Thoughts From Eric Archive

While I was in Santa Fe, NM a couple of weeks ago, I dropped my TiBook onto a bed from a height of about three inches.  The result was as immediate as it was unexpected: the hinge on the right side of the laptop snapped completely away from the display panel.  I have no idea how the forces involved could have even shifted the panel, let alone rend hardware joints.  The screen went blank in concert with the snapping sound, which set off an icy explosion in the pit of my stomach.  Fortunately the display was fine.  It had just gone into sleep mode for some reason.

So last week, I got in touch with the IC Help Desk (it’s actually AOLTW’s laptop) and they set things up with AppleCare.  A box was delivered on Thursday, and with a tear in my eye I boxed my silver little baby up on Friday.  A completely repaired TiBook came back to me yesterday.  Even figuring on overnight express shipping, that’s astonishing.  I figured it would take a minimum of four weeks to get there, be fixed, and come back, not four days—and one of them a Sunday, too!  Just when I was feeling grumpy about Apple‘s rapid move to OS X and the mass exodus of developers away from OS 9 (including Mozilla, which is no longer being updated for OS 9), they make me love them all over again.  Well, maybe not love them, exactly, but you know what I mean.

• Titanium Turnaround was published on Tuesday, March 4th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Mac category.
• There have been no replies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Amaya team has recently said they’re very willing to accept contributions of redesigned icons and color choices for the browser.  So those of you with talent in that area, get to it!  Since the WThRemix contest closes today, you should have plenty of time to devote to Amaya, right?  Right?  Right.

I recently had a very interesting conversation with Ian Hickson about fonts and font-sizing.  Both of us have thought a lot about fonts in CSS and Web typography over the years, but I think we both realized that we had more thinking to do.  When you get right down to it, there is no good solution regarding font sizing on the Web today.  Every authorial choice has a drawback for some visitors, and every choice has a lot of benefits.  Pixels penalize high-resolution visitors who can’t (or won’t) use text zooming.  Percentages and ems can penalize visitors who have changed their default font size.  Leaving the text at user default looks stupidly big for visitors who haven’t changed their default font size.

It doesn’t help matters that there are huge differences in how serif and sans-serif fonts look at the same value of font-size, and that the commonly-available fonts on the Web today are not suitable for really nice typography.  I know some people think typography isn’t something we need to worry about, but it’s critical to good visual design and our current capabilites are laughably crude.  In fiddling with some test pages, I rapidly came to the conclusion that there just isn’t a good answer.  I’m not entirely thrilled with how this site’s typography is handled, for example, but I was even less thrilled by the other approaches I tested.

Is waiting for a downloadable-font mechanism our only hope?  I wish there were another answer, but right now, I don’t see one.  It seems we’ll have to accept and work with what little typographic control we have, and cede the rest of our textual desires to future improvements in both specifications and the browsers that implement them.

• Upgrading Designs was published on Friday, February 28th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, CSS, and W3C categories.
• There have been no replies.

Pioneer 10 has fallen silent after traveling 7.6 billion miles.  Its mission started when I was just a couple of weeks past the age of two.  It will reach Aldebaran in about two million years.

I wonder if we’ll already have been there and gone.

• An Eon of Silence was published on Tuesday, February 25th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Tech category.
• There have been no replies.

Ian Hickson complains that he can’t read meyerweb.com due to his high-resolution display being placed too far away.  Two words, Ian: Text Zoom.  Two more words: user stylesheet.  (Three words, if you prefer “style sheet.”)  You can make the Web more legible with this simple rule:

html, body {font-size: 1em !important;}

That will reset this site’s text to match your browser’s default font size setting, because I do use ems and percentages for all elements that descend from the body element.  On the body, I use a pixel value for font-size, thus establishing the basic size of text for the site, and every other element scales from there.  Reset that element’s size, and you change the baseline from which the rest of the site is sized (which is how the “advanced setup” text-sizing feature works).  The same will happen on the new DevEdge, as it happens, and on any other site that intelligently uses inheritance and CSS to size text.  The tools are there.  Use them to your advantage.

(Aside: I find it weirdly funny that Ian’s complaining about not being able to read my site, which uses valid CSS, when his site is almost completely unreadable in IE5/Mac thanks to his valid CSS.)

I’ve been trying to come up with a name for this font-sizing approach.  “Baseline sizing” is too evocative of the baseline used to lay out lines of text, which has nothing to do with this technique.  “Body sizing” sounds like it’s a weight-loss program.  “Right sizing” probably hits too close to home for a lot of unemployed IT folks.  Something to mull over as I nurse back muscles sore from shoveling wet, heavy snow and ice.

• Try This On For Size was published on Monday, February 24th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been no replies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A redesigned Netscape DevEdge has been launched.  Look, ma, no tables.  Well, hardly any, and none in the basic design.  I was a primary project manager for this one, and the design is a from-scratch effort.  It’s nothing visually groundbreaking, and of course using positioning for a major site has been done, but we’ve gone a step further into using positioning to make the design come together.  The site didn’t quite validate at launch thanks to some deeply stupid oversights on my part, but hopefully they’ll have been fixed by the time you read this entry.

