Thoughts From Eric Archive

Fabian Valkenburg sent in e-mail letting me know that my comments on Opera 7’s CSS support got used in the talkback to an evolt.org article, and that I’m wrong about Opera 7’s display of the dates on this page being a bug.  As it turns out, the answer to that is “maybe.”

First, a word on how I set up the title and date styling in the basic site theme.  Both are contained in successive h5 elements, each with an appropriate class value (title and date, in fact).  I make the title inline so I can wrap a border around it that “shrink-wraps” the text.  Then, since I want to move it upward, I relatively position it upward two-third of an em.  Since it has been relatively positioned, for the purposes of laying out other elements, browsers should act as though the element wasn’t positioned at all.  (See CSS2:9.4.3 for details.)  So, in that sense, the relative positioning should have no impact on how the date is laid out, and in fact it doesn’t in the browsers I tested; I only brought it up to show that the title wasn’t floated.  On the other hand, I float the date to the right and right-align its text.  Since I’m floating the date to the right from below the place where the date’s h5 would have been (because the date comes after the title), I give it a negative top margin to pull it upward, so that it sits just below the top border on the entry.

Now here’s where things get fuzzy.  According to CSS2:9.5.1, the outer top edge of a float may not be any higher than the top of preceding float or block boxes.  It doesn’t say anything about inline boxes.  Remember that with CSS, it’s possible to have inline and block boxes for sibling elements.  So the effect of that portion of CSS2 is to allow floats to ignore preceding inline boxes when they float.  Or not ignore them, as the case may be.

Let me frame it another way: here’s a testcase that shows h3 and h4 elements in the normal flow, and then with the h4 elements floated.  To my way of thinking, both floats should sit below the h3 elements that precede them, regardless of the type of box those h3 elements generate.  This is because my conception of floats is that they start from their place in the normal flow, and then move to the right (or left).  From there, they move downward if they must, but not up.  Unless I give them a negative top margin to move them up, of course.

The behavior I just described is what IE5.5/Win and Gecko-based browsers do, to pick two examples.  But what Opera 7 (and, in many cases, IE5/Mac) does is not a bug, because it doesn’t violate the CSS specification, so I retract my earlier statement.  I believe that what it does is not what  site authors would want, but it isn’t wrong.  Thanks to the wording in CSS2:9.5.1, neither are the browsers that don’t agree with Opera 7 wrong, although I would accept that they’re further away from the letter of the specification.  Whether or not they violate its spirit isn’t clear, and it’s in cases like this that browsers tend to do whatever their programmers thought best.

So what we have here is a gray area in which I believe the letter and spirit of CSS are pulling in different directions, and browsers are splitting over which path they choose.  Hopefully CSS2.1 will be clarified to address what should happen, and we won’t have to bother arguing about who’s doing what better in which way for whom.

As for css/edge, yes, I hear you.  Opera 7 gets most or all of the demos correct, and may in fact reveal some erroneous assumptions on my part in the pure CSS menus demo (or maybe not; I don’t know yet).  When I get time to actually run Opera 7 through all the demos and evaluate its behavior, I’ll see if I can get the support information updated.  Unless of course I finally decide that the support information is becoming too much trouble to have around, in which case I’ll update it into oblivion.  It never really helped prevent people from misrepresenting what the demos were supposed to do anyway.

Personally, I like Opera 7 (or did once I switched its skin to the classic look), and my comments weren’t meant to cast it into the junkbin of bad browsers.  If I were a Windows user, I’d probably use it a lot more than I do.  There are rough edges, as with any browser, but overall it’s quite good—I think I said that already, but some people don’t seem to have heard that part.  Opera 7 handles a site redesign project I’m working on a lot better than Opera 6 does, I’ll say that much.

• The Silence of the Fat Lady was published on Saturday, February 8th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, CSS, and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

Wow.  The attendance at last night’s talk was overwhelming, probably a hundred or so people; we ended up having to break down an airwall and spill into an adjoining room to provide space (not to mention seats) for everyone.  My deepest thanks go out to everyone who was there to hear me run over my allotted time.  The talk file will soon be available on the Talks page.  Thanks also to Al Wasco for making the event possible.

