Thoughts From Eric Archive

A thing people ask me with some regularity is, “What’s a good book for someone who wants to get started in web design?”  I’m here to review a book that’s one of the best I’ve seen, Create with Code: Build Your Own Website, written by Clyde Hatter of CoderDojo’s Dojo Bray in Ireland.  I got my copy at my son’s elementary school Scholastic Book Fair earlier this year; it’s available from online booksellers and probably through local bookstores as well.

I’ll go into some details of what’s in it and what I think, and there will be some complaints.  So I want to stress up front: this is an excellent book for people who want to learn web design, with the modifier if you’re available to help them out when they hit stumbling blocks.  You aren’t going to have to hold their hands through the whole thing by any stretch, but there are moments where, for example, the filenames used in the text will mislead.  (More on that anon.)  For all that, it’s still an excellent book, and I recommend it.

The book is 94 pages, of which 88 pages are instructional, and none of it is filler — Mr. Hatter packs a surprising amount of good web design practice into those 88 pages.  The pages themselves are filled with colorful design, and the text is easily readable.  It’s aimed squarely at elementary-school readers, and it shows.  That’s a good thing, I hasten to add.  The tone is simple, uncomplicated, and stripped to the essentials.  At no point does it condescend.  It works well for any age, not just the suggested range of 7-17.  I enjoyed reading it, even though I knew literally everything the book covers.

The organizing idea of the book is creating a small web site for a ninja band (!!!) called The Nanonauts.  In the course of the book, the reader sets up a home page, an About Us page, a page listing upcoming concerts, and a couple more.  Everything makes sense and interrelates, even if a couple of things feel ever so slightly forced.

Here’s a page-number timeline of concepts’ first introductions:

p. 6

Brainstorming site content and sketching a site map.  Bear in mind here that the actual instructional text starts on page 6.

p. 10

Adding a style sheet to an HTML document via a link element.

p. 14

A nice breakdown of how images are loaded into the page, what the various (common) image attributes are and mean, and the importance of good alt text.  On page 14.

p. 17

The concept of an empty element and how it differs from other elements.

pp. 20-24

An extended discussion of proper structure and good content for the web.  It shows how using headings and paragraphs breaks up large text walls, makes the distinction between ordered and unordered lists, and demonstrates the importance of proper element nesting.

p. 25

Diving into CSS.  A style sheet was added to the document back on page 10, but this is where CSS starts to be discussed in detail.

p. 28

Radial gradients!  They went there!  The syntax isn’t dissected and explained, but just showing working gradients clues readers in to their existence.  There’s also an example of styling html separately from body, without making a super big deal out of it.  This is a pattern throughout the rest of the book: many things are used without massively explaining them.  The author relies on the reader to repeat the example and see what happens.

pp. 30-32

A really great explanation of hexadecimal color values.  I’ve never seen better, to be honest.  That’s followed by a similarly great breakdown of the uses for, and differences between, px, em, and % values for sizing.

p. 36

The first of several really lovely step-by-step explanations of style blocks.  In this case, it’s styling a nav element with an unordered list of links, explaining the effects of each rule as it’s added.

pp. 50-52

An example of properly structuring and styling tabular data (in this case, a list of upcoming concerts).

p. 59

The box model and inline elements explained in sparing but useful detail.  This includes a brief look at inline elements and the baseline, and vertical alignment thereof.

p. 74

Responsive web design!  A nice introduction to media queries, and a quick primer on what responsive means and why it’s important.

p. 78

Floating images to wrap text around them. That segues into layout, using floats for the boxes enclosing the bits of content.

p. 88

Using web fonts (basically Google fonts).

p. 90

Putting your site online.

That isn’t everything that’s touched on in the book by a long shot — max-width and min-width show up early, as do :last-child, border-radius, and several more CSS features.  As I said above, these are generally introduced without much detailed explanation.  It’s a bold approach, but one that I think pays off handsomely.  Trusting the reader to become interested enough to track down the details on their own leaves room to include more things to spark interest.

That said, there are some aspects that may — probably will — cause confusion.  The biggest of these has to do with images.  There are several instances of using img to add images to pages, as you’d expect.  The author does provide a downloadable archive of assets, which is a little difficult to actually find (here’s a direct link), but the real problem is that once you extract the files, the filenames don’t match the filenames in print.  For example, in the book there’s a reference to nanonauts.jpg.  The corresponding file in the archive is NINJA_FACE_FORWARD.png.  At another point, DSC03730.png turns out to actually be NINJA_GUITAR.png.  There’s no indication of this whatsoever in the book.

I get it: mistakes happen, and sometimes digital assets get out of step with print.  Nevertheless, I fear this could prove a major stumbling block for some readers.  They see one filename in the book, and that filename doesn’t exist in the assets.  Maybe they open up the asset images until they find the right one, and then maybe they figure out to replace the filename in the book with the one they found, and move on from there… but maybe they don’t.  I’d be a lot happier if there were an errata note and mapping table on the download page, or the online archive’s assets were corrected.

Something similar happens on page 19, where the reader is directed to create a navigation link to songs.html when the page they’ve already created is called our-songs.html.  This one is a lot more forgivable, since the filenames are at least close to each other.  But again, it’s a place the reader might get lost and frustrated.  The painful irony is that this error appears in a “NINJA TIP” box that starts out, “Be careful when you’re typing links. You have to get them exactly right!”

Another error of this kind happens in the section on adding a video to a page (p.45).  All the markup is there, and the URL they supply in great big text loads a video just fine.  The problem is that the video it loads is an ad for Scholastic, not the ninja-playing-a-guitar video the text very heavily implies it will be.  I don’t know if it used to be a rock ninja shredding power chords and Scholastic replaced it or what, but it almost feels like a bait and switch.  It was a little disheartening.

