Um, any chance it’s a band I might have heard of?”

  “The Jesus and Mary Chain”, he said.

  “WHAT?!?!?”

  I had to ask him three times if he was having me on.  Turns out he wasn’t: I was talking to Dave Evans, who was their guitarist in the late 80s.  Seriously.  I could not make this up even if I tried.  I really had a former member of the Jesus and Mary Chain in my CSS workshop.

  That’s so far beyond incredible that I can’t even describe where it ends up.

• Workshop Wrap-Up was published on Wednesday, June 8th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the (X)HTML, CSS, and Speaking categories.
• There have been six replies.

Since I’m going to be arriving in London a week from today, I wandered over to the Professional CSS / XHTML Techniques Workshop site to see how things were going.  I discovered that there are only three seats left for the Friday session, Saturday having sold out long ago.  So if you’ve been hesitating, might be best to overcome that hesitation in a timely fashion.  I’m just sayin’.

• Limited London Seating was published on Thursday, May 26th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the (X)HTML, CSS, and Speaking categories.
• There have been eleven replies.

Over at Complex Spiral Consulting, I maintain a list of upcoming appearances at conferences, workshops, and the like.  These are the “public” events; that is, events which are accessible by members of the public, assuming they pay whatever registration fee is being charged by the people in charge of the event.  This is in contrast to “private” events; that is, client work that isn’t open to anyone except employees of the client.

Occasionally I’m asked if I have an RSS feed of those events, or send out e-mail updates, or otherwise provide any sort of notice other than just changing the web page.  For a long time, the answer was basically “no”.  Now it’s “yes”, and it’s an example of a microformat in action.

If you’re using iCal on OS X, or any other webcal:-aware calendaring program, then all you have to do is hit the following link: Complex Spiral upcoming events calendar.  Your calendar program should come to the foreground and let you add the URI as a subscribed calendar.  And hey presto!  You’re done.  Any changes to the web page will be reflected in your calendar the next time the subscription is refreshed, and iCal lets you set your refresh interval to be 15 minutes, once a day, once a week, and so on.

What’s happening there is you’re pouring the home page of complexspiral.com through an XSLT recipe called X2V written by Brian Suda.  His XSLT pulls out the hCalendar markup and turns it into an ICS file, one fully conformant with RFC 2445.  So I don’t have to figure out how to produce and provide my own ICS file.  Providing the hCalendar markup is enough, thanks to Brian’s work.

Of course, the number of people who would want to subscribe to my professional appearances schedule is fairly small.  This is just a demonstration, though.  Suppose a site like, oh, upcoming.org were to publish their event calendars with hCalendar markup?  Then all you’d have to do is find the page that corresponds to your city, run it through Brian’s script, and you’d have your very own regularly updated local events calendar, just like that.

Guess what?  You can do that right now:  upcoming.org is publishing its information using hCalendar markup.  For example, here’s the calendar for Cleveland, Ohio, ready for one-click subscription: Cleveland events calendar.  If you just want the ICS file to be downloaded to your hard drive, then you can use this link instead: Cleveland events ICS file.  The only difference between the two links is that the former uses the webcal: scheme identifier, whereas the second uses the more familiar http:.

I personally think there needs to be some work done on their hCalendar markup, like properly marking up location information.  The time information for some events seems to be a bit wonky as well, although the dates are accurate.  The great thing is that the hCalendar information could be fixed in very short order.  In fact, from what I’ve heard, they added basic hCalendar markup to the site in under an hour.  Adding more, or fixing any problems in what they have, shouldn’t take much longer.

Imagine how much further this could go.  Suppose Basecamp marked up its project calendars with hCalendar, and used a script like Brian’s to turn it into ICS information.  Its users could have project milestones right there in their personal calendar programs.  Ditto for the To-Do’s lists, because that sort of information is all defined in the iCalendar specification.  The TiVo site could provide customized schedules, like all the showings of American Idol or Masterpiece Theater.  The IMDB could publish movie opening dates in hCalendar format; studios could do the same.  Want a calendar schedule that shows what DVDs are coming out, when?  Or what new albums are being released for the next month?  All it takes is a little slice of a webmonkey’s time.

The point being, there’s nothing for which said webmonkey has to wait.  The tools are already here.  No browser has to be upgraded.  In fact, in many ways this bypasses the browser to send information directly to the calendaring program… but the information is provided in a browser- and search-engine-friendly way, so they can access and use the same data in their own ways.  No alternate files.  Just a single set of information, made more rich and useful through easily understood mechanisms.

How cool is that?

• Getting Onto The Calendar was published on Wednesday, May 18th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the (X)HTML, Microformats, and semantic web categories.
• There have been eleven replies.