Just before the talk, an audience member told me he’d read my journal entry where I talked about the Xupiter toolbar and what it can do to IE/Win, and that he’s basically moving to the Macintosh platform as a result of all the security problems in Microsoft.  I’d worry about my apparent power to mold people’s thinking, except I have to remember that’s what it is: an illusion.  There’s not only the Xupiter thing, but SQL Slammer hit the news (and Microsoft’s internal network) in the last week, and shortly thereafter a security consultant mentioned he’s thinking of migrating to the Macintosh because it has far fewer security problems.  So it’s not just me saying this.  If anything, it’s probably just me sailing with the prevailing winds.

None of this really seems terribly important, though, what with tragedies national and personal among those I know.  I even find it hard to get worked up over the whole Opera/MSN thing, which feels to me more like a broken browser detect than a deliberate act on Microsoft’s part.  As a friend likes to say, “Never ascribe to malice that which can be more easily explained by stupidity.”  Sniffing user agent strings to send them different style sheets is, as I may have opined once or twice before, pretty stupid.

I finally managed to pick out frames for my glasses and started wearing them today.  All I can say is that I don’t understand how anyone thought this was a good idea.  My vision is much sharper in the center, and then gets rapidly distorted towards the frame… and then, beyond the frame, the world looks like it always has.  The whole package is messing with my depth perception, balance, and ability to see at all.  No wonder prescriptions have to get strong over time; the glasses are wrecking your vision!  It’s all an optometristic conspiracy, I tell ya!  Aliens would doubtlessly be involved except life isn’t The X-Files.

I wonder how much it actually costs to rent a country.  I suppose that’s one of those “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” deals.

• Keeping Perspective was published on Friday, February 7th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal and Speaking categories.
• There have been no replies.

Just a quick reminder that the WThRemix competition closes in eleven days.  Here’s your chance to remake the face of the W3C Web site, and maybe win some peer accolades and a few prizes along the way.  I’ll be impressed by any entry that gives the W3C site a bold new look without changing its markup structure at all, personally, but I’m not a judge so impressing me won’t get you anywhere in the competition.

Did I mention that the different thematic choices for adactio.com are really, really impressive when you visit the author’s journal?

I somehow missed the announcement of the winners of AllTheWeb‘s restyling competition, so I’m going to mention now that the contest is over and the winners’ entries publicly available.  There are some really good entries.  I worked (remotely) with one of the runners-up when he was an intern at Netscape last year.  Speaking of which, I hope to have some good (or at least interesting) news in the near future.

I’m off to be a geek or a guru, or maybe even both, at Tri-C’s Western campus tonight, where I’ll talk about (among other things) how CSS can be used to restyle any site, regardless of what the site author has to say about it.  Hope to see you there!

• Restyling Madness! was published on Thursday, February 6th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Speaking categories.
• There have been no replies.

For those curious, Cuyahoga Community College has sent out a press release regarding their “Geeks & Gurus Visual Communication & Design Lecture Series.”  The first session of the series is to take place this Thursday at 7:30pm, and features yours truly.  Check out the release for more details; I’m hoping to make it to the rest of the series as an audience member.  All the other sessions look really interesting.  There is more detailed information available at awdsgn.com.

As I indicated before, this Thursday’s presentation will greatly affect my ability to be at the Web Standards Meetup, unless of course everyone shows up at the talk and we go somewhere afterward.  I definitely plan to make it to the Web Design Meetup next week, though.

• Moving On was published on Monday, February 3rd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been no replies.

No doubt you’ve already heard that the Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart over Texas during re-entry this morning.  NASA’s Web server is currently offline due to excessive load.  The original CNN report of the problem ends on a horribly tragic note.

I remember when Challenger was lost, 17 years ago this past week.  I was a sophomore in high school, walking from lunch to my first afternoon class with my friend Dave when his father (a teacher at the school) stopped us in the hall and said, “Did you guys hear the Shuttle blew up?”  I didn’t believe him at first; I think the first words out of my mouth were, “Ha ha, very funny,” even though as I uttered them I knew he wasn’t kidding.  It was a reflex action, an emotional spasm, divorced from anything else.