There’s one aspect I can’t quite make up my mind about, which is that just about everything in the book — text, design elements, media query breakpoints — is done using pixels.  A couple of percentage widths show up near the very end, but not much is said about them.  There is a very nice comparison of pixels, ems, and percentages on page 32, but with ems never being used (despite a claim to the contrary), readers are unlikely to use or understand them.

Now, I don’t style this way, and my every instinct rebels against it.  But given that pixels really don’t mean what they used to, and that all modern browsers will scale pages up and down pretty seamlessly, is this a major problem?  I’m not sure that it is.  Either way, this does set readers on a specific initial path, and if that path bothers you, it’s worth knowing about so you can give them extra advice.

The third thing I found weird was the two pages devoted to embedding a live Google Map into one of the pages (showing the location of the Nanonauts’ next show).  On the one hand, it’s cool in that it shows how some HTML elements (i.e., iframe) can serve as containers for external assets more complicated than images and videos, and having a live map show up in the page you’re building is probably pretty mind-blowing for someone just starting out.  On the other, it’s kind of a fiddly and unusual use case: not many novice sites need an embedded widget calling an API.

I had less of a problem with the author showing a simple image-swapping-on-hover JavaScript solution, later in the book (even though my hindbrain kept chanting, “do that with CSS!”).  It’s a simple example of scripting pieces of the page, and lets Mr. Hatter talk about the DOM and DOM scripting without getting super crazy about it.

The last thing I found a bit lacking was the closing two pages, which cover putting the site online.  The author does their best with the two pages, and what’s there is correct, but it’s just not enough to help everyone get the results of their work online.  I’m not sure two pages ever could be enough to help the novice audience.  I’d have liked to see this get four pages, so there was room for more detail and more options.  If you’re giving this book to someone to help them learn, my advice is to tell them up front that you’ll help them get their work online once they’ve finished the book.

Okay, all that said?  I still absolutely recommend this as a beginners’ book.  Nearly every topic the text introduces, and there are many I didn’t mention here, is covered just the right amount and in just the right way to get readers where they need to be, excited about what they’ve accomplished, and ready to learn more on their own.  It’s pretty well up to date, at least as I write this, and isn’t likely to fall badly out of date any time soon.  Approachable, accessible, and instructive.

Final grade: I give it a solid B+, only falling short of A level due to the filename mismatches.

Note: All images in this review are copyright The CoderDojo Foundation.  Some were taken from the book’s asset files.

• Book Review: “Create with Code: Build Your Own Website” was published on Sunday, December 3rd, 2017.
• It was assigned to the Books and Commentary categories.
• There have been no replies.

I was recently noodling around with some new layout ideas for An Event Apart’s speaker pages (e.g., Chris Coyier’s or Jen Simmons’) and wanted to share the ideas with other members of the team.  But what I really wanted to show was wireframes to convey basic arrangement of the pieces, since I hadn’t yet done any time polishing details.

I thought about taking screenshots and Photoshopping wireframe boxes over the various layout pieces, but then I wondered: could I overlay boxes on the live page with CSS?  Or perhaps even create and overlay them with nothing but some declarations and a wanton disregard for the sensibilities of god or man?

And that’s when I realized…I could.

Now I’m going to share my discovery with you.

Before I get started, I want to make one thing clear: this isn’t backward compatible.  I don’t care.  It doesn’t need to be.  It does work in the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome, within reasonable tolerances — Chrome falls a bit short on one aspect, which I’ll point out when we get there.

All good?  Then let’s go.

The goal was creating X-filled boxes that wireframers love so very, very much.  I figured, any container element that needs to have a box stuck over it gets a class of wireframe.

<div class="wireframe">…(content goes here)…</div>

(Don’t get too attached to that class, by the way: it doesn’t survive the article.  Foreshadowing!)

The easy part was drawing a box around any element with that class.  I decided to use outlines, because they’re rarely employed for box edging and they don’t affect the layout even if your box-sizing is set to content-box.  (Mine usually is, by dint of not setting box-sizing at all.  But, you know, you do you.)

.wireframe {outline: 2px solid gray;}

The boxes overlap each other because the layout pieces on the right are, at least for the moment, floated.  They’re laid out that way so that if the right-hand content is short and the bio and articles run long, they can wrap around below the ‘sidebar’.  It’s generally useful to have the outlines showing the actual limits of the element boxes to which they’re attached.

There is a potential drawback here: if your layout involves using negative margins to pull some elements out of their parents, and those parent elements are designated as wireframe boxes, outlines will stretch around the outhanging elements in Firefox, though not in Chrome.  Borders do not act the same way in Firefox.  I can’t rightly call this a bug, because I’m honestly not sure what outlines should do here.  Just be aware of it, is what I’m saying.

Anyway, drawing rectangles with outlines, that’s the easy part.  Now I needed two diagonal lines, going from corner to corner.  But how?

Linear gradients, that’s how.  See, if you use quadrant-based directions for your gradients, special magic math happens under the hood such that at the exact midpoint of the gradient, the color-line that extends perpendicularly off the gradient ray shoots precisely into the corners of the two quadrants adjacent to the quadrant into which the gradient ray is pointing.  Okay, that was probably hard to follow.  For example, set the gradient direction as to top right and the 50% color line of the gradient will run into the top left to the bottom right corners.

That’s exactly what I needed!  Thus:

.wireframe {outline: 2px solid gray;
   background:
      linear-gradient(to top right,
         transparent 49.9%, gray 49.9%,
         gray 50.1%, transparent 50.1%);
}

Okay, that’s one diagonal line.  The other is literally a copy of the first, except for having it go toward a different quadrant.

.wireframe {outline: 2px solid gray;
   background:
      linear-gradient(to top right,
         transparent 49.9%, gray 49.9%,
         gray 50.1%, transparent 50.1%),
      linear-gradient(to bottom right,
         transparent 49.9%, gray 49.9%,
         gray 50.1%, transparent 50.1%);
}

Bingo: an X.  But not one that scales terribly well.  Using percentages there means that the gray lines will be as thick as 0.2% the total length of the gradient ray.  Small boxes get thin, sometimes broken diagonals.  Great big boxes get thick honkin’ lines.

