Kat wrote up a short account of our recent trip, which includes a detailed review of the resort where we stayed in case you’re thinking about heading for Cancun. I marked it up and scanned in a few pictures to make it prettier. It’s all in the “Miscellaneous” section.
Kat and I just flew back from a weeklong vacation in the Cancun region, and boy, are my arms red! No, really—my sunburn has yet to completely fade. We might actually write up a review of the place we stayed, which is only a few months old. If we do, of course I’ll post the link. First I have to dig throught the 2,407 e-mail messages that piled up in my absence.
While I was gone, John Manning wrote to point out that I need to correct an earlier posting, so I’ll do it here:
<style type="text/css" media="quantum-foam">
cosmos {color: #FEF8EA;}
</style>
Turns out the previously-posted value was the result of computational error. Oopsie.
I would have laughed harder at the article “Item Found In Garbage To Be Turned Into Lamp Someday” except it hit a little too close to home. When we took possession of our house, there were several boxes of trash on the treelawn left by the previous occupants. For no apparent reason, I looked through the boxes and actually salvaged something for later conversion to a lamp. What was it, you ask? Let’s just say it’s plastic, brightly colored, and covered in Grateful Dead stickers.
The other day I got e-mail containing this amusing vignette:
I took my four-year-old to Borders Bookstore today because I needed three books (Dreamweaver 4 Bible, Heinle’s latest JavaScript book, and your CSS book). Because he can spend almost forever in the Children’s Section, I told him that we had to get my books first.
I find the JavaScript book, then manage to find the DW book. But I can’t find yours. (Of course, this is Borders’ computer section…loaded with books not always organized.) [My son] is getting bored…it’s not much fun for him in this section. He starts looking at different books and liking the O’Reilly ones because of the animals on the covers.
I reach his limit…he’s ready to go. So he reaches up, grabs a book, and says, “This is the one we want.”
And he was right…it was your book.
So you can honestly say that the popularity of your book extends to young and old alike.
As a result, I’ve decided that I’m going to follow Zeldman’s example and term myself “Friend of the Developers’ Children.”
Ohio is forcing everyone with old-style license plates (three letters, three numbers) to get the new “Bicentennial” plates, which are still six characters long. From what I can tell, the difference is that with the new plates the first and third character pairs go from AA through ZZ, and the middle pair from 00 through 99.
About a week ago, as I pulled up to a traffic light, I noticed the car in front of me had the license plate AA31FF. Without even thinking about it, I did the translation in my head and came up with a shade of purple. Then I burst out laughing at myself. I fear I’m going to spend the next ten years seeing sporadic colors while driving, which is as strange a route to pseudo-synaesthesia as I can imagine.
When I went to reluctantly pick up my new plates, they didn’t bear a hexadecimal number.
Remember the Martian Sphinx? Well, now we have similarly incontrovertible proof that Hallmark is controlled by alien beings. Never mind watching the skies—keep an eye on your local drug store!
A big gap in writing means a big update. I’ll try to keep it brief. Wait, who am I kidding? I’ll be as long-winded as usual.
Travel: Kat and I just spent a weekend together in New York City, after I met with various people within Time-Warner to introduce the Netscape Evangelism team. Jeff’s head cold prevented us from seeing him and his gal for dinner (although I’d seen him earlier in the week), but we did get time to hang out with a variety of Kat’s friends. On Saturday, we fought our way through packed masses of people to see the Chinese New Year parade in Chinatown. It was there that I found a new definition of “pathetic.” The parade turned out to be two very short dragons, a guy hitting a cymbal, and some local businessmen in suits. Front to back, the entire parade was about twenty feet long. Seriously.
We also got to see Kat’s parents for brunch on Sunday morning, which is always nice. The Inn at Great Neck has a great buffet-style brunch, including oysters on the half-shell and some really amazing jumbo shrimp.
While coming in for a landing at Hopkins, I composed a blank-verse poem. I’m not sure why. It was as wretched as my other poetry, so I let it go, but what is it about recent months that has made me more poetic? Or at least made me think I am?
The Written Word: People have been asking about my writing, and there are quite a few rumors floating around, so here’s the latest scoop straight from me. (I’d just like to pause a moment to reflect on the fundamental oddity of there being rumors about me and my work. Okay. Let’s move on.)
The biggest news is that I’m writing a CSS book for New Riders; if you want to waste a few minutes for no good reason you can check out my author profile on their site. This book will not, as some have speculated, be called “CSS Magic.” This is entirely because I couldn’t live with the format restrictions that series places on its authors. Instead, the book will preserve the spirit of the Magic books but be presented more like a narrative text that walks the reader through the creation of a design, or an important aspect of one. The feeling the reader should (hopefully) get is of sitting next to me while I work through a project, seeing how the styles are built up and, when necessary, changed. Every chapter will be a project, and labeled as such. Code fragments will show what’s added or changed at every step. The entire book will be in full color, and I’m aiming for an average of about one screenshot per page. Code fragments will show what’s added or changed at every step. Sidebar notes and warnings will point out other things to try, or certain caveats, and so on. So in many ways, it will be very much like a Magic book. But it won’t be called “CSS Magic.”
