Nothing’s ever finished | 01.09.03
Apologies for the lack of updates recently, but I’ve have other things to think about. However, I have now updated (read: ‘finished’) the addtional stylesheet and added a new stylesheet selector link (in the footer; next to the © information) to allow the interested reader to view the site without either of my stylesheets applied (this may be preferable for any number of reasons).
And in case you still don't really get this whole stylesheet business, here are some handy thumbnail images of a single page on this site displayed in three different ways:
What do these mean, exactly? Well, they show the three different ways that the site can look, provided you’ve got JavaScript and cookies enabled that is. The first one is the ‘Basic’ theme, the second the ‘Motto’ theme, and the third is the page without either of the stylesheets applied (in which case you just see the formating that your browser applies by default). Geddit?
I should mention though that I recently created a whole new incarnation of an Artist’s Portfolio (previously to be seen at www.priseman.com). Go visit – it’s all slimmed down, semantically structured, take-no-prisoners XHTML, with oodles of CSS doing the hard work formating it. I have to say I was quite pleased with the design once I’d finished it. And in other news there are a couple of new ambigrams: Rob & Helen and Andrea. Make of all this what you will.
The technicalities of style | 11.07.03
It’s taken me a while to get it organised, but I’ve now created a new default style sheet for the site – and you’re probably looking at it! Don’t complain if it’s a little rough round the edges; it’ll improve, and evolve a little, with time.
You can (in theory, and in most browsers) switch between the two styles (currently called ‘original’ and ‘Motto’) using the links in the footer, which is, just to make the point, either at the top or the bottom of the page depending on which style is currently active. The mechanism (courtesy of A List Apart) requires both JavaScript and cookies to be enabled, so if you’ve turned them off, the effect won’t work.
Of course, this is all just more CSS showmanship – which may or may not entertain the infrequent visitors to my site! – but it’s also another rung on my own ladder of understanding, and I’m pleased to finally get it working. If the point of this escapes you, go visit the excellent CSS Zen Garden: the page does a good job of explaining more about the possibilities.
The Devil in the details | 12.06.03
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been making some more refinements to the site’s XHTML and CSS. The biggest job was to (once again!) change how I coded the site’s navigation: previously the numerous link icons were included as HTML images placed within the links, like this:
<li> <a href="links"><img src="icn/links.gif">Links</a> </li>
However, I have borrowed from Doug Bowman’s now widely used image replacement technique to give myself more flexibility (his article explains the use of the technique to do clever things with HTML headings). Now all the navigation links now have exactly the same form:
<li> <a href="links" id="links" title="Links"><span>Links</span></a> </li>
The wonders of CSS allow me to present the links in whatever way I like: with an icon, or not; with text, or not. Go to the photography section (for instance this picture of New York) to see three of the different possibilities on one page.
Remember, the form of the HTML code for all the links is exactly the same... well, no, that’s not entirely true: the highlighted links do use different tags to create different contexts, but the same principle is used throughout. (If you’re not au fait with CSS, however, then trying to fathom what all this means is not a terribly good place to start your education.)
What’s good about this techique is that it works in all browers; indeed, it is more effective in Netscape 4 than the previous version, since that browser simply presents the navigation links as simple text-only bullet lists, and doesn’t load any images at all. An unexpected effect is that Safari actually preloads the icon images for all the site’s links when the homepage is first visited. All the images are referenced in a single CSS file and it dutifully fetches all of them, not just the ones it needs to render the current page.
Most other modern browsers do not do this. It seems likely that this behaviour is either defined in (or explicitly ruled out by) the CSS specification, but which is it? Does this ‘feature’ of Safari’s CSS implementation bolster its web standards support? Or diminish it?
You are the weakest link! | 22.05.03
Every self-respecting website needs one: a comprehensive collection of links. Not for the faint-hearted mind you, since there are approximately 170 of them. In truth this is really a by-product of some much needed house-keeping.
My Internet Explorer favourites had got a little out of control, the result of years of browsing with an ill-considered, almost blazé, attitude to URL collecting. What they needed was a good, old-fashioned bout of spring-cleaning. So I checked all the links, threw out the broken (or just plain uninteresting) ones, and renamed and reorganized them as I saw fit.
It might take me a while to annotate them all however, so forgive the stark nature of some of the lists for now.
Zen and the Art | 19.05.03
Meliorism: the belief that the world may be made better by human effort.
Dave Shea over at mezzoblue has garnered much online praise recently for his latest project: the CSS Zen Garden. Being a recent convert to the ways of CSS myself I felt compelled to try my hand at developing a design for the garden.