I actually own a copy of the report of the Presidential Commission on the Challenger accident.  I don’t know what that means.

NPR just reported that Colonel Ilan Ramon, the Israeli crew member, was one of the pilots who attacked an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981.  There is a tiny, tiny part of me that’s glad that this accident happened at an altitude 200,000 feet instead of a lower altitude, one where people might have asserted it must have been a terrorist missile attack against the Shuttle and its Israeli crew member.  There’s a larger part of me that is dismayed that our world is such that it was one of my first thoughts.

As I watched the video of the multiple debris trails of Columbia slowly etching the Texas sky, I couldn’t help but wonder why America’s national tragedies keep coming on perfectly clear blue mornings.

• Shuttle Down was published on Saturday, February 1st, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Imagine the ability to spread a bunch of sub-millimeter sensors around and then collect the data.  Now go read “Companies test prototype wireless-sensor nets” at EE Times Advanced Technology.  Then, assuming you haven’t, go read A Deepness In The Sky by Vernor Vinge.  It goes on rather longer than I might have liked, but it’s still full of interesting ideas, including the use of a “smart dust” sensor network.  It would seem that privacy as we know it really will be over.  David Brin touched on this topic in Earth, and apparently addresses it directly in The Transparent Society, which I haven’t read.  Is the only defense against technological invasion of privacy the ability to detect the invasion, and the ability to counter-invade?  I don’t see too many other options, frankly.  It might be possible to jam some forms of invasion privacy, but who could afford the gear to detect and defeat all possible forms of invasion?

Along similar lines, the more I hear about the things that can happen to IE/Win users, the happier I am about being a Macintosh user who works for Netscape.  The very idea that a Web browser can be taken over, and seriously mess up the operating system in the process, makes my eyes cross.  I’m starting to wonder how any company with the slightest shred of concern over security could possibly justify running IE/Win.  Here’s a scenario:  a high-level manager wanders past a site that does a drive-by download of a toolbar which then does its own download of a small program that quietly transfers all of the hard drive contents to another system.  Hey, were those your corporate secrets leaving the building just now?  Yeah, I think they passed a virulent data-eating virus on its way in.

Then again, if said company is also running Outlook, I suppose getting upset over virus infections became passé a long time ago.  In any case, the only defense against this sort of thing is the ability to find out that it’s happening and put a stop to it.  If there were a way to inflict similar damage on the original perpetrators, we’d all be mini-Cold War actors: don’t mess with my data and I won’t mess with yours.  In that kind of situation, how long would it take someone to decide a first strike was a good idea, and how much damage could they inflict?

• Stay in View, Please was published on Thursday, January 30th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.

I’ve watched word of the Web Standards Meetup work its way through various blogs like a slow conceptual pulse, so I may as well keep it going.  I seem to be the only one in my area signed up so far, and I’m slightly bummed that there are cool people like Nick and Molly signed up in cities far away from me.  Of course it was only after I signed up that I realized the meetup is the same night I’m presenting at a local community college, so I’d be incredibly late or in absentia anyway.  Of course, people interested in standards could come meet at the talk, and then we could all go to a nearby place afterwards.  It’s an idea.  It might even be a good one.  You be the judge.

I’d been toying with the idea of trying to get local Web folks to assemble for socialization and (human-relation) networking for a while now, but thanks to Meetup I don’t have to undertake the organizational effort.  That’s pretty cool.  It just makes sense someone named Eric would be involved in something that cool.  We’re everywhere, and everywhere we go is cool.  That’s the kind of cool we are.

Some time yesterday, someone asked how my new book was coming along.  I asked which one they meant.  It turned out they meant Eric Meyer on CSS, and that they’d spotted a mention of it on MozillaZine.  So I went over to see what they had to say, and discovered they were saying that evolt had posted an interview with me last Saturday.  Well, shoot the horse and slap me silly!  I’m always the last to know.

Actually, said interview was already available in Italian, and I forgot to mention that fact until now.  I sense a karmic balancing here.

