Thoughts From Eric Archive

Anyone remember the American Express commercial where a guy talks about how he was at a big client dinner and his credit card got declined?  “I was so embarrassed,” the voice actor moans, and then goes on to relate how his father told him to get an American Express.  With no pre-set spending limit, he informs us, he’ll never have to worry about being declined again.

Wrong.

It turns out that “no pre-set spending limit” does not mean “you can charge as much as you want as long as you pay off the balance on time”.  It means “your monthly spending ability changes based on your spending history”.  You can absolutely have a charge to your AmEx declined.  Even better, since the limit changes continually based on your activity, you have no reasonable way to know when a decline might happen.  It’s the worst of both worlds!

All this, and an annual fee to boot.  Awesome!  Where do I sign?

Of course, when you think about it, you quickly realize that there had to be some kind of limit.  If there weren’t, you could buy a fully armed jet fighter with it.  (Which would of course be awesome.)  What rankles is that the advertising explicitly claims, and the wording “no pre-set spending limit” strongly implies, that declines are a thing of the past with an AmEx—which is completely and utterly false.

Fortunately, it seems that there is a way to handle charges that exceed your spending limit: pre-pay the charge(s) in question.  Of course, I had to think of this and ask someone at AmEx about it; the three people I’d talked to before that hadn’t volunteered the information, or else just didn’t think of it.  I’ve been assured that, having paid in advance, everything will go through without incident, even though what I’m charging is about an order of magnitude greater than the initial spending limit set for the card.  We’ll see how things play out.

I just wish they’d been more open about all this in the first place.  As a result of all this, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that my new card issuer has been lying to me.  That’s not really the way I prefer to start a new relationship.

Anyway, I just thought I’d share this little tidbit for the benefit of anyone interested, including any future Googlers.  Oh, and vent a bit in the process.  That always feels good.

• American Express Limited After All was published on Monday, April 16th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Rants category.
• There have been seventeen replies.

Over the weekend, I reworked meyerweb’s sidebar a bit.  One of the changes is the addition of a section called “Identity Archipelago“, which links to various bit of my online identity and makes use of XFN‘s me value.  I’ve been meaning to do this ever since co-presenting a poster on how me could be used to accomplish identity consolidation, and hey, I’m only thirty months late.

I ran into an interesting dilemma as I assembled the links, though.  Should I link to the Wikipedia entry about me, and if so, does it really merit a me marker?  I’m not so sure.  Yes, the page is about me, but it isn’t something I created, nor is it something I control.  Thanks to the open nature of Wikipedia, it could be altered to state that I’m a paste-eating pederast with pretensions to the Pakistani presidency.  It would be kind of embarrassing to link to something like that, let alone proclaim in a machine-parseable way that the information on the other side of the link represented me in some way.

While I’ve never stated a Wikipedia policy, as others have, I’ve privately maintained a hands-off policy.  Even though I’d like to replace the picture with a better one and flesh out some details of my career, and on occasion have wanted to correct some inaccuracies, I’ve refrained from doing so.  I’m not going to proclaim that I’ll never ever edit my own entry, because if libel (alliterative or otherwise) shows up and I’m the first to notice, I’ll at least roll the page back.  But in general, I’m keeping my hands off.

Nevertheless, it is arguably a piece of my online identity.  Not linking to it feels like a glaring omission—or am I just trying to rationalize an egocentric desire to show off?  I don’t think that I am, but then I’m hardly a neutral party.

So what’s your perspective?  Is a Wikipedia entry created and edited by others properly a part of my archipelago, or is it simply a nearby island?

• A Question of Identity was published on Monday, April 16th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Microformats and Personal categories.
• There have been five replies.

Thanks to the faintly odd generosity of a colleague—I won’t name names, but let’s just say the URL of the gentleman in question rhymes with “fairgag”—I find myself with a yearlong XBox Live subscription.  One interesting wrinkle in this scenario is that I don’t really have any multiplayer games besides Halo 2, but that isn’t really the biggest issue.  No, the real problem is that the XBox 360 is two floors away from the DSL router, with no possible cable routes that don’t involve winding about a hundred feet of CAT-5 around stairwell bannisters and across public walls.

