CSSquirrel

Straight from the city of Bellingham, WA (city of residence for yours truly) has come Tatango, a web application that broadcasts messages to groups of mobile phones that you configure. I’ll be honest that I don’t know all the details, as I get too much traffic on my own phone already and am thus not seeking more. However, for those of you that aren’t messaging hermits like myself, it looks like a great way to keep in contact with your friends with a lot less effort than painstakingly messaging each.

Check it out.

One huge advantage of media on the web: it’s dynamic.

This is great when you realized you’ve dropped words, added an unwanted ’s’ in a post’s title, and generally borked up a post.

The last entry should be legible now. No promises, of course.

Firefox 3 will have display: inline-block. Hooray! I always felt this was a great way to do things like hyperlink buttons and such without having to worry about all the floating nonsense needed to get a block in certain locations. Thankfully now all the major browsers will have it.

I spent an ungodly amount of time yesterday trying to concoct a method to doing liquid column layouts without an extra wrapper element, and somewhere along the way my brain started hurting a lot. It keeps feeling to me that there’s somehow a way to trim the markup down to just the one element each per column, but it keeps barely escaping me. I was hoping inline-block would prove the key to this, but so far I’ve had no luck.

One of my thousands of permutations of CSS worked only in Opera (which I found odd), and another in IE (which didn’t surprise me, as it’s always ’special’), but as of yet nothing has produced what I desire for Firefox and Safari. Yes, I could get two elements to nest next to each other, yes I can get one to sit on one side of the screen at a fixed width. The problem is that although I can have the remaining column adjust it’s minimum size based on the width of the parent and otherwise be elastic, I couldn’t get it to expand to fill the width of the space on it’s own (rather than, say, because it has a paragraph inside it that pushes it’s borders out to fill the space it’s in).

I’m guessing there’s a reason the negative-margin layout (aka this) is still around.

I haven’t given up hope yet, but I’m beginning to hit a wall here and suspecting that it’s just not going to happen. So I’ll ask, has anyone  had any luck doing a two-column liquid layout design with CSS without resorting to a wrapper element for one of the divs (aka, standard negative margin layout)? To increase the difficulty rating, a footer would need to be beneath the columns (so you can’t just use absolute positioning) and the solution can’t use javascript.

As cool as I’m sure it is to get the thrill of having strangers finding you important/interesting enough to follow on Twitter, I think people need to start paying attention more and blocking stalker-bots and other bloat-causing monstrosities.

Let’s be honest here: Twitter isn’t the fittest boat in the ocean right now, with a tremendous number of crashes and slowdowns this week alone. What isn’t helping are twitter accounts following several thousand strangers at once. I myself just decided to block a new follower who was following over twenty-four thousand people!

Twenty-four thousand. That’s like me trying to keep track of what a