CSSquirrel

Every time I have to slave away at a CSS solution to a problem that could be easily solved by CSS3’s multiple backgrounds or border-radius, I want to inflict harm upon myself. This is exasperated by the number of rounded corner designs I seem to be working on today. (Are those currently in, out, or tacky?)

At the moment, the only notable (sorry Konqueror) browser to support both is Webkit (Safari). Firefox supports border-radius, but neither IE or Opera support either. Granted, Opera’s percentage of the browser population doesn’t make its feature set a deal breaker, but it’s simply impossible to put these solutions into play when IE’s massive user-base can’t see them.

*sigh*

I’d be less melancholy about it if Internet Explorer 8 was going to bring at least one of these with it. But no, that would be too nice.

It annoys me that out of the various improvements CSS3 is supposed to bring to the table that these two are so far away from implementation. The amount of presentation-only markup (the great enemy that CSS is meant to fight) that would be eliminated is immense.

That’s alright. I don’t mind putting three to five elements on a page where I should only need one.

I’m going to go get some warm milk and cry myself to sleep.

When my analytics started showing IE6 hits, I realized two things.

1. Even people following links from a place like meyerweb.com (thanks for visiting!) may still be using the dread bile beast of Redmond (Internet Explorer 6 for those not following along).

2. They probably want to be able to see/use the site like everyone else.

I needed to bite the bullet and get that particular “browser” (if you can call it that) to render the site functionally, since this page is crawling with PNGs. Unfortunately, after a couple of hours of tinkering around with Dean Edwards’ IE7, things hadn’t improved much. I got the transparency I needed, but a lot of unusual bugs crept into the header (clipped elements, missing buttons, unusable navigation, etc).

So since I’m expected to work on client sites at work and I was out of time, I made a quick fix (using conditional comments and a ie6-specific stylesheet as I describe here) and for the moment the IE6 version of the site has GIFs. Ugly-edged GIFs. I could clean them up, but I think I’m going to take a page out of Andy Clarke’s book and just do a completely different look for visitors with IE6, like he does with Stuff and Nonsense.

I suppose a design that was nothing more than a giant mother nagging you to upgrade your browser wouldn’t quite be appropriate.

It’s been three days so far with the Firefox 3 beta on my home computer, and I’m loving it. I’ve manged to find FF3-capable versions of the add-ons I use the most, including Firebug, FireFTP, and del.icio.us, which was the major hurdle in my experimenting with earlier betas.

It is tremendously faster. I can’t get over how quickly it loads by comparison to version 2. Also, the interface is looking pretty slick. There’s bound to be a number of feature upgrades and functionality that I haven’t even noticed yet, but everything just feels like it’s working more smoothly.

Good work, Mozilla.

It only took me about four and a half months from the moment the idea was conceived, but finally the first CSSquirrel comic has been produced.

Initially my inaugural venture into the world of a web design webcomic was going to provide a gentle mockery of Opera’s failure thus far to produce a developer add-on in the vein of Firebug. Then, of course, they dropped the Dragonfly bomb. Robbed of my thunder, I’ve moved to something both more ridiculous and risque.

Which is to say, Andy Clarke’s underpants.

Well, it’s not precisely about underpants. I’ve recently fallen to the web developer trap that is Twitter, and like some voyeur into the world of the notable I’ve started following the twits (tweets?) of luminaries such as Clarke, Zeldman, and David Shea, among others. Buying into the premise of Twitter as a micro-blogging tool, I’d hoped to see the insights their bright minds would produce about this whole web design thingy.

I’ve definitely seen some insights, but at 140 characters or less, it seems Twitter is more adept at detailing what someone’s had for lunch, absurd overheard remarks, or links to Flickr photos. (Incidentally,  the whole blending of Twitter and Flickr and other such apps ties nicely into Zeldman’s topic of the vanishing personal site that I’ve been meaning to weigh into. File that under ‘Topic for Later’.)

So I’ve felt less like an enthusiastic pupil and more like a peeping Tom. Has this stopped me?

… No. No it hasn’t.

What I didn’t expect to see, and am fascinated by, is the sort of weaving tales that a group of Twitter feeds create when a bunch of users are discussing the same topic or are at the same convention. In particular, An Event Apart New Orleans 2008 was an event that I didn’t have the pleasure to go to, but did have the pleasure to experience indirectly through the various tweets of the designers present. It was even more enhanced by the various Flickr photostreams linked to by the participants, showing smiling pictures of famous designers, hazy pictures of jazz bars, or neon-lit photos of rainy Bourbon Street.

For a guy who was struggling with misbehaving forms on a chilly spring workday, it was a delightful diversion to refresh my follows every now and then via Twitteroo and see what was going on.

What was forming were stories. One that caught me the most was what I’ve dubbed the “Ballad of Andy’s Bag”, a gripping tale that starts here with his touchdown in New Orleans, and then shows the breakdown of a man’s mind as he’s robbed of his luggage for almost two days before being finally reunited here.

I decided this little tale could use some immortalization, and perhaps a disturbing implication of stalking, thus I’ve formed the monster that is this comic. I’m not sure if it was entirely wise for me to launch things off with a sketch of web design’s British folk hero in his knickers, but sometimes these things just write themselves.

Although it’s my intent to continue to provide comic forays into the web design world (probably on a weekly basis), it’s not my plan to show mostly nude designers regularly (I don’t think the world is ready for Jeffrey Zeldman displayed as such).

Please feel free to enjoy

I’ve once again downloaded the Firefox 3 beta to my home system to check it out. The most obvious new thing that gets me excited is the faster speed and the smaller memory usage. My machine isn’t exactly new, smaller equals better.

What made me drop FF3 last time was the lack of add-on support thus far. But I’m running betas of both FireFTP and Firebug, which are practically impossible for me to function without these days.

I did just notice that the spell checker doesn’t seem to be doing its job. At least not in the blog editor. Hmmm. Oh, wait, now it kicked in. Very slowly.

I’ll see if I can tolerate this for a couple days, or if I’ll be regressing back to Firefox 2 until 3 goes out of beta.