Thoughts From Eric Archive

Hitting a link shared by Unstoppabot, who really needs to get around to fixing his feed linking policy (“View this site”?  Lame!), I was seized with another spasm of appreciation for the deliciousness that is SketchUp.

I did a moderate amount of 3D modeling back in the day.  The specific day in question would be the one where we all thought that images of rendered 3D models and, whenever possible, blobs of text were the absolute last word in Great Web Design.  Remember that?  Wasn’t it fantastic?  When every page title could be a bunch of extruded and beveled sans-serif letters viewed slightly from above, with the whole mess of text angled away from the observer?

Good times.

So anyway, while I was cranking out renderings of page title text and university logos, I also spent some time creating scenes of other stuff.  You can find some of the results if you dig deeply enough here on meyerweb, but that’s not my point.  What I’m trying to say is that I enjoy a bit o’ three dee more than most, and have some knowledge of how difficult it can be to construct models.

When I first heard about SketchUp, I was intrigued but didn’t really buy into all the hype.  It couldn’t be that easy, could it?  And then I watched someone using it—at An Event Apart, as it happens; and no, it wasn’t one of the attendees—and was captivated.  I downloaded the installer while I was sitting there, watching him create and modify shapes as easily as sketching them on paper.  And then I left it uninstalled, because I was afraid of what it would do to my free time.

A few days ago, I finally broke down.  I actually did have a legitimate reason to install and use it, a really good one, but of course I’d been waiting for any reasonable pretense to launch the .dmg and make with the modeling.  So I did.

Color me deeply impressed.  While you’re at it, add some heavy tints of addicted.  I started by modeling our kitchen, and now I want to do the whole frickin’ house.  I’m starting to eye local landmarks for recreation and contribution to the Warehouse and Google Earth.

I don’t have time for this.  I need help.  Stop me before I model again!

• Another Soul Lost to SketchUp was published on Monday, September 17th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Projects and Tools categories.
• There have been eleven replies.

In response to my post about Camino and Firefox, Simon and Smokey Ardisson sent along the following:

• AsceticBar by (who else?) Jon Hicks Stuart Morgan removes all the icons in Camino’s Bookmarks bar without killing them off in the actual Bookmarks menu.  Exactly what I wanted.  Thanks to Smokey for pointing it out, and Hicksy Stuart for writing it!

• A Firefox extension that fixes its last-tab behavior in OS X when “always show tab bar” is turned on.  This was contributed by Simon in a comment on Bugzilla bug 348031, and once I installed it, I found Firefox much easier to tolerate.  I hope that this gets permanently fixed in a future version of Firefox, but until that happens, we’ve got the extension to paper over the problem.

My heartfelt thanks to both gentlemen for their pointers and efforts!

• Browsers Boosted was published on Monday, September 17th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Browsers category.
• There have been two replies.

This evening, we decided to cap off the weekend with dinner out.  Carolyn was in the mood for french fries, and the rest of us were looking for decent dinner fare, so we decided to hit Brennan’s Colony.  This is one of the more fascinating restaurants on our side of town.  From both the outside and the inside, it looks like a low- to middle-rent bar, all uncushioned wood benches and odd angles and dimmish lighting.  The baseline menu is burgers and fried food at very affordable prices.

And then you get the dinner menu, and you wonder from which other restaurant they swiped their menu.  Chicken breast stuffed with goat cheese in a bearnaise reduction, or words to that effect.  Mint-crusted New Zealand rack of lamb.  Et cetera.  It is, to use a word I picked up on my last trip to Ye Jolly Olde Englande, a gastropub, only with really good food.

We hadn’t gone for a while because, being a bar, smoking was permitted, and while they had an area labeled “No Smoking” it was about as effective as setting up a ring of buoys just offshore and marking that area “No Water”.  We used to go every now and again in olden days, but after Carolyn’s arrival, it was stricken from our dining list for the obvious health reasons.  However, Ohio voters passed an indoor smoking ban late last year, so we could once again eat and breathe.  Everybody woohoo!

Only when we arrived and asked for a table on their newly opened outdoor patio, we were told Carolyn wasn’t old enough to be seated there.  We could eat indoors, but the patio was off-limits to anyone under the age of eighteen.  This baffled us just a little all by itself, and then we turned around to behold a pre-teen boy sitting at the bar, eating a sandwich and drinking a Coke.  At least we hoped it was a Coke.

We brought this oddity (and, if I’m not mistaken, violation of Ohio state law) to the staff’s attention, and were told that he was seated there because they were so busy.  But no kids on the patio!  No no!  That would be, um, whatever they feared would come of allowing children to eat at an outdoor table.  The apocalypse, no doubt.

So we ate at The Tavern Company a little way down the street, where they were more than happy to have us sit wherever we liked, indoors or out—the presence of a smallish, well-behaved child notwithstanding.

I think we’ll keep to that seating arrangement for as long as the policy at Brennan’s remains.

• Odd Seating Arrangments was published on Sunday, September 16th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Cleveland and Food categories.
• There have been four replies.