Now, I do have 802.11b wifi in the house, so I could buy the official wifi adapter.  What I’m wondering, though, is if I could plug the XBox into my Airport Express‘ Ethernet port (or the USB port) and get it onto the network that way.  I Googled a bit but didn’t turn up anything relevant, and poking around the administration utility’s configuration pages didn’t seem to help.  Anyone know if there’s a way to make this happen?

Of course, I have no idea if my Netgear MR814v2 router is even XBox Live compatible, but one thing at a time, I guess.

• XBox Live via an Airport Express? was published on Sunday, April 15th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been sixteen replies.

Here’s the latest version of my “baseline” style sheet, with some changes based on feedback from readers on the original post.

/* Don't forget to set a foreground and background color 
   on the 'html' or 'body' element! */
html, body, div, span,
applet, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,
small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,
dd, dl, dt, li, ol, ul,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td {
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
	border: 0;
	font-weight: inherit;
	font-style: inherit;
	font-size: 100%;
	line-height: 1;
	font-family: inherit;
	text-align: left;
	vertical-align: baseline;
}
a img, :link img, :visited img {
	border: 0;
}
table {
	border-collapse: collapse;
	border-spacing: 0;
}
ol, ul {
	list-style: none;
}
q:before, q:after,
blockquote:before, blockquote:after {
	content: "";
}

The changes are:

1. The leading comment — rather than fill in some default document colors, which I hesitate to do given how often they’ll be changed, I just threw in a comment reminding the author that setting them is a good idea.  I’d expect that anyone who uses their own set of baseline styles will fill in their own favorite color set.

2. font-weight: inherit; — this used to be normal, but it was pointed out that this would upset normal inheritance.  For example, if you set a div to be boldfaced, none of its descendant elements would inherit that boldness (because they’d be explicitly assigned normal).  Using inherit avoids this problem while still “zeroing out” boldface styling.

3. font-style: inherit — same reasoning.

4. vertical-align: baseline — this brings everything onto the baseline, including superscripts and subscripts.  This forces authors to determine the exact vertical offset they want for such elements, as well as any others they might care to vertically shift, as well as how they’ll accomplish said shift(s).

5. a img, :link img, :visited img — this will make sure images in anchors and links don’t have a border by default.  Using a img covers images in named anchors, while the rest of the selector handles images inside either visited or unvisited links.  You might consider a img to be sufficient, and for now you’d be right.  But in the future, any element may be a link, not just a elements, so this gives us a bit of future-proofing.

I also put some spaces into the selectors to make them easier for me to read.  If you use these styles, you might consider stripping out the unnecessary whitespace to compact the rules as much as possible.

It was suggested that min-width: 0; be added to the first rule in order to invoke hasLayout, but Ingo Chao explained why that was a bad idea.  It was also suggested that text decorations should be removed from links, but I’d rather not.  I try never to mess with link decorations, and also figure that anyone who feels otherwise can add their own text-decoration declarations.

So we’ll see how well this one stands up to use in the wild.  Let me know!

• Reworked Reset was published on Saturday, April 14th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been ninety-nine replies.

At AEA Boston, I advocated using a “reset” or “baseline” set of styles, but not one based on the universal selector.  Instead, I said the styles should list all the actual elements to be reset and exactly how they should be reset.  During the Q&A afterward, an audience member asked me if I would create such a style sheet to share with the world, and I said that I would.

Then, during the break, someone else (sorry I’ve forgotten who!) reminded me that the Yahoo! UI group already did it with reset.css so I don’t have to.  Awesome!