So I fixed it with calc().

.wireframe {outline: 2px solid gray;
   background:
      linear-gradient(to top right,
         transparent calc(50% - 1px), gray calc(50% - 1px),
         gray calc(50% + 1px), transparent calc(50% + 1px)),
      linear-gradient(to bottom right,
         transparent calc(50% - 1px), gray calc(50% - 1px),
         gray calc(50% + 1px), transparent calc(50% + 1px));
}

And there you go: two-pixel-thick diagonal lines.

There are two things to note here, before we move on.  First is that the spaces around the operators in the calc() values are intentional and, more to the point, necessary.  If you remove one or both of those spaces, calc() will simply fail to work.  In other words, calc(50%-1px) will fail — no background for you!  This is as designed, and there are reasons for it I don’t want to go into here, but suffice to say they exist and are arguably sensible.  calc(50% - 1px), on the other hand, works as intended.

Well, mostly: this is where Chrome comes up a bit short.  In large boxes, Chrome creates fuzzy lines thicker than 2 pixels.  I’m not sure what it’s doing to fudge the numbers here, but it sure seems like it’s fudging something.  The lines also don’t go into the corners quite as precisely as they should.  Firefox’s lines, on the other hand, come out correctly sized no matter what box size I set up, even if they are a bit jagged at times, and they go exactly into the corners of all the boxes I tested.  Chrome’s sloppiness here isn’t a deal-breaker, as far as I’m concerned, but it’s there and you should know about it.

So that’s an element with an outer edge and two diagonal lines.  This is great as long as the box contains no actual content, which will sit on top of the diagonals, as you can see with the “hero image” in the top right.  Maybe that’s what you want, in which case great, but I specifically wanted overlays.  That way I could stick them on a live page and sort of fade out the contents while sticking wireframe boxes on top, to make the boxes the focus while still showing the stuff inside them.

Enter generated content.  If I create a pseudo-element and attach the diagonal background gradients to that, they can sit on top of all the content.  That’ll also let me throw in a translucent background color to fill the box and fade out the contents.  Like so:

.wireframe {outline: 2px solid gray;
   position: relative; z-index: 1;}
.wireframe::before {
   position: absolute; z-index: 8675309;
   top: 0; bottom: 0; right: 0; left: 0;
   background:
      linear-gradient(to top right,
         transparent calc(50% - 1px), gray calc(50% - 1px),
         gray calc(50% + 1px), transparent calc(50% + 1px)),
      linear-gradient(to bottom right,
         transparent calc(50% - 1px), gray calc(50% - 1px),
         gray calc(50% + 1px), transparent calc(50% + 1px)),
      #FFF9;
      content: "";
}

I used ::before mostly because hey, why not, but also because clearfix is usually an ::after and I hear people are still using clearfix, more’s the pity.  So this avoids it.  If you’ve moved beyond the need for clearfix, then you can use ::after just as easily.  Whatever floats your fancy.  (Get it?  Floats?  Yeah?  Clearfix?  Floats?  Ah, I kill me.)

The stupidly large z-index on the ::before is there to put the box overlay above any gridded, flexed, or positioned content that has an automatic z-index, or at least a sensible one.  You can raise it as high as you’d like (and your browser’s bit-depth will allow).  The small z-index on the elements themselves, on the other hand, makes sure they get an explicit stacking placement instead of an automatically-assigned place on the Z axis.  I find this generally settles a number of odd behaviors in various browsers.  Your experience may vary.

It was at this point that I realized there was a whole other level here.  I mean, wireframe boxes stretched over content is pretty nifty all by itself.  That could have been enough.  But it wasn’t.

Because what I realized was that I didn’t just want wireframe boxes, I wanted labeled wireframe boxes.  If a box was being applied to a list of articles, then I wanted a great big “Articles” label sitting in the middle of it, to make it obvious what was being placed there.

Well, there was already a content property just sitting there, waiting to throw in actual content instead of an empty string, but how to fill it?  And that’s when I knew that .wireframe’s days were numbered.

That’s because the easiest way to label each box was to use an HTML data attribute to attach the label I wanted to display.  And once that attribute was there, why not apply the wireframe styles based on the presence of the attribute, instead of adding class names that might get in the way of some unexpected DOM script?  So I changed the markup and CSS like this:

<div data-wf="Articles">…(content goes here)…</div>

[data-wf] {outline: 2px solid gray;
   position: relative; z-index: 1;}
[data-wf]::before {
   position: absolute; z-index: 8675309;
   top: 0; bottom: 0; right: 0; left: 0;
   background:
      linear-gradient(to top right,
         transparent calc(50% - 1px), gray calc(50% - 1px),
         gray calc(50% + 1px), transparent calc(50% + 1px)),
      linear-gradient(to bottom right,
         transparent calc(50% - 1px), gray calc(50% - 1px),
         gray calc(50% + 1px), transparent calc(50% + 1px)),
      #FFF9;
      content: "";
}

(True story: I almost called it data-wtf instead.  Almost.)

Having done that, I could modify the CSS to insert the attribute value, style the inserted text to look nice, and use flexbox properties to center it in the box.  So I did.

[data-wf] {outline: 2px solid gray;
   position: relative; z-index: 1;}
[data-wf]::before {
   position: absolute; z-index: 8675309;
   top: 0; bottom: 0; right: 0; left: 0;
   background:
      linear-gradient(to top right,
         transparent calc(50% - 1px), gray calc(50% - 1px),
         gray calc(50% + 1px), transparent calc(50% + 1px)),
      linear-gradient(to bottom right,
         transparent calc(50% - 1px), gray calc(50% - 1px),
         gray calc(50% + 1px), transparent calc(50% + 1px)),
      #FFF9;
      content: attr(data-wf);
      font: bold 2em Jubilat, Georgia, serif;
      color: gray;
      display: flex; justify-content: center; align-items: center;
}

That yielded big beautiful bold Jubilat labels (Jubilat is one of AEA’s brand font faces), sitting right on top of the center of the box, the crossing of the two diagonal lines behind them.