A while back, I got fed up with the memory leaks of Safari, but found Firefox to be a bit too poky for everyday browsing.  Also, I can’t even find words to describe my seething hatred of Firefox’s insistence on keeping a blank window open when I close the last tab in said window.

So I started using Camino as my default surfing browser.  Firefox is still my web development environment, of course; I just seethe for a moment when a blank window occurs and then keep going.  Life in Camino has been a mostly positive experience, but there are a few things that really irk me.  I’m wondering if the (Lazy)web can help me fix them.  To wit:

• The form autofill routines latched on to some early mistakes of mine, and now just will not let go (for example, my name gets filled into the e-mail field and vice versa when commenting on WordPress blogs).  I want to fix this.  Where do I find that information?

• Safari has an autofill feature I really like, which is that it remembers every input ever made for a given field on a given page, and uses them for autocompletion.  For example, it remembers every blog post title I’ve ever input through it, which helps me avoid duplicates.  Is there a way to get or add something similar for Camino?

• Is there a way to turn off all favicons, including the default green diagonal bookmark, in the Bookmarks bar, but leave them in the Bookmarks menu?  All I can find is browser.chrome.favicons, which seems to kill all favicons everywhere, and doesn’t seem to turn off the green guys (unless I did something wrong).

Camino hasn’t been all pain, certainly.  I absolutely love its state restoration feature, for one.  And once I got into about:config and flipped a few settings (such as disabling “Delete” as a back button equivalent), and ran the shell command to get inline URL autocompletion (as documented most of the way down this “Hidden Preferences” page), I was much more satisfied with my Camino experience.  I’d just like to get it the rest of the way there, if I can.

• Tweaking Camino was published on Friday, September 7th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Browsers category.
• There have been thirty-two replies.

On stage at An Event Apart Chicago, I made reference to recent efforts I’ve been making to develop a set of “diagnostic” styles.  I’d hoped to have them ready for presentation in Chicago, but didn’t get it done in time.

Well, they’re still not really done, but as I’ve now torn them apart and rebuilt them three or four times, with no real end to that cycle in sight, it’s time for me to get them off of my hard drive and into the public eye.  It’s a little bit complicated, so rather than post the whole thing in this entry, I’m going to link to a demonstration page.  I first want to say a few things about it, though.

The primary goal here is to have a set of rules that can be applied during the development phase of a new layout.  These rules’ aim is to visually highlight problems in the markup.  For example, here’s one of the rules:

a[href="#"] {background: lime;}
a[href=""] {background: fuchsia;}

That brings some eye-watering attention to any link that has an empty href, or is (most likely) being used as a JavaScript trigger with no fallback.

Where things got tricky was when I wanted to do things like higlight images that didn’t have alt or title attributes.  In a perfect CSS3 world, I could just say img:not(img[alt]) to select non-alted images.  At least, I think that’s what I would say—:not() syntax makes my temples throb.  Since I was developing these with the idea of releasing them to a more general development audience, though, I decided to use regular old non-:not selectors.

So what I ended up doing, in slightly simplified form, was this sort of thing:

img {outline: 5px solid red;}
img[alt][title] {outline-width: 0;}
img[alt] {outline-color: fuchsia;}
img[alt], img[title] {outline-style: double;}
img[alt=""][title], img[alt][title=""] {outline-width: 3px;}
img[alt=""][title=""] {outline-style: dotted;}

The logic works out like so:

1. Set all images to have a big red outline.
2. If an image has both alt and title attributes, set the outline width to zero.
3. If an image has an alt attribute, set the outline color to fuchsia.  This means the outline of any image that doesn’t have an alt attribute will stay red.
4. As long as an image has either an alt or a title attribute, make its outline style double.
5. If an image has an empty alt with any kind of title, or vice versa, make the outline’s width three pixels.
6. If an image’s alt and title attributes are both empty, then make the outline dotted.

Whew.  Maybe I piled a few too many conditions in there, but I wanted to get some finer granularity on the results, which you can see demonstrated (along with several other things, like highlighting table headers without scope attributes and tables without summary attributes) at the diagnostic demonstration page.  On that page, you’ll see a number of examples and the style sheet that drives them all.  If it’s getting in the way of seeing what’s going on, move the mouse over it to mostly clear it away without actually removing it.  Mouse back out to bring it back.  (Maybe I should reverse those states—what do you think?)

Admittedly, much of what these styles do can be replicated with tools like the Web Developer Toolbar.  The advantage I find with writing my own diagnostic styles is that I can tune them to present exactly the way I want them.  Outlining deprecated elements is fine, but what if I’d rather make them lime-green on cyan to really drive the point into my optic nerves?

Anyway, I don’t for an instant think that these constitute a replacement for the WDT.  They’re just another handy tool to have in the toolbox.

A final note: when actually using diagnostic styles, all of the declarations should be marked !important so as to ensure their application.  I left those directives out of the demo page for clarity’s sake.  If you’re going to use diagnostic styles of this sort in your own projects, remember that you’ll need to add them.

I’m putting these out for comment, suggestions, and general community improvement.  Anyone see things we could add or upgrade?  Let us know!