…except that I don’t think it goes far enough in some areas, and a little too far in others.  So here’s my version of reset.css, based off of the YUI styles.

html,body,div,span,
applet,object,iframe,
h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,p,blockquote,pre,
a,abbr,acronym,address,big,cite,code,
del,dfn,em,font,img,ins,kbd,q,s,samp,
small,strike,strong,sub,sup,tt,var,
dd,dl,dt,li,ol,ul,
fieldset,form,label,legend,
table,caption,tbody,tfoot,thead,tr,th,td {
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
	border: 0;
	font-weight: normal;
	font-style: normal;
	font-size: 100%;
	line-height: 1;
	font-family: inherit;
	text-align: left;
}
table {
	border-collapse: collapse;
	border-spacing: 0;
}
ol,ul {
	list-style: none;
}
q:before,q:after,
blockquote:before,blockquote:after {
	content: "";
}

I omitted elements like hr and the various frame-related elements, as well as form elements like input and select, because of their general weirdness, though I may change my mind about those at a later date.  I intentionally left out dir and menu because of their deprecated status.

I’m absolutely open to questions, comments, and suggestions, so feel free to use the comments for that purpose.

(Side note: if anyone’s disturbed by the unitless value for line-height, please read my post “Unitless line-heights“.)

Addendum: There have been some good suggestions in the comments, so they’re definitely worth reading.  See also the followup post, which incorporates some of those suggestions.

• Reset Styles was published on Thursday, April 12th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the An Event Apart and CSS categories.
• There have been seventy-five replies.

From my comment queue, possibly the first time I feel a spammer is really speaking to me as a person:

Did u ever heard about CSS…? it will help your site.

Do tell, oh random anonymous stranger whose site URL crudely references the genitalia of older females!  I wish to learn.

• Stylish Spam was published on Friday, March 30th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Humor categories.
• There have been seventeen replies.

Wow.

Just wow.

I’m back home and I still can’t believe how amazing An Event Apart Boston was for me and everyone with whom I talked.  I knew going in it was a great lineup of speakers covering great topics.  I knew that we had a completely kick-ass staff in place, and amazing volunteers to help us out.  I knew that we’d have great support from the venue.

I knew all that, and I was still overwhelmed and ecstatic at how things went.  At least on one level.  On another, thanks to the aforementioned kick-ass staff, things went so smoothly that I almost felt like I was a speaker at someone else’s conference.  I had so little to worry about that it was sometimes hard to remember that this was all happening because Jeffrey and I, over breakfast at Las Manitas in Austin, decided to take a chance and put on a show.  In a way, I had to prod myself just a little to remember to feel pride in what we’d accomplished.

What required no effort to feel was a deep sense of humility and awe that so many people had come to support what we did.  Over five hundred folks gathered in Boston, drawn by the same love of the web and pride in Doing Things Right that drives us.  I see the attendees at AEA as the craftsmen and women of the web.  Sure, there are shops mass-producing sites, the way a factory churns out cheap clocks.  That’s fine if you just want something to put on your nightstand.  But if you want an elegant, finely tuned work of art that you’d hang in a prominent place, a clock that is as much a point of pride as a timepiece—you find a craftsman.  And that’s who came to Boston.  That’s who comes to An Event Apart.

What amazed me even more was the overwhelming wave of positive feedback that we got.  Marci, our event manager, told me that in 25 years of event planning, she’s never seen attendees so happy.  So many people came up to me and Jeffrey and Marci just to say, “Thank you so much for doing this”.  They were thanking us, which seems entirely backwards.  I did thank each of them for coming to the event, but let me state it here for anyone I didn’t get to thank in person.  Thank you so much for coming to AEA and showing that you know creating the web is much more than churning out code, and that you take pride in being a craftsman.  Thank you for making the show so amazing.  Without you, it couldn’t have happened at all.

Now I’m looking forward to AEA Seattle twice as much as before, and I thought I was already maxed out on anticipation.

Again: wow.  Thank you, one and all.

• After Boston was published on Friday, March 30th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the An Event Apart and Projects categories.
• There have been eighteen replies.

Five minutes after I should have left for the airport to catch my flight to Boston and An Event Apart, I finally got the DSL service back, four and a half days after it went dark.  After a few minutes of frantic testing and configuration to make sure it would work for Kat in my absence, I blew out the door.

Guess what’s broken in my hotel room.

• Net Loss was published on Sunday, March 25th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Humor category.
• There have been ten replies.