MyDimension

Via Simian Design, apcmag.com: Opinion with David Emberton, a most ridiculous article that makes me wonder just where David got his material. Here we have someone who has obviously been burned in some fashion by the emergence of web standards and his only reaction is to take the ignorance stance and wave it all off as a fad. Given my love for CSS, David’s rant on them really got my goat:

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are a classic example of the madness. Reared in a cubicle somewhere, they’re pitched as the pinnacle of document styling. CSS are public, free and future-proof. Sounds great until you realise that: a) you need a degree to understand them; b) Microsoft doesn’t care about them; and c) they suck. What’s more, CSS have been promoted as “the future” since the mid-90s, and by now the only thing keeping them alive is a steady stream of guilt and the occasional Movable Type installation.

Anyone who says that CSS is hard to learn has obviously never taken the time to learn this simple rule-set language. How much easier can you get than selecting an element and applying clearly worded rules to that element? Not easy enough if David feels the need for a college degree, a subscription to geek magazine, five computers in your room, no social life or all of the above.

Via Stopdesign, Drawing with CSS is a stunning example and exploration into what one can accomplish with CSS. Specifically the creation of bar graphs. Not only does it work, but it just looks cool.

I recently downloaded the new Winamp 5 RC10 and am absolutely loving it. I am however a little irked that the developers have chosen to use invalid XML in the Modern Skin layout files. From what I can tell there is no use root elements anywhere nor is the XML preamble there. Instead it looks as if Winamp uses line by line parsing to utilize these files, a true XML parser would simply fail out. As far as I’m concerned this is not a good way to show skin developers how to use XML. Hopefully Nullsoft will change their ways and comply the XML standard.

Update [10/09/2003]: It looks like I spoke a little to soon as I sometimes do. I searched a little more and found that what Winamp is really doing is using one initial file to “include” all the sub-files via an include tag. However my point still has legs to stand on here. It should be using entities (i.e. Trillian style).

Been away for a while here. My drive to write comes and goes. This was one of those times. Here is a brief review of what has happened since my last post.

In my absence there has been a renewal of the mini icons article I did over on Brainstorms and Raves.

I discovered that Winamp3 is essentially at a stop in its development. Nullsoft is now focusing on Winamp2 and a combination of the two to become a Winamp5 (2 + 3 = 5) of sorts, taking the best of both and putting them together. In reaction to this I stopped using Winamp3 and rolled back to Winamp2. I forgot how much better 2 is than 3. Not to mention there is just more out there for 2 then there is for 3.

Got my copy of Designing With Web Standards. This book is fantastic. I’ll do a full write up shortly. Go visit the mini-site (see the DWWS button).

I’ve started moderating on a new web development forum, Advanced Web Aid. They are very young and looking for members. I know one of the head admins, some really great people over there. Go check them out. Join even!

And perhaps the best news of all, a new job fell in my lap. Seriously. No resume (yet, at least), no searching (they searched me out) and best of all, all the employees are my friends. Unfortunately I must keep the details down for a while to protect the new company but as soon as I can, I promise I will fill in some details.

I believe that’s it. I’ll post as things come to mind.

Oh, I turn 21 in 16 days. Yeah for me!

Ran across CSS Play while looking through by access logs. Presented is some examples of things that can CSS can do, or rather, should be able to do provided it is viewed in a compliant browser.

Speaking of “compliant browsers”, this raises another issue that has cropped up regarding Microsoft’s IE release schedule. If you haven’t read already, Microsoft plans to halt production on future standalone browser versions. From now on, IE browser upgrades will only be available to those who upgrade to the next operating system that Microsoft puts out. I personally think this a terrible move, carrying with it very negative effects on the web development community. It’s bad enough that browsers currently don’t agree on standards, now we ave IE6/Win as our lowset common denominator.

Via webgraphics, the CSS Zen Garden. This site is absolutely beautiful. Some very clean and inspiring designs. And all done in CSS none the less. Proving once again that CSS can provide form and function.

Ick, just had a look at my site through IE5.2/Mac. The spacing is all wrong in the header area. I’m gonna look into it further, but if you feel you have the answer then feel free to let me know.

I have returned from Florida, pulled in at 12:30a this morning. Its’ good to be home.

As you can see, I have redesigned my site. It was largely done in CSS with a few minor changes to the markup but they were only so I could select things a little better. For those running Mozilla (and its derivitives), Opera and other browsers with native style sheet selection, the old design is still available (dosen’t stick though). I plan to write some JavaScript to expand this functionality to other browsers, but that will have to wait.

Please let me know what you think and definitely alert me to any bugs in the design.

Via Zeldman, the winners of the WThRemix contest were announced today. The winner, Radu Darvas, gave a very impressive entry. Just looking at it makes me want to redesign even more.

Inspired by Tamara, I went searching for the origins of her micro icons to indicate external links. My search turned up micro icons at webgraphics. Along with the external links icon, I also grabbed the email icon.

My implementation is a bit different then Tamara’s though. I used a set of CSS3 selectors to select links that are external.

a[href^="mailto:"] {
background: transparent url('/images/aemail.gif') 100% 50% no-repeat;
padding-right: 10px;
}
div.content a[href^="http:"] {
background: transparent url('/images/aoutside.gif') 100% 50% no-repeat;
padding-right: 10px;
}
div.content a[href^="http://my-dimension.com"],
div.content a[href^="http://www.my-dimension.com"] {
background: inherit;
padding-right: 0px;
}

That last selector disables the icon on links to this site but that use a ful URL instead of a relative one. This won’t work in most browsers (not sure which though) but then again this is my persoanl playground. Not to mention it is a feature which is not required to interact with this site.

Update[04/18/2003]: It seems a lot of feedback is being generated by this attribute selector method. Something I need to clarify though, I did not create this method. I found it on as days pass by. I apolgize for not crediting this earlier.