• Diagnostic Styling was published on Friday, September 7th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Tools categories.
• There have been seventy-two replies.

Ma nun me lassà, Nun darme stu turmiento!

Luciano Pavarotti died last night of pancreatic cancer at the age of 71.

Among my “classical” recordings, the original Three Tenors concert holds a special place, one that has survived nearly every iPod reorganization I’ve undergone.  What I find most fascinating about that recording is the marked contrast between the three stars, and just how much Pavarotti stands out.  I’ve thought about the reasons why that is, and I think it comes down to his restraint in the use of vibrato.  Whenever I hear a singer whose long notes are more warble than tone, I wince.  I recognize the physical skill that goes into producing the sound, but the result is actually uncomfortable to me.  This is why there’s hardly a soprano I can stand; they all seem to exist solely to find long notes to strangle.

Pavarotti, in contrast, used vibrato as a shading on his notes.  At their core, they were long and pure and steady.  Yes, at times he went for all-out vibrato, but it always seemed to make sense when he did.  He wasn’t warbling to show that he could do it; he did it when and how it was right.  That, coupled with the sheer power of his voice, creates an emotional punch that I’m powerless to comprehend but joyful to behold.

I listened to some Pavarotti this morning, and though his heartbreaking renditions of “Nessun Dorma” and “Torna A Surriento” have always misted me up a little, this time there was an extra tightness in my throat.

Part of me hopes that nobody is asked to sing at his memorial services; or, if anyone is, that they turn down the invitation.  Nobody could do the job as well as he would have.

E noi dovrem, ahimè, morir, morir!

• Torna A Surriento was published on Thursday, September 6th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Culture category.
• There have been ten replies.

Despite my best efforts to cut back on travel, the 2007 world tour seems to be continuing apace.  In addition to my sessions at An Event Apart in San Francisco at the beginning of October, I’m due to hit (at least) three four other stages before the year is out.  Here’s the skinny:

• I’ll be doing a short bit on microformats at the Cleveland Web Standards Meetup.  If you’re in the area and interested, please do sign up for the group!  We’ve been growing quickly and, having shifted our meeting place to the Tri-C West campus, now have room for a lot more growth.  We’re also moving beyond simple gathering, with some great ideas for helping out local organizations and sharing knowledge and skills.  Even if you can’t make this month’s gathering, you should still join up so you’re in the loop.

• I’ll be delivering the keynote at the first annual CIW Partner Conference in Destin, Florida, at the end of September.  No official title for the talk as yet, but the general theme will be how we’ve gotten to where we are, what I see as the best ways to train the next generation of web designers and developers, and the best tools currently available to current designers/developers.  I may also participate in a panel, depending on exact scheduling.

• In mid-October, I’ll be on stage at the first Voices That Matter: Web Design conference in San Francisco (which will make my second trip to the city in the space of three weeks).  We’re looking to do sort of an open “Conversation With…” format with lots of audience questions and commentary, which is a little unusual for me.  Jeffrey and I did a conversational session with Brian Alvey at ‘Meet the Makers’ back in the day, but I haven’t really done a Merv Griffin since.  Should be fun!

• Then, in mid-December, I’ll be doing three hours of CSS at Web Design World Boston.  It will pretty much be like it was last year: a mix of deep dives into obscure (yet important) corners of CSS, assessments of current trends, fun with cutting-edge techniques, and open-format Q&A.  We’ll have three hours (with breaks) to play around, so that’ll leave plenty of time to wander into the weeds and come back mostly intact.

I’m starting to do some rework on the sidebar here on meyerweb, and a “coming soon” list is one of the things I have in mind.  Those of you who actually do drop by the site will probably notice the sidebar mutating over time, since I’m going to do my reworking live and in public.  That sounds so much more grandiose than the reality of fiddling with markup and making mistakes, doesn’t it?  It’s editing 2.0!

• Staging The World Over was published on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the An Event Apart, Cleveland, and Speaking categories.
• There have been two replies.

Chicago, Chicago.  It was my sweet home Chicago for all of a year, and admittedly that was back around the national bicentennial, but I still enjoy my visits.  I’ve just learned to accept that the traffic jams are omnipresent, and to chill accordingly.

We drove in on Friday afternoon and left Wednesday morning, tired but content. As I knew would be the case, the folks who came to AEA Chicago were filled to the brim with awesome.  We had a great time röcking out, groovin’ to the tunes, filling Fadó, wondering about Shreddies exchanges, and savoring the lunches.  I’ve gotten my pictures onto Flickr in what is, for me, close to record time, and added them to the show’s photo pool.  All with geocoding, natch.  Gotta geocode.

If you want to know what other people thought of it, Jeffrey‘s got some links—perhaps understandably, Brain Freeze’s post is one of my favorites—and Technorati will be happy to point you to what everyone’s saying.  I can tell you what I thought, though: fantastic.  I can’t wait to do it again!

• Magnificent Chicago was published on Friday, August 31st, 2007.
• It was assigned to the An Event Apart category.
• There have been eleven replies.