Which actually turned out to be a small problem for me.  That text is certainly readable, but I wanted it to stand out a bit more from the diagonals.  I decided to stack text shadows in order to semi-simulate outside text stroking.

[data-wf] {outline: 2px solid gray;
   position: relative; z-index: 1;}
[data-wf]::before {
   position: absolute; z-index: 8675309;
   top: 0; bottom: 0; right: 0; left: 0;
   background:
      linear-gradient(to top right,
         transparent calc(50% - 1px), gray calc(50% - 1px),
         gray calc(50% + 1px), transparent calc(50% + 1px)),
      linear-gradient(to bottom right,
         transparent calc(50% - 1px), gray calc(50% - 1px),
         gray calc(50% + 1px), transparent calc(50% + 1px)),
      #FFF9;
      content: attr(data-wf);
      font: bold 2em Jubilat, Georgia, serif;
      color: gray;
      text-shadow:
         0 0 0.25em #FFF9, 0 0 0.25em #FFF9,
         0 0 0.25em #FFF9, 0 0 0.25em #FFF9,
         0 0 0.25em #FFF9;
      display: flex; justify-content: center; align-items: center;
}

It’s possible to use just four offset shadows with minimal or zero blur, but I find it sometimes creates weird jags on serif fonts, so I like stacking blurred shadows better.  But, again, you do you.

As I looked over the results, it slowly dawned on me that the white-on-gray box scheme works well enough for a starting wireframe setup with no branding applied, but I was planning to drop these on pages with actual design and colors and that sort of thing.  I didn’t want the boxes to fill with translucent white; I wanted them to be translucent versions of the page background color.  And, furthermore, I wanted a way to be able to easily alter that color, when applied to different designs.

Custom properties to the rescue!  Which is to say, native CSS variables to the rescue!

Our page background color at An Event Apart is #F7F6F1, a combo I actually have memorized at this point.  Since I wanted to fill the boxes with a roughly three-quarters-opaque variant, I settled on #F7F6F1BB.  (Actual 75% is BF, if you care.)  So I defined a custom property for it:

html {
   --fill: #F7F6F1BB;
}

I could have assigned the variable to the [data-wf] rule instead of html, but I felt like setting them globally.  Because that’s how I roll, yo — Wulf & Shaw have no strings on me.  If you want to bring the variables in closer, go for it.

While I was there, I figured, why not, let’s also define a variable for the shared color of the outlines, diagonals, and label text.

html {
   --fill: #F7F6F1BB;
   --wire: gray;
}

Then all I needed was to sprinkle variable calls where the colors were sitting.  I ended up here:

html {
   --fill: #F7F6F1BB;
   --wire: gray;
}
[data-wf] {outline: 2px solid var(--wire);
   position: relative; z-index: 1;}
[data-wf]::before {
   position: absolute; z-index: 8675309;
   top: 0; bottom: 0; right: 0; left: 0;
   background:
      linear-gradient(to top right,
         transparent calc(50% - 1px), var(--wire) calc(50% - 1px),
         var(--wire) calc(50% + 1px), transparent calc(50% + 1px)),
      linear-gradient(to bottom right,
         transparent calc(50% - 1px), var(--wire) calc(50% - 1px),
         var(--wire) calc(50% + 1px), transparent calc(50% + 1px)),
      var(--fill);
      content: attr(data-wf);
      font: bold 2em Jubilat, Georgia, serif;
      color: var(--wire);
      text-shadow:
         0 0 0.25em var(--fill), 0 0 0.25em var(--fill),
         0 0 0.25em var(--fill), 0 0 0.25em var(--fill),
         0 0 0.25em var(--fill);
      display: flex; justify-content: center; align-items: center;
}

The label could be broken out to use its own variable (e.g., --text or --label) easily enough, but I wanted a minimum of things to change.  I know myself too well to set up a bunch of controls to fiddle with, especially where color is concerned.

And with that, I had a ready-to-hand, easily theme-able wireframing style block that I can drop into any development page and invoke simply by adding a few data attributes to the markup.  Data attributes, I might add, that would be trivially easy to later find and remove with regular expressions.  It’s a quick way to make it clear to stakeholders that a work in progress is, in fact, in progress, as well as a handy way to visualize which pieces of a prototype layout are going where.

Now that we’ve come to the end and you’re still hanging in there with me, let me just say that I hope you’ve enjoyed this little trip through various parts of CSS.  If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comments below.  I’ll do my best to respond in reasonable amounts of time, travel and such permitting.

P.S. And one final note, as Kai Ryssdal would say: every bit of CSS I used here is covered in CSS: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition.  I turned to my print copy twice in the process of working all this out, as it happens, to remind myself of specific syntax (for custom properties) and whitespace requirements (for calc() operators).  It really feels good to have a thing I made be useful to me!

• Generating Wireframe Boxes with CSS and HTML5 was published on Monday, November 27th, 2017.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Hacks, and HTML5 categories.
• There have been fourteen replies.

At the end of last week, I posted this picture to Twitter and Facebook, and on Twitter it kind of took off.

My intent in posting it was to say, in not nearly so many words, “Look at how CSS has dramatically expanded its capabilities since the previous edition, and wow, I can’t believe Estelle and I did that much work!”  I know we have 280 characters now, but I try not to blog places other than, well, my actual blog.  (Welcome!)

The Twitter reaction was…interesting.  And by interesting, I really do mean interesting.  There were the people who responded with excitement and anticipation — thanks to you all! — but a whole lot of people who said, in effect, “This is what’s wrong with front end, all this accelerating complexity.”