Dave has been kind enough to add my design to the list of official entries, and was generous enough to advise and prompt me to develop my original submission into the version that appears on the site – a design that I have, perhaps rather too knowingly, entitled meliorism.
Peterborough | 08.05.03
An excellent base for nearby places.
Which is all the Holiday Inn slogan-writers could find to say about Peterborough; seen in the lobby of the Holiday Inn Express, Manchester.
This is surely one of the most banal things that any advertising executive has ever managed to say about anywhere.
And the advertisement in question hardly strengthened it’s case with the graphic that accompanied this arresting statement: one of the so-called ‘nearby’ places was ‘Stanstead’ Airport which is (a) 72 miles from Peterborough and (b) not spelt like that.
In other news: the site has received a minor technical upgrade over the past week or so, although you wouldn’t know to look at it. I’ve streamlined the HTML code and stylesheets a little, and added support for that degenerate underclass of internet users still browsing with the erstwhile Netscape 4. The precise details of this process is only of interest to people who already know how to do it, so I shan’t attempt an explanation. (There’s also a couple more ambigrams: Rosanna and James.)
And speaking of website design, I noticed yesterday an interesting thread about a guy who ripped off Antipixel’s excellent site design, only to rip off the equally elegant SimpleBits as soon as his first misdemeanour was exposed. Coming from a ‘traditional’ publishing background, I am fully aware of the vagaries inherent in the phrase ‘copyright infringment’. But whatever the vagaries, as soon as you appropriate another person’s intellectual property and claim it as your own you are infringing their copyright.
However, what’s interesting in this case is the range of opinions, from indignation to indifference, voiced in the discussion. And if you take out the strictly legal copyright stuff, what’s left? If, let’s say, someone was to take my site design, change the pictures, add a few bon mots of their own, and then slap their name after the ‘©’ symbol at the bottom of the page, what would I think about that?
A cynic, so Oscar Wilde told us, is a man who knows ‘the price of everything and the value of nothing.’ Taking someone else’s site design may be a cheap way to get one for yourself, but is, in all important respects, a worthless exercise.
Here endeth the lesson.
Easter Hymn | 17.04.03
If, in that Syrian garden, ages slain,
You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,
Not even in dreams behold how dark and bright
Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night
The hate you died to quench and could but fan,
Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by,
At the right hand of majesty on high
You sit, and sitting so remember yet
Yours tears, your agony and bloody sweat,
Your cross and passion and the life you gave,
Bow hither out of heaven, and see and save.A.E. Housman
And there’s more where that came from: specifically at A Hundred Visions, a new location for something that’s been sitting, half-built, on my hard drive since last year. Just don’t mention the word ‘copyright’, nor point out that there are, as yet, only thirty of said ’visions’.
Another site new this month is an online CV for Jess Plumridge, an actor and singer – read about her, see her picture, and download the MP3 files and hear her sing! In other news, the Ambigrams gallery has grown (a little) with the addition of Maureen and Ali.
And finally, from The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld – a webpage that has already garnered much press attention (well, it was mentioned in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago at least) – a little something entitled, simply, ‘A Confession’:
Once in a while,
I’m standing here, doing something.
And I think,
‘What in the world am I doing here?’
It’s a big surprise.from an interview with the New York Times, May 16, 2001
On (nearly) Mothers’ Day | 26.03.03
Why is it that mothers and fathers have ‘days’
While the sons and the daughters do not?
It seems so unfair (in a number of ways)
For those children displeased with their lot.
But think! For it speaks of – indeed it betrays! –
A near-masterful parenting plot:
To show all those malcontent children it pays
To have children themselves... (dot dot dot)
I wrote that for my own dear mother a couple of years ago; I should get a contract with Hallmark. Or something.
In other news, the only recent additions to the site have been five more ambigrams which I hope all readers will take time to enjoy – the best one is perhaps Tina & Nick.
I should point out to people that my sister’s puzzle has now reached the shops! (at least in the US) – this is very exciting news, not least because the company (Binary Arts), and River Crossing™ in particular, got a mention in the Washington Post a few weeks back. It was quite an extensive article, although you won’t now be able to access it on the Washington Post website unless you pay (it’s disappeared into their subscription-accessed archives).
Anyway, watch out for the Perilous Plank Puzzle in all good toy retailers... soon.
Man, running, with lettuces | 12.02.03 | 5:43 pm
Not something you see everyday, to be sure, but this is exactly what the sleepy hamlet of Sawbridgeworth had to offer its residents this morning.
In other news: I have now added a whole new section – a small gallery of my own ambigrams.
Sense and sensibility | 06.02.03 | 9:58 pm
If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.
