Excerpt from an IM session this afternoon:
Eric Meyer: Browsers– can’t live with ’em, can’t kill their developers.
Molly Holzschlag: well one could …
Eric Meyer: Okay, but not legally.
Molly Holzschlag: justifiable homicide?
Eric Meyer: Juries are notoriously unsympathetic to technical explanations.
Molly Holzschlag: you have a point
I quick-linked 10 Things to Do in Cleveland Before You Die, but the more I looked at the list, the less happy it made me. So I’ve decided to compile my own list. Note that this list doesn’t include restaurants. As much as I love to eat, I just don’t think that a single meal is worthy of a “things to do before you’re dead” list, no matter how amazing the meal. I might compile a separate “Ten Places to Eat In Cleveland” list, but that’s a subject for another day.
Not on CD, you goof—anyone can do that. Hear them perform live and in person at least once in your life. Odds are you’ll want to make it more than once, given that they’re one of the best orchestras in the world. Bonus points for seeing them at Blossom Music Center, followed by a fireworks display.
That includes the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, which includes the Shafran Planetarium; the Western Reserve Historical Society, which includes the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum; and the Cleveland Botanical Gardens, all within a quarter-mile radius. Included in that grouping is Severance Hall, home of the Cleveland Orchestra. This one’s kind of a cheat, since if I mentioned them all separately that would make this a “Top 15 Things To Do” list, which for some reason doesn’t sound as interesting.
Known as the “Emerald Necklace”, the extensive park system (20,000 acres in 14 reservations) not only girds the city but also runs throughout the greater metropolitan area. There are hiking trails, picnic areas, educational events, and a whole lot more, including the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo.
The real joy is in the smaller cases, where you can find original lyrics sheets to landmark songs complete with scratched-out ideas and arrows marking rearrangements, bills for hotel-room damage, and other tidbits. The architecture of the building is fascinating as well.
Besides the dozens of fruit and vegetable stalls in the outside promenade, the interior market space is filled with local butchers, bakers, and other amazing treats. Come early on Saturday morning for the best selection.
That’s where and when you’ll find the Taste of Cleveland, a great way to sample various cuisines, while the aerial displays of the Cleveland National Air Show, based not half a mile away, soar overhead. (Assuming the FAA relaxes its restrictions on such flights near sporting events, that is.) If you stick around until nightfall, you’ll have a perfect excuse to go party in the Flats, too.
Technically these aren’t in Cleveland itself, but they’re close enough to warrant inclusion. About forty minutes southeast of downtown is Geauga Lake (formerly Six Flags Worlds of Adventure), a combination amusement park and water park. Just over an hour west of downtown, you’ll find Cedar Point, one of the nation’s premiere amusements parks and the roller coaster capital of the world.
Whether you take out a two-man boat or take a dinner cruise on the Good Time III, it’s worth seeing the city from the water. Even better, if you’re captain of your own boat, you can sail to one of the islands or head west along the shoreline to Cedar Point.
With three major-league teams (the Indians, Browns, and Cavaliers) playing downtown, if you’re a sports fan, you’ll find a game to watch. There are a number of other teams in town as well, including the Barons (hockey) and the Force (soccer).
Do it while you’re still alive, okay? You’ll not only get great views of the city, but also see artistic, beautiful monuments to James A. Garfield, John D. Rockefeller, Eliot Ness, and others. The Wade Chapel, situated on the shores of a pond, features an interior designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany and full of the famous glasswork bearing his name. Who knows? Maybe you’ll find a place to rest after you’re dead.
I have to be honest and admit that I haven’t even done everything on my own list. However, I suspect that as our kids grow up, we’ll do all of those things more than once.
A couple of nights ago, Kat and I watched most of Toy Story 2 before going to bed. In subsequent nights, we watched the rest of the movie, and also the original Toy Story, but that’s not important right now. It was interesting to compare the technical differences between the two, from rendering to animation, but that’s also not important right now.
A few minutes before 5:00am on the morning after we’d watched most of TS2, we were awakened by a cry from Carolyn. She settled back down within a minute, and as we lay there dropping back off to sleep ourselves, we very clearly heard, coming from somewhere in the house, a quick series of three beeps.