Which was not what I was saying.  And which is not, I think, what’s actually happened here, but it depends on what you mean by ”complexity”.

CSS has a great deal more capabilities than ever before, it’s true.  In the sense of “how much there potentially is to know”, yes, CSS is more of a challenge.

But the core principles and mechanisms are no more complicated than they were a decade or even two decades ago.  If anything, they’re easier to grasp now, because we don’t have to clutter our minds with float behaviors or inline layout just to try to lay out a page.  Flexbox and Grid (chapters 12 and 13, by the way) make layout so much simpler than ever before, while simultaneously providing far more capability than ever before.

“How?  How is that even possible?” you might ask, to which I would reply, “That’s what happens when you have systems that were designed from the outset to be used for layout.”  Floats weren’t; they were a necessary hack.  Inline-block wasn’t; that was a necessary hack.  People did ingenious, brilliant things to make those tools work, yes.  But they were always a perversion of original intent.

Whereas with Grid and Flexbox, we have things that were always meant to handle layout.  That’s why, for example, they make vertical centering of elements a breeze.  A breeze, people.  I’ve been working with the new stuff long enough that I literally forget vertical centering is supposed to be difficult.  I have similar amnesia about the struggle to balance layout needs with accessible source order.  These problems are not 100% banished, but it’s to the point now that when I do run into these problems, it’s a surprise, and almost a personal affront.  Like how you feel when you’ve been zooming along a near-empty highway for hours, enjoying the rush of wind and power, and then you come around a curve and all of a sudden there’s a roadblock of two slow-moving cars side by side, doing exactly the speed limit of all things, each refusing to pass the other.

I envy “the kids”, the ones just starting to learn front end now.  They’re likely never going to know the pain of float drop, or wrestling with inline blocks, or not being able to center along one axis.  They’re going to roll their eyes when we old-timers start grumbling about the old days and say, “Floats?!?  Who ever thought floats would be a good way to lay out a page? That’s totally not what they’re for, anyone can see that!  Were you all high as a kite, or just utterly stupid?”  You know, the way “the kids” talked ten years ago, except then it was about using tables for layout.

So if you’ve written CSS in the past, CSS today is not significantly harder to understand, and probably a bit easier.  There’s just a lot more of it.  You might not be able to remember every single property and value, but that’s okay.  Neither can I.  I don’t think many (or any) of us can hold every last tiny piece of a serious programming language in our heads, either.  We know the core things, and the patterns we learned, and some cool techniques, and there are the things we always have to look up because we don’t often use them.

I also think people saw the books in the picture and forgot about the time component.  I checked the page number at the end of the last chapter for each book (thus omitting appendices and the index) and came up with the following chart.

Whoa, right?  But let’s chart those numbers again, this time taking date of publication into account.

Rather less crazy, I would say.  It’s still an apparent upward trend, but think about all the new features that have come out since the 3rd Edition, or are coming out right now: gradients, multiple backgrounds, sticky positioning, flexbox, Grid, blending, filters, transforms, animation, and media queries, among others.  A lot of really substantial capabilities.  They don’t make CSS more convoluted, but instead extend it into new territories.

Speaking of which, a few people asked how I got the books to line up so neatly.  I admit they’re being supported by a table there, but the real secret?  Grid.  So easy.  Here, have a set of three “book spines” (each one a cite element) gridded out in supporting browsers, and still laid out just fine in older browsers.

Cascading Style Sheets The Definitive Guide Meyer CSS The Definitive Guide Meyer CSS The Definitive Guide Meyer & Weyl

See what I mean?  That took me about 20 minutes all told, even though I’m using internal markup that’s probably not ideal, by putting grids in my grid so I can grid while I grid.  I rearranged the 2nd-3rd-4th source order into the visual arrangement seen in the photo, and centered the text blocks vertically without using margins or padding or line height to fake it, just because I could.  The grid layout is an enhancement: in older browsers, the spines render as a vertical stack, one atop the other, in chronological order.

Another five minutes, and I could neaten that rendering up further so the spines looked more consistent between grid-capable and grid-incapable browsers.  Five to ten more minutes could get the O’Reilly logo and fish graphics into the black areas.  Five more, and it would be neatly responsive.  Maybe I’ll come back and fix it up to do those things, but for now, as far as I’m concerned, this will do nicely.

The other common response I got was, “Well, looks like it’s time for ‘CSS: The Good Parts’!”  Fam, we already have “CSS: The Good Parts”.  Estelle and I just wrote it.  You can see it on the right side of the picture up above.  Available now on paper or in electronic form!

• Declining Complexity in CSS was published on Tuesday, November 14th, 2017.
• It was assigned to the Books, Commentary, and CSS categories.
• There have been eight replies.

CSS: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition is wending its way to the reading public, and I have some updates on that.

The O’Reilly catalog still says October 2017, but for the physical copy, Barnes & Noble and Amazon are now listing a release date of November 5th, 2017, so we seem to have just missed that October release window I was hoping to hit.  But not by much!  The DRM-free version at eBooks is apparently available now, as are Nook and Kindle versions.

For those of you with access to O’Reilly’s Safari subscription service, there’s an older version of the book currently available.  Apparently, so many people have joined the queue to get it that the content-update process breaks.  (Our production editor was impressed.)  O’Reilly’s engineering staff is aware of the problem and working on it, so hopefully by the time you read this, the problem will be resolved and the final copy online.  If not, our apologies, and thanks for your patience.