So, Opera 7.  It’s out, and yes, it does wonderfully well on css/edge, so you can all stop e-mailing me now.  I’ll update the demo pages one of these days to say so, I promise.  Just not today.  Opera 7 still suffers from some disappointing CSS bugs, though.  One is on this page right here, assuming you’re using the default page stylesheet or one of its variants.  The entry dates should be appearing below the horizontal line at the top of each entry, not above the borders.  Also, on my Speaking page, the :first-line underlining of li children of ul#upcoming is being applied to more content than it should.  Neither is really tragic, but they are a touch annoying.  Opera 7 also has some problems with negative text-indent values on block-level links; it seems to be flipping the sign on the value, so that it’s positive.  But I could be wrong about that, since I haven’t invested a lot of time in detailed analysis of the behavior.

There have also been some changes that make OperaShow do odd things to some of the files available on my Speaking page.  It’s probably a case of my writing my projection-media CSS to cater to Opera 6 bugs, and Opera 7 having fixed said bugs.  I probably won’t get around to fixing up old talk files, so if you really want to see them as first written, keep a copy of Opera 6 around.  Hey, at least you can have multiple versions of Opera on your computer, just like most browsers.

These are just the things I’ve noticed from a little surfing around.  To a degree, I’m just picking nits, but I also wonder how many other “combinatorial” problems I’m going to encounter.  It’s one thing to pass a test suite, which is a set of controlled circumstances that is easily predictable.  Dealing with the wonderfully wacky ways authors like to combine bits of CSS in pursuit of a given effect is something else entirely.

Is Opera 7 better than Opera 6?  Yes.  Does it have a good CSS engine?  Yes.  Is it the best CSS engine I’ve seen?  No.  Close, but not quite.

On a completely different front, the interface on this medical detector is really cool, not to mention the technology itself is pretty nifty.  Give ’em about 15 years to wedge in more advanced scanners and extra features, and we’ll have tricorders after all.

• Increasing Circulation was published on Wednesday, January 29th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.

The files I used for last Thursday’s presentation are now available on the Speaking page.  The presentation space that COMMUG uses is, in a word, awesome.  Picture a large lounge-type setup with three wall-height projection screens, each of which can be devoted to any of the video input signals.  I was able to set it up so the slides (an OperaShow document running on my Windows laptop) were in the center screen, and the examples (which came off the TiBook) were on the left and right screes.  Beforehand I decided to have some fun; running three fifteen-foot-tall iTunes visualizations of “Block Rockin’ Beats” is a sight to behold.  I felt like a real rock star for a moment there.

In my post last Thursday, I referred to the XHTML 2.0 element nl as meaning “nested list,” when in fact it stands for “navigation list.”  My bad.  I’ve corrected the original entry as well.  It’s another data point in the topic of markup, semantics, and semantic overloading, but not one I’m currently prepared to explore in detail.  Meanwhile, I’ll just increase my Buzzword Rating by saying “Semantic” a lot.  Semantic semantic semantic.

So it looks as though the Northwest Passage will open up in our lifetimes, but I’m sure there’s no such thing as global warming.  After all, the Republican News Cha—er, I mean, Fox News Channel said so.  It’s all just a fantasy of radical environmentalists who don’t have anything better to do, apparently.  Which makes sense, because obviously there isn’t anything else to get upset about, like widespread deformities in amphibians.  Oh wait!  Sorry, the FNC gurus have said that last one is all made up as well.  Too bad nobody told Scientific American before they published an article about an eight-year scientific investigation of amphibian deformations.  Oh, those wacky scientists.  When will they learn that science is only valid if its conclusions agree with certain political agendas?

Which, oddly, reminds me: ever noticed how when a judge rules in a manner favorable to conservatives, it’s hailed as respect for the rule of law, but when the ruling leans to the left, that’s called judicial activism?  Maybe it’s time to turn the terms around, just to see how the right wing likes it.  After all, there’s nothing like extremist apoplexy to brighten one’s day.

• Talking, Correcting, Ranting was published on Monday, January 27th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Politics and Speaking categories.
• There have been no replies.