My first thought was the carbon monoxide detector, but it wasn’t loud enough or the right tone pattern (the CO detector just wails in one long earsplitting tone). My second thought was a fire detector running low on batteries, but again, wrong tone pattern. The interval between these two thoughts was probably a couple of minutes, because it was very early in the morning and I was stumbling around the house trying to figure out what had produced the sound.
After a tour of the first floor and a quick peek into Carolyn’s room, I went back to bed. It took a while, since I’d shifted into sentry mode, but I eventually fell back asleep. We haven’t heard any mysterious beeps since then.
It’s hard to shake the suspicion that our electronic gadgets have started talking to each other at night. I’m not sure what they’d talk about; how much would a VCR really have to say to a cell phone? Maybe they discuss difficult philosophcal questions and further illuminate the nature of existence. Maybe our technosphere has gotten sophisticated enough that a collective awareness has emerged. If that’s true, then it’s little wonder we wouldn’t have heard about it. What interest would a global intelligence have in talking to any of us?
Then again, maybe a short-circuit or other unexpected condition triggered some beeps, and that was that.
Yesterday morning, I saw via somebody’s feed (most likely either Matt or Simon) that Rakesh Pai has published a piece called “The Economics of XHTML”, in which he explores and summarizes many points in favor of moving to XHTML. As he says, XHTML and semantic HTML are basically the same thing, so when you read the article you should prepend the words “old-style” to the term HTML and “semantic HTML or” to the term XHTML. Thus, the following paragraph from his article:
HTML files are rather complex. They have so much irrelevant information, it becomes difficult to manage them. XHTML on the other hand, if well planned, will be much easier to manage in the long run due to sheer simplicity of the files.
…should be read (emphasis indicates my modifications):
Old-style HTML files are rather complex. They have so much irrelevant information, it becomes difficult to manage them. Semantic HTML or XHTML on the other hand, if well planned, will be much easier to manage in the long run due to sheer simplicity of the files.
I admit I’m reading a bit into the text, but I think my reading is supported by Rakesh’s statement about the basic equivalence of semantic HTML and XHTML.
Overall, it’s a very good summary of the business reasons to shift to standards-oriented design. It bothers me not at all that he left out a discussion of CSS in the article, since the focus was purely on the benefits to be gained from improving your markup. It’s often useful to concentrate on small pieces in detail, so that by the time you’ve looked at the various pieces you have a much better understanding of the overall picture. I would like to talk about an under-recognized aspect of his first point, which was (again, emphasis indicates an insertion on my part):
Semantic HTML or XHTML will give a definite reduction in amount of space used on the server, which translates to money saved. Large sites will also benefit from the bandwidth savings, though this might be insignificant for smaller sites.
It’s true that smaller sites probably won’t save a lot of money on bandwidth. This is especially true given that many small businesses pay a flat rate each month so long as their bandwidth is below a certain level. So sites in that range will likely not see significant reductions in expenses.
What they will see, though, is a faster site. Okay, actually, that’s what their users will see, but that’s the entire point. Suppose I said I could sell you a product that would make your Web site twice as fast as it is today. How much would that be worth? Maybe not much for a fandom site, but even for a small business trying to sell its products online and disitinguish itself from competitors, a 2x speed booster would probably be worth buying.
The thing is that you don’t have to make a purchase to get this boost (unless you decide to hire a consultant like me to help you migrate to standards-oriented design). There’s no product to buy. Along with all the other benefits Rakesh describes—accessibility, ease of maintenance, and so on—a faster Web site is part of the standards package.
How so? Far and away, the #1 factor in request-to-render time is the raw number of bytes you’re shipping to the user. If you’re sending a dialup user a 60KB page, then even assuming an uninterrupted, uncongested connection it will take about 15 seconds for the page to render, measured from the time the user requests it. If you send a 30KB page, it will take half that time.
I’m not just saying that because it sounds true: while I was at Netscape, Bob Clary and I did experiments on the effects of standards-oriented design on request-to-render time. We saw basically no speed improvement from using standards-oriented design beyond the reduction in page weight—but that was a substantial effect. Thus, the actual markup you use is basically irrelevant in this arena. The whole page could be one graphic scan of your brochure, or it could be a press release. Either way, the more bytes you send over the wire, the slower the site will seem. True, there are other considerations, like server load, network congestion, and so on. All of those factors will be eased, and speed improved, if there are fewer bytes per page request. It’s honestly that simple.