If you’re wondering if this edition is for you, absolutely it is!  But I would say that, wouldn’t I?  As would my co-author Estelle.  To help you decide, here’s the Table of Contents with a few brief notes on the new things contained therein (chapters marked ALL NEW! are chapters that didn’t exist at all in the 3rd Edition):

1. CSS and Documents – a brief overview of what CSS is for, how to apply it (including via HTTP headers!), basic syntax, media and feature queries
2. Selectors – all the selectors as of mid-2017, including :not(), validity pseudo-classes, the case-insensitivity modifier in attribute selectors, and more
3. Specificity and the Cascade – probably the least-changed chapter, this lays out the cascade in some detail
4. Values and Units – adds viewport units, ch (which does not actually mean “one character”), calc(), and various new color syntaxes like HSL and #RRGGBBAA patterns
5. Fonts – includes a lot about @font-face and the process of loading custom fonts, in addition to the classics like weight, style, variant, family, etc.
6. Text Properties – adds a fair amount of material on non-horizontal writing and alignment, writing modes, hyphenation, and so forth
7. Basic Visual Formatting – this is another chapter that didn’t change a huge amount from the 3rd Edition, though it does touch on the new values for display
8. Padding, Borders, Outlines, and Margins – to all the existing details on those basic topics, we’ve added border-radius and all the properties that affect image borders
9. Colors, Backgrounds, and Gradients – there are all the new background-related properties like background-size and background-clip, handling multiple background images, and the wonder world of linear and radial gradients, explained in more detail than anyone probably thought reasonable, plus there’s a section on box-shadow
10. Floating and Shapes – floating hasn’t changed much, but the section on Float Shapes is all new and pretty nifty, if I do say so myself
11. Positioning – this got a section on sticky positioning to go along with the classic positioning material
12. Flexible Box Layout – ALL NEW! – the ins and outs, the nitty-gritty, the pros and cons of Flexbox
13. Grid Layout – ALL NEW! – Grid is here and it’s hot; this chapter explores it in up-to-the-minute detail
14. Table Layout in CSS – the third of the minimally-updated chapters, this discusses how data tables are laid out
15. Lists and Generated Content – a surprisingly large amount of new material in this chapter, pretty much all centered around @counter-style and its capabilities and how you can create emoji counting systems
16. Transforms – ALL NEW! – rotating, scaling, translating, 3D effects, and more, all with a minimum of matrix math
17. Transitions – ALL NEW! – state-based animations and how to define them, introducing some of the basic animation concepts along the way
18. Animation – ALL NEW! – stateless animations, which can happen at any time, for any reason you choose to define, made possible through @keyframes and a bevy of new properties
19. Blending, Filtering, Compositing, and Masking – ALL NEW! – all (okay, almost all) the nifty things you used to do in Photoshop, now available natively in browsers, so you can do grayscale images that pop color on hover or click without having to produce two separate images
20. Media-Dependent Styles – this was almost ALL NEW!, but it’s a radically reworked chapter from the 3rd Edition with fewer bits about printing, no bits on audio, and a whole lot of details about media queries

And then the Appendices:

1. Animatable Properties – a list of CSS2.1 properties that are animatable, with a note on exactly what can be animated
2. Basic Property Reference – a compact table of properties, their default values, and the complete value syntax
3. Color Equivalence Table – the 148 color names defined in CSS Color Level 4 with their equivalents in RGB decimal, RGB percentage, HSL, and hexadecimal formats

Whew!  After all that, you might be thinking that, much like Emacs, this book has everything.  And I’d like to say that it does, but… it doesn’t.  For example, I decided fairly late in the process to drop multicolumn properties.  It was a tough decision, but when I started testing browser support and looking at the state of the specification, it felt too unstable to include.  I’ve rushed explanations in past editions, and usually regretted it.  (Although, fun fact: the 2nd Edition contains the only known documentation of the CSS Working Group’s multi-hour discussion on how the old clip property was supposed to work.)  So I put multicolumn off for the next edition.

Still, there are far far far more examples of things added in than things left out, enough to make this edition twice as long as the previous.  There’s been a lot of growth in CSS over the past decade, and I think Estelle and I have brought together something that will get you up to speed on very nearly all of it.  For those of you eagerly waiting on a copy, we really hope you enjoy the result!

• “CSS: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition” Release and Contents was published on Friday, October 27th, 2017.
• It was assigned to the Books and CSS categories.
• There have been four replies.

Yesterday afternoon, CSS: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition went to the printers.  Eighteen years after the First Edition hit shelves, eleven years after its predecessor came out, five years after I first started working on this edition, and thanks in no small part to Estelle Weyl and a parade of long-suffering editors at O’Reilly, the last changes were entered, the pages were locked, and the repository closed.

It comes in at 1,088 pages: almost exactly twice the length of the Third Edition, with six new chapters and a lot of overhauling of old chapters.  Flexbox, Grid, filtering, blending, clipping and masking, float shapes, animations and transitions, transforms, image borders, counting systems, custom properties (a.k.a. CSS variables), media and feature queries — they’re all in there, and a whole lot more besides.  Gradients got a major new section in what used to be called just “Colors and Backgrounds” and is now “Colors, Backgrounds, and Gradients”.  And all the new background properties!  So many new background properties.

We didn’t skimp on the visuals, either.  The book has, if I counted correctly, a total of 778 figures.  Almost all of them were captured in-browser, and you can download or clone all the files from GitHub.  If you’d rather just browse them online, you can do so thanks to GitHub Pages.  That’s also where to find the transition and animation examples that are referenced in the text, but not figures themselves (detailed animation being somewhat difficult to represent on paper).  If we add figures and animation examples together, there are 826 elements supporting the main text.  Which feels like a lot to me.

The book will be available in both tree-wafer and glowing-display formats from your favorite supplier of such things; e.g., Amazon.  (If you’re going to buy through Amazon and are inclined to support another aspect of my life, please designate Rebecca’s Gift as your Amazon Smile recipient before buying the book.)  I also hear tell it will be available DRM-free from eBooks.com, and potentially in PDF form for those who prefer it.  O’Reilly doesn’t sell books directly any more, but I do believe it will be avialable to those with Safari subscriptions.

I’ll have more to say about the book and its contents as the release date draws closer.  Last I heard, it should be out by the end of this month, but as always, release dates can slip for any number of reasons.  Even if this release does slip, it should still come out no later than early November.