As for the design approach we took… that’s a subject for another day, and also the subject of an article I wrote.  I predict that we’ll draw fire for using HTML 4.01 Transitional, for not validating when we launched, for our font sizing approach, and for our dropdown menus.  On the other hand, we’ll probably draw praise for making the markup accessible (once one of my stupid mistakes is fixed), for using CSS in a sophisticated manner, for pushing the envelope in reasonable ways, and for our dropdown menus.  For myself, I’m very much satisfied with and proud of the result, and very grateful for all the effort and help I got from the other members of the team.

On a less important but possibly more amusing front, yesterday I hacked together a color-blending tool after Matt Haughey asked on Webdesign-L how to calculate the midpoint between two colors, and Steve Champeon explained how to do it in some detail.  The JavaScript is no doubt inefficient and clumsy, the tool may not work in your browser, and for all I know it will lock up your computer.  It was just a quick hack.  Well, not quick, actually; I’m not very skilled at JavaScript.  Enjoy it, or don’t, as you like.  Just don’t expect me to fix or add anything unless you mail me the code needed to do whatever you want the tool to do.

Lucas Gonze over the O’Reilly Network mentioned a fascinating paper on “cascade attacks” and how they can be used to take down a distributed network.  So the Internet can suffer cascade failure, eh?  I wonder how much effort would be required to take down the Internet’s starboard power coupling.  Or, worse yet, trigger a coolant leak.

It’s been revealed that the blurry, grainy image of the Space Shuttle Columbia wasn’t taken using any advanced telescopes or military systems after all, but three engineers who used some off-the-shelf parts to put together a personal experiment.  CNN says: ‘Hi-tech’ shuttle pic really low-tech.  Let’s think about that for a second.  Three guys took an eleven-year-old Macintosh, hooked it up to a telescope that probably cost no more than a couple hundred dollars, and took a picture of an object almost 40 miles away moving 18 times the speed of sound.  That’s low-tech?  The fact that you can even recognize the object they imaged is astounding.  Hell, the fact that they imaged anything at all is astounding.  No criticism of the three men intended; I’m sure they’re brilliant guys who know what they’re doing.  But think about it!

I refer to moments like this as “technological vertigo.”  They’re those points where you suddenly come to a dead halt while you realize the incredible complexity of the world, and just how much we take for granted.  For that one moment, you stop taking it for granted.  Here’s an example: a couple of years ago, I was driving south through suburban Columbus.  In the back yard of a house just off the interstate, I spotted an old satellite dish lying on its side, obviously no longer in use.  Then it hit me: whoever lived there once had the ability to receive information from orbit, and decided to throw it away.  Their garbage was so much more advanced than anything their parents had ever even envisioned that the gap was barely comprehensible.  Any general in the Second World War would have given anything, including men’s lives, to have the kind of communication capability that now lay discarded in somebody’s back yard.

The even more remarkable thing about this trashed satellite dish is that there was nothing remarkable about it.  So somebody threw out an old satellite dish—so what?  They can always get another one, and one that’s a lot smaller, better, and more capable than the piece of junk they tossed, right?

And that is perhaps the most incredible part of it all.

• The Nature of Progress was published on Thursday, February 13th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Redesign, Technovertigo, and Tools categories.
• There have been no replies.

There’s an interesting review of Eric Meyer on CSS at Linux Journal.  Instead of just reviewing the book, Russell Dyer also asked me some interview questions and wove my responses into the review.  I really like the format; it allows him to make points about how and why the book was written in a certain way without just guessing.  It also means that a reader will get a better sense of the book’s purpose through the author’s words.

Thanks to Nick, I found out what operating system I am.    I’m wondering how much time constitutes a passage, since I don’t feel that old.  Yet.  As for few understanding me, that’s no surprise.  Nobody gets me.  I’m the wind, baby.

I thought about incorporating a graphic displaying the current U.S. Homeland Security Advisory System level into my site design, but in the end decided I didn’t want John Ashcroft getting anywhere near my Web site.  Thus I continue to shore up a pleasant illusion that he couldn’t have someone crack into the server’s file system and download everything in about nine seconds if he felt like it.  All in the interests of defending liberty from those who would destroy it, of course.

Although it occurs to me to wonder who that someone might be.  The Department of Justice?  The National Security Agency?  (Side note: one of the funniest things I’ve seen lately is that the NSA has a privacy and security notice on their Web site, and it’s sort of a shame that it doesn’t just say: “You have none.  Get over it.”)  The Department of Homeland Security?  Probably any of them.  It bothers me that the only safeguard to my personal privacy could well be an interdepartmental fight over who gets to invade it first.

• New Review, Old Author? was published on Monday, February 10th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Books, Humor, Politics, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.