My “schedule” lately has been a little, um, off. I find myself waking up between three and four in the morning, answering work-related emails, fumbling through putting together the blog entry for the day, then showering, dealing with whatever precipitation is on the sidewalk before the mailman arrives at 9, and then going back to bed for a “nap”. The majority of the working day happens after an early lunch.
That’s not all bad, as schedules go, but it means that I’ve been done for the day about 9pm, which is going to prove difficult with some evening obligations coming up. I only need to shift my body’s clock about 4 hours later to be in good shape, with a normal afternoon siesta, but I’m not sure how to solve the problem. I think it’s going to involve staying up awfully late one of these evenings so I’m tired enough to sleep until sunrise or so.
- In Don’t just read the news, make it, Matt Haughey tells how he scored an interview with the head of TiVo User Experience.
- Is spiffy design dead because of weblogs and standards? Bronze says it is. CSS Zen Garden would suggest design is alive and well, but as I blip through designs there, nothing really catches my eye. Me, I’d like to have a spiffier design here, but I also want to keep things easy to read and know that I have the creative graphic design capabilities of a kumquat. Maybe I should have a contest?
- Here’s a short explanation of how Google Suggest works. I’d never thought of trying to do real-time feedback on a web-page, but there it is, a complete, working example that doesn’t seem to suck too much. Hmm …
- The Autistic Cuckoo has an excellent tutorial on Float Layouts and floating elements in XHTML/CSS in general. Good reading if you care about this sort of thing. If you’re not, you’ve probably already moved on, figuring I might have something interesting tomorrow.
- There was a day when IE5/Mac mattered, but I think I agree that day has mostly passed. But looking at the various CSS wrangling a guy needs to do to keep old browsers happy while still being able to move forward, I think I need to start working on the idea I talked about on css-d almost three years ago (that I haven’t seen anyone implement yet):
I think it might finally be time to do make the effort, especially since nobody else seems to have decided to implement it so I don’t have to. My basic idea is to do something like preprocessor directives in C, so I could have a stylesheet that has something like the following, and when I serve it up to your browser, it’ll automagically fix up things without needing goofy klduges:Is there a way to define one class in terms of another like this?
Not in CSS, no. Sorry! This is one of those ideas that comes up every now and again on www-style, and thus far the Working Group has chosen not to do any work on it. (The other one that comes up a lot is ‘how can I define my own variables so I can make up my own color names?’ Same reaction from the WG.)
#if BROWSER != IEWIN /* code to do drop-caps which happens to crash IE on windows */ #endif /* adjust the dropcaps, since they line up differently between browsers */ #if BROWSER == SAFARI #define DROPCAP_MARGIN_TOP -0.2em #define DROPCAP_MARGIN_LEFT 0.1em #elif BROWSER == MOZILLA #define DROPCAP_MARGIN_TOP 0 #define DROPCAP_MARGIN_LEFT 0.2em #else #define DROPCAP_MARGIN_TOP 0 #define DROPCAP_MARGIN_LEFT 0 #endif p.dropcap:first-letter { float:left; font-size:280%; margin:DROPCAP_MARGIN_TOP DROPCAP_MARGIN_LEFT }I would need to change the # to something else, and a few other tweaks so I don’t make it more difficult to write valid CSS, but other than that, it would be something I would be familiar with, and hopefully not too difficult for other folks to learn. I think it would actually end up being simpler than what I do now. - Meanwhile, here’s a way to Print our HREFs on Links for Print StyleSheet, which was something I could never figure out in IE (Mac or Win), and now I’ve got a snippet to let me do exactly that if I so desire.
- Quirks Mode’s Bug Reports are useful if you’re trying to get your CSS to work across the various browsers out there. At least you’ll know when things are just broken.
- Here’s a way to Make all your tables sortable using JavaScript and CSS. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to work in Safari.
- Finally, just because I could, I turned on text-shadow on the page title up there in the upper-left corner sometime over the weekend. Only works in Safari, and it’s probably more annoying than it should be, but I was playing around, and I kinda like it. And some day the other browsers out there will update, and I’ll get bug reports out of the blue about something I’ve forgotten that I’ve done.