Guiseppe di Lampedusa
There’s a new diversion to play with: Gibber – check it out! I should say that the point I made in the previous log about compund CSS classes is clearly nothing new; today I tripped over a rather better explanation by J. David Eisenberg, who also presents some other handy CSS and HTML tips on his site.
Compound interest | 03.02.03 | 4:17 pm
While in a branch of Borders on London’s Charing Cross Road over the weekend, tripped over a copy of Eric Meyer’s book on CSS (almost literally: it was in a pile on the floor). The book has a companion website that looks like it presents much useful information (I’ve not yet had a chance to properly check it out), and one thing I learned simply by leafing through the book in the shop was that compound class attributes such as the following are perfectly valid:
<div class="aside important"> ... </div>
You can then use a whole set of different but related compound div classes (‘aside important’, ‘aside witty’, ‘aside banal’, etc.), and define any CSS properties shared by all of these compound classes using a single CSS rule, for instance:
.aside { /* properties shared by all kinds of aside */
color: red;
font-family: verdana;
}
Property definitions specific to each of the compound classes can then be handled by a series of separate rules:
.important{}
.witty{}
.banal{}
Eric used this techique in a chapter of his book dealing with using CSS to present long documents (specifically chapters from his book) which had a reasonably complex structure. Grouping elements in this way will simplify the formatting of related elements, as well as make reading and editing the code at a later date easier and more intuitive.
You do, as they say, learn something new everyday.
A thousand words | 31.01.03 | 5:27 pm
Three galleries of my pictures have now made it into the Photography page. In time I may add some extra commentary to accompany some of the individual images, but for now I trust that the photos can speak for themselves.
Weatherview: a couple of inches of snow and the country, predictably, has ground to an undignified and shuddering halt. And with the promise of more tonight, it seems likely that the country will, if anything, go into reverse.
Spit, polish and elbow-grease | 31.01.03 | 12:35 am
The only problem with Microsoft is that they just have no taste.
Steve Jobs
Have been working hard today to further refine the XHTML and CSS of the site (discovering more of the vagaries of IE 5.2 Mac along the way), and have even introduced something that looks like actual content on the Web design page. Whatever next?
Well, plenty of photos dredged from the archives for starters, and something entirely new: examples of my own efforts at the sort of typographic legerdermain practised by Scott Kim and John Langdon. I found Scott’s site some time ago and was immediately intrigued, and last year I was given a copy of his book for Christmas, which has inspired me to turn my hand to creating more so-called ’inversions’ of my own. Watch this space!
In other news: it snowed today. Suddenly double-glazing and central-heating seem like very good ideas.
Brave New World | 30.01.03 | 2:37 am
New Year’s Resolution No. 1: Rebuild website with a funky new layout and design. It’s still January, and I don’t think getting the all-new paragraphic designed, built and on the server within the first month of 2003 is such bad going. I mean, strictly you’ve got all year to get Resolutions resolved, and I had to up the ante on my XHTML and CSS knowledge while I was at it.
Everything you see here is my own work, although websites such as Jeffrey Zeldman, Stopdesign, A List Apart and What Do I Know? have provided information, inspiration and some excellent real-world examples of tidy coding to help me understand the exact size and shape of the hoops through which I had to jump in order to make the page you are now looking at.
And so far, so good. The new site works, uses validated XHTML (Strict) and CSS and renders consistently on all browsers that matter (including Safari for any fellow Mac OS X users out there) although I am currently testing only on IE6, Mozilla 1.2 (and hence Netscape 6+) and Opera 7 on my PC, and Chimera 0.6, IE 5.2 and Safari on my Mac OS X iBook.
If you have no idea what XHTML or CSS actually is I doubt I can explain it terribly cogently in just a few sentences, but the concept is to separate webpage content (the XHTML bit) from its presentation (the CSS bit – ‘cascading stylesheets’). To get the idea, click the toggle CSS link (also at the bottom of this page; doesn’t work on all browsers). This turns off (and on again) the stylesheet attached to this document. What you’ll see is the underlying HTML code (which itself contains no presentation data) rendered using the default styles of your brower (black text, blue/purple links, white background, etc.) without any of the typographic and visual niceties provided by the stylesheet.
(And if you’re thinking that the present stylesheet is looking a little drab and monochrome I would agree; it will eventually be joined by some more lively page ‘themes’, plus (most likely) some geeky wizardry nabbed from one of the websites already mentioned to allow the interested reader to switch between the different ‘look and feel’s.)
McFlustered | 29.01.03 | 4:32 pm
Please use the other side of the door.
Instruction posted on the inside of a door at McDonald’s, Liverpool Street Station.
I subsequently suffered some confusion when, in attempt to leave the premises by following these instructions, I inadvertently bumped into myself going out coming back in again.