(Let’s hope I didn’t just jinx that.)

This is always a tense and exhilarating time.  What if I got a huge piece completely wrong?  What if I made the wrong calls on what to include and what to defer to the next edition?  What if I missed egregious typos?  What if nobody likes it?  Basically, the same doubts that strike most any author.  But there’s also the incredible feeling of a project brought to its conclusion and the anticipation of getting it into readers’ hands.  This has been a longer-than-usual time coming, but as it usually does, the time has come at last.  I hope you’re looking forward to it half as much as I am.

• “CSS: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition” Goes to Print was published on Wednesday, October 11th, 2017.
• It was assigned to the Books, CSS, and Writing categories.
• There have been nine replies.

My primary SVG viewer is Firefox.  This is partly because it’s always running, so the startup time is essentially zero.  It also allows me to directly inspect and modify elements of the SVG element through the Web Inspector, which can be handy.

But I’ve run into a problem more than once, which is that if I load an SVG file in Firefox, the browser window’s background defaults to white, and a lot of times I’m trying to view images that are partially or entirely white.  I started thinking that if there were a way to make the window background medium gray, that would solve the problem with rare downsides, since I can’t remember trying to view an all-medium-gray SVG.

After a question on Twitter and some ideas from Tibor Martini, I realized I could use Stylish to give the SVG files a background through CSS.  I didn’t want to select all SVGs, only those I was loading directly, so I tried this:

svg:root {background: gray;}

And it worked!  So I decided to make it more robust by doing a multicolor gradient, and grayscaling it on hover.  I couldn’t use filter because that would grayscale the whole image, rather than just the background, but that was easy to work around.  I ended up with this:

svg:root {background: linear-gradient(135deg, hsl(0,50%,60%), hsl(180,50%,40%));}
svg:root:hover {background: linear-gradient(135deg, hsl(0,0%,60%), hsl(180,0%,40%));}

Which works great!  Except that I discovered Firefox applies it to all SVGs, even those loaded into HTML documents via img.  SVGs apparently define their own roots, which I hadn’t expected, but I can see how it might make sense.  So I poked around in MDN until I came up with this:

@-moz-document url-prefix(file:) {
    svg:root {background: linear-gradient(135deg, hsl(0,50%,60%), hsl(180,50%,40%));}
    svg:root:hover {background: linear-gradient(135deg, hsl(0,0%,60%), hsl(180,0%,40%));}
}

And that’s exactly what I wanted.  If it’s useful to you, have at it.  Just paste that into a new Stylish rule in Firefox, and you should be good to go.

If you’re on Chrome, you can import the above into Stylish and create a new rule, but it hasn’t worked for me, and I’m not sure why not.  Removing :root didn’t fix it when I tried, and that shouldn’t matter anyway: I can see in Chrome’s user styles that svg:root is used and applied.  And my Stylish toolbar icon shows the rule is being applied.  It just doesn’t do anything I can see.  If anyone can figure out how to make it work, or explain why it can’t work, I’d love to know in the comments!

• Adding Backgrounds to Directly Loaded SVGs was published on Friday, July 21st, 2017.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, CSS, and SVG categories.
• There have been eight replies.

On Monday, July 3rd, as I sat in the living room of a house just a bit north of New York City, I pushed the last writing and editing changes to CSS: The Definitive Guide, Fourth Edition and notified the production department at O’Reilly that it was ready.

All twenty chapters, three appendices, and associated front matter are now in their hands.

It’s been a long and difficult journey to get here.  Back in 2011-2012, I started updating chapters and releasing them as standalone books, for those who wanted to grab specific topics early.  In mid-2013, I had to stop all work on the book, and wasn’t really able to get back into it until mid-2015.  At that point, I realized that several new chapters had to be added — for example, when I started out on this edition, Flexbox and Grid were pie-in-the-sky ideas that might or might not come to pass.  Feature queries weren’t a thing, back then.  Filters and masks and blend modes were single-browser at best, when I started out.  And forget about really complex list counters.

Now all those topics (and more!) have chapters, or at least major sections.  Had I not been delayed two years, those topics might not have made it into the fourth edition.  Instead, they’re in there, and this edition may well end up twice as long as the previous edition.

I also might not have brought on a co-author, the inestimable Estelle Weyl.  If not for her contribution in new material and her close, expert review of the chapters I’d already written, this book might have been another year in the making.  The Guide was always my baby, but I couldn’t be happier that I decided to share it with Estelle, nor prouder that her name will be on the cover with mine.

Speaking of major changes, I probably wouldn’t have learned AsciiDoc, nor adopted Atom as an authoring environment (I still use BBEdit for heavy-lift text processing, as well as most of my coding).  O’Reilly used to be a “give us your Word docs!” shop like everyone else, but that toolchain doesn’t really exist any more, from what I can tell.  In fact, the first few chapters I’d given them were in Word.  When I finally returned to writing, they had to give me those chapters back as AsciiDoc exports, so I could make updates and push them to O’Reilly’s internal repository.  The files I created to create figures in the book went into their own public repository, which I’ll get to reorganizing once the text is all settled and the figure numbers are locked in.  (Primary to do: create chapter lists of figures, linked to the specific files that were used to create those figures.  Secondary to do: clean up the cruft.)

As of this moment, the table of contents is:

• Preface

1. CSS and Documents
2. Selectors
3. Specificity and the Cascade
4. Values, Units, and Colors
5. Fonts
6. Text Properties
7. Basic Visual Formatting
8. Padding, Borders, Outlines, and Margins
9. Colors, Backgrounds, and Gradients
10. Floating and Shapes
11. Positioning
12. Flexible Box Layout
13. Grid Layout
14. Table Layout in CSS
15. Lists and Generated Content
16. Transforms
17. Transitions
18. Animation
19. Filters, Blending, Clipping, and Masking
20. Media-Dependent Styling

• Appendix A: Animatable Properties
• Appendix B: Basic Property Reference
• Appendix C: Color Equivalence Table

Disclaimer: the ordering and titles could potentially change, though I have no expectation of either.