We’re aiming to have it on shelves this summer, with writing projected to be finished by the end of March. It’s about two-thirds done already. As a bit of a teaser, the book will incorporate at least three of the demos found in css/edge, in whole or in part. I’ll leave you to guess which ones made it in.
As for Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, there will not be a second edition before 2003 at the earliest. The problem is that expanding the book to cover CSS2, as I would pretty obviously have to do, means I’d have to write a lot of “this is how things should work, but no browser gets this right yet” or “only one browser will handle this, the rest will gack up a hairball.” Even in a book like CSS:TDG, which is concerned as much with theory as practice, I vastly prefer to cover theory that can actually be put into practice. Who wants to read a 20-page chapter on generated content when it isn’t fully supported by any known browser?
So that’s a big factor in when the writing starts and when a second edition might hit the shelves. The release of IE6/Win actually delayed this process, because it added so little in the way of new and correct CSS support.
There you have it: the latest writing information. I should probably restructure my “Books” page so it has room for this sort of thing, and allow me to keep interested parties more up-to-date on what I’m doing. Maybe when the New Riders book is done…
On a related note, Owen Briggs (thenoodleincident.com) and Eric Costello (glish.com) are also finishing up a practical CSS book, and I believe it’s due out in April. I don’t know much more about it, except that given the uniformly excellent work the both of them have published, I’m confident it will be a worthwhile addition to anyone’s library.
On another related note, Meryl K. Evans has posted a new article, Blast Sites with User CSS Sheets, which was written with some input from me and was apparently inspired in part by my presentation “User Stylesheets: A Tool for Design (and Destruction!)” last November at Web Design World 2001. You can find the original Powerpoint files for that presentation on my Talks page, but read Meryl’s article for a much more friendly and thorough look at how user stylesheets can be a useful too in the hands of a savvy designer.
css-discuss: Although the pace has slowed quite a bit, we’re still adding members; the count is now over 1500 subscribers to the list. The ebb and flow of the list has been fascinating, and I think we’re starting to evolve the kind of community I’d hoped to create. It will still take some shepherding, but I think people have caught on to what I’m about. Word.
On yet another related note, Al Sparber, founder of Project VII and a highly respected Dreamweaver guru and real-world standards advocate, recently started up a CSS discussion newsgroup on the PVII NNTP server. I presume the group will be primarily focused on using CSS in a Dreamweaver environment, and certainly in conjunction with Al’s DW extensions and design packs, but I bet it will also be a good place to get information about using CSS in general. You can find it at news://forums.projectseven.com/css.
(Thanks to Shirley K. for reminding me, by dint of her blog entry, that I’d forgotten to post this before my trip to NYC.)
It was a week ago that John Allsopp and I announced the existence of css-discuss. In that time, we’ve gone from 1 subscriber (me) to 1,301 subscribers. There was one message on the list when we started—my initial test message. Since then there have been 1,013 messages posted, many of them utterly fascinating. Several subscribers have commented that they’ve learned a lot about CSS from the list in its first week. That goes for me too. While the posting volume does seem to be slowing a bit, it’s still close to 100 messages per day, indicating that there is more interest in CSS than I had dared even to dream.
So I’d like to thank each and every member of css-discuss for already making it an amazing, vibrant, useful community of learning. I don’t think I could have asked for much better.
Speaking of CSS, I’ve added three more presentation choices to the menu, all of them variations on the basic layout. “Darkfall,” at least, presents a very different look to the site. I also managed to squash a couple of bugs in the site’s minimal Javascript, with help from Bill Pena and co-worker Bob Clary, so you shouldn’t be seeing errors any more, assuming that you did at all. Remember: if the text is smaller than you’d like, go to the “Advanced setup…” page and set your preferred font size. (If you don’t see the advanced setup or any theme choices, you might want to read about this site. If you get my drift.)
Last night, I announced the creation of a new mailing list devoted to practical discussions of CSS called, ingeniously enough, css-discuss. In the first two hours we’d picked up 150 subscribers; two hours after that the list size had doubled. As I write this, we’re passing 700 subscribers and still climbing. If I’d known it was going to be like this, I probably never would have done it!
Of course, it wasn’t just me. Major thanks go to John Allsopp of Western Civilisation for providing the server resources and setting up the list. John and I will try our hardest to keep up with this runaway train, and we hope you’ll hop aboard!