As I’ve been telling clients, this is what makes standards a big economic win: standards-oriented designs are nearly always much smaller than old-style designs. Usually they’re half the size of old-school pages, although that reduction can vary; Microsoft’s home page size dropped by about two-thirds in terms of the markup weight alone. With Microsoft’s traffic, they stand to save a boatload of money on that reduction. They also have a site that’s faster, that feels less bloated, that leaves more of a positive impression on the user. That’s an important consideration for any company, regardless of its size. It’s a consideration that’s harder to quantify than reduced costs, of course, but not one that can be ignored. As Richard Rutter shared, when Multimap went to a standards-oriented design, they didn’t see as much of a drop in bandwidth consumption as they’d expected, although there was a reduction. What they saw was a dramatic upswing in page views, which meant increased revenue for the firm; in other words, they were able to serve more customers and increase revenue while using less bandwidth than before.
That’s what they call increased efficiency, and it’s a competitive advantage in any arena.
Over dinner this evening, I wondered why it is that bank ATMs always have to ask me what language I prefer. Why not just encode my language preference on the card’s magnetic strip, so that when I insert the card into the machine it immediately knows what language to use?
It was, of course, too obvious an idea for me to have had it first: Why Not? has a post proposing the same idea just over a year ago. The followup comments pretty much covered all the related ideas that came up as well.
So while it turns out I don’t get points for having the idea first, the question still remains: why don’t ATM cards (and the ATMs themselves) offer this capability?
Update: I forgot to enable comments, so a few people have e-mailed me to say that Bank of America ATMs do in fact let you set your language preferences, along with several other options. Apparently these settings only carry to other BoA ATMs, so I suspect it’s data being stored in their database instead of being written onto the card itself. It would be nicer if the card could carry that information and have it recognized by all ATMs, but I suppose we get these things one step at a time.
Every now and again, I stumble across a weblog post that makes me feel the way I expect random visitors feel about my CSS posts. I hit one recently titled “No Information Lost Here!” which says, in part:
Anyone who hasn’t been asleep for the past 6 years knows that quantum gravity in asymptotically anti-de Sitter space has unitary time evolution. Blackholes may form and evaporate in interior, but the overall evolution is unitary and is holographically dual to the evolution in a gauge theory on the boundary.
Um, yeah. I mean, who didn’t know that? Sheesh!
It’s always fun to come across someone who clearly is expert in a field I know nothing about (although, in a parallel universe where I stuck with my original college plans, I’d understand it) and who is clearly writing for other people in the same field. It reminds me that much of what I write here is effectively gibberish to 99.9995% of the planet, even though that probably isn’t the case for most of my visitors. It’s good to hit a weblog where I am, for lack of a better term, an outsider. It helps preserve perspective.
Even more fun in this case, however, was to note the end of the URL for the post titled “No Information Lost Here!”: 000404.html.
This past weekend, I was honored to be a groomsman in the wedding of Jim and Genevieve. I suspect that I was chosen in part because my height came reasonably close to matching that of the bridesmaid with whom I was paired, but I can accept that. It was, without doubt, one of the most interesting wedding events I’ve ever experienced.
Not because of the actual wedding itself—no, that was a fairly normal affair, complete with a quick relocation indoors due to a thunderstorm that arrived precisely on time. It was more punctual than some of the guests, actually. Similarly, there was the expected folderol with the photographer, who was stressed out and stressed out everyone else in her attempts to get The Absolute Best Bridal Party Pictures Ever. Nothing unusual there. We even had the requisite confusion about who was escorting whom, and in what order, to their seats at the very beginning of the processional, despite having rehearsed it twice the night before.
Things actually got interesting a few weeks back, when the bachelor party started with an afternoon of paintball. That was before the more normal dinner and then visits to a series of, er, gentlemen’s clubs. (Sadly, I missed that last part since we only had a babysitter until eleven, and Kat was at the bachelorette party being held the same night. We drew straws, and I was the one who got to come back home early.) But paintball? Who starts off a bachelor party with a bunch of guys running around shooting paint pellets at each other? The last of my bruises finally vanished a few days ago, in fact. I mean, it was fun and all, modulo the stinging impacts and aches of course. It just seemed very, very odd. Especially that we didn’t all gang up on the groom and paste him head to toe in paint. And bruises.