I don’t have a specific timeline for release as yet, but as soon as I get one, I’ll let everyone know in a post here, as well as the usual channels.  I expect it to be relatively speedy, like the next couple of months.  Once production does their thing, we’ll get it through the QC process — checking to make sure the figures are in the right places and sizes, making sure no syntax formatting got borked, that kind of thing — and then it’ll be a matter of getting it out the door.

And just in case anyone saw there was news about O’Reilly’s change in distribution and is wondering what that means: you can still buy the paper book or the e-book from your favorite retailer, whether that’s Amazon or someone else.  You just won’t be able to buy direct from O’Reilly any more, except in the sense that subscribing to their Safari service gives you access to the e-book.  That does mean a tiny bit less in royalties for me and Estelle, since direct paper sales were always the highest earners.  Then again, hardly anyone ever bought their paper copies direct from O’Reilly, so honestly, the difference will be negligible.  I might’ve been able to buy an extra cup of coffee or two, if I drank coffee.

It feels…well, honestly, it feels weird to have finally reached this point, after such a long time.  I wish I’d gotten here sooner for a whole host of reasons, but this is where we are, and regardless of anything else, I’m proud of what Estelle and I have created.  I’m really looking forward to getting into your hands.

• CSS: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition was published on Wednesday, July 5th, 2017.
• It was assigned to the Books, CSS, Web, and Writing categories.
• There have been six replies.

This is my daughter Rebecca in 2013.  She was 5¼ years old when I took this picture.  Less than three days later, she almost died on an ER bed.

She’d been completely fine when we set out for vacation that year, and just seemed to come down with a virus or something just after we arrived.  She got checked out at an urgent care center, where they diagnosed strep throat.  But antibiotics didn’t help.  She slowly got more and more sick.  We finally took her to be checked out at a nearby hospital, who were just as stumped as we were.  They were looking for a room to put her in when she seized and flatlined.

Just like that.  She’d been ill, but not severely so.  All of sudden, she was on the edge of death.  The ER staff barely stabilized her, by intubating her and administering drugs to induce a coma.

There was a large tumor in the center of her brain.  Our five-year-old girl, who so far as we knew was completely fine just days before, had aggressive brain cancer.

After a midnight life flight nobody was sure she would survive, she arrived in Philadelphia and had several cranial surgeries, spent more than a week in the pediatric intensive care unit, and then was transferred down a few levels to spend another two weeks on the recovery floor, slowly rebuilding the muscle strength she’d lost from more than a week of immobility.

Later, there were weeks on weeks of radiation and chemotherapy in Philadelphia.  After the initial treatment was done, we came home to Cleveland for more chemotherapy.

This is her, hauling her baby brother Joshua up the slide in our backyard, and hauling her mom through the crowd at the local garlic festival.  At a CureSearch walk with her siblings and dozens of friends and family.  Just barely tolerating my terrible dad jokes, doing her utmost not to encourage me by laughing.

We did everything we could, sometimes through tears and sickening horror, but the treatments didn’t work.  Rebecca died at home, surrounded by friends and family one final time, less than ten months after her cancer was discovered, in the early evening hours of June 7th, 2014, her sixth birthday.

In those ten months, the total retail cost of her procedures and treatments was $1,691,627.45.  Nearly one point seven million US dollars.

We had health insurance — really good insurance, thanks to COSE’s group plans and my wife’s and my combined incomes.  The insurance company’s negotiated rates meant they paid $991,537.29, or about 58% of the retail price.

We paid very little, comparatively speaking, until you counted the monthly premiums.  All of it together, co-pays and premiums, was still in the low five figures.  Which we were, fortunately, able to pay.

Without insurance, even if we’d been able to get the insurer’s rate, we’d have gone bankrupt.  All our investments, our house, everything gone.  If pre-existing conditions had prevented us from being covered, or if we’d been less fortunate and unable to afford premiums — bankrupted.

In which case, Rebecca’s brother and sister would have suffered her death, and the loss of their home and what precious little remained normal in their lives.

How many families live through that double hell?  How many go completely broke trying to save their child?  How many could have saved their children, with coverage that paid for life-saving treatments?  How many never had any chance of saving their child, but ran out of money before treatment was complete and now believe their lack of insurance and money was what killed their child?

How many more will have to live with those unthinkable situations, if the House and Senate bills go forward?

The point, the essential point, is this: every family should have the chance to fight as hard as possible for their loved one’s life without going bankrupt in the process.  And for those who cannot be saved, no family should be denied the knowledge that they didn’t have a chance.  Because knowing that does provide some (small) measure of comfort.

The Affordable Care Act wasn’t perfect, and it was severely and willfully undercut after it launched, but it was a huge step in the right direction.  The bill currently before Congress would be an enormous step back.  I doubt that I’ll benefit from the tax cuts that are part of the bill, but if I do, I’ll commit every cent I get from them and more to unseat anyone who votes yes on this bill.  I have let my senators know this.

I would spare every family the pain we endured, if I could, but nobody has that power.  We do, together, have the power to help every family that must endure that pain, to give them access to the simple safety net they need, to concentrate everything they can on the struggle to heal.

I miss her every day, but I know that we did everything that could be done, including being able to afford the hospice care that kept her as comfortable as possible in her final hours, preventing the seizures and pain and fear that would have made her last moments a hell beyond endurance.  Allowing her a peaceful end.  Every family should have access to that.

Please think about what it means to take that ability away.  Please think about what it means to take away the ability to avoid having to make those choices.

Please.

• Help Insurance was published on Monday, June 26th, 2017.
• It was assigned to the Commentary and Rebecca categories.
• There have been thirteen replies.