Then, the night before the wedding, things got more interesting. At the rehearsal dinner, Jim presented us with our groomsman gifts, something he’d been saying for a couple of weeks he was really stoked about, all while rightly refusing to say what he’d gotten. All of them were obviously the same thing, and felt through the wrapping paper like a set of Craftsman wrenches or something similar. Turns out he got us all Victor II paintball guns (excuse me, “markers”). Seriously.
I mean, I’ve heard of shotgun weddings before, but this is something else altogether.
Apparently, there will be more paintball in our futures. Kat was really excited, announcing in front of everyone that she hoped there’d be monthly paintball, because she wants me out of the house. Really, that’s how she phrased it. I felt so very loved.
Then there was the night after the wedding. After a well-attended and very tasty barbeque on the shore of Lake Erie, a bunch of us deliberately went to play Whirlyball. “What’s that?” you ask. It’s sort of like lacrosse, except the competitors drive around the playing arena in bumper cars. Seriously. Go check out the site if you don’t believe me. I can wait.
Now for the part many of you may not believe: Whirlyball is actually a lot of fun. Besides the sheer joy of driving around bumper cars for fifteen minutes straight, you’re involved in a game that actually lends itself to some sophisticated strategy and tactics, if you pay attention and have teammates who do the same. There’s just one thing I really want to know. Why Whirlyball? There’s really no whirling in the game unless you get confused by the car’s steering mechanism and start driving in a circle… or, as happened to one player, get the steering mechanism slammed into your groin, causing him to slump over and drive in a small circle for a while, feebly waving his scoop in the air whenever the referee asked if he was okay. I guess that’s why they tell you to buckle the seat belt low and tight across your lap.
Frankly, more weddings should be as fun as theirs.
There’s a faint tendency in my work to operate in threes. I wrote a theory book, a reference book, and a practical book, for example, even referring them to the three legs of a stool. (Okay, so I’ve written more since then.) Hopefully, this will serve as the third of three posts on tables and layout, and not the third of more than three. I have other things I want to write about that have been delayed, and honestly, I grow weary of tromping the same ground again and again.
Brad Bice pointed out that my example markup could be noticeably reduced in size by doing the following:
div#layout {display: table;}
div#layout > div {display: table-row;}
div#layout > div > div {display: table-cell;}
<div id="layout">
<div>
<div>...content...</div>
<div>...content...</div>
<div>...content...</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>...content...</div>
<div>...content...</div>
<div>...content...</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>...content...</div>
<div>...content...</div>
<div>...content...</div>
</div>
</div>
That brings the CSS approach roughly into line with the weight of the table-based approach, which is good. That still leaves us with the larger problem that Explorer still doesn’t support the application of table-related display values to non-table markup, so the layout will completely fall apart in IE/Win, which is bad. I suppose you could script your way around the problem, a la IE7. I wonder how you’d account for the lack of things like rowspan and colspan, though. CSS doesn’t offer anything comparable.
There were a few responses to the effect of “what Eric fails to say is that table elements already have a predefined meaning”. True, I failed to say that, mostly because I didn’t think it was important to bring up. I think it’s fairly safe to assume that if you’re worrying about any of this stuff, then you’re going to try to use semantically appropriate elements when you can. However, if you accept that there are times when a grid layout system is needed, then you have to accept that need will override any concerns about defined element meanings. In other words, the defined semantics of table markup are important, but they aren’t important enough to block the use of table markup when it’s needed for layout purposes.
Some would say that if you can’t accomplish your design without violating markup semantics, then you should create a different design, one that doesn’t require the use of table markup. That’s one of those “you can choose any color you want as long as it’s black” arguments that just make me sadly shake my head. There’s no argument that will change that kind of thinking: it rejects reality in favor of internal consistency. If that works for you, great, but I can’t operate that way. We’ll just have to agree to disagree.
Then there were the responses that ran something like “okay, so tables are necessary for a few things, but for almost every type of Web design you don’t need to use tables”. Yes. I said that. I said it several times, in fact, in different ways. Maybe that was a mistake. So, if I may, allow me to summarize the points I’ve apparently been obscuring over the past few days.
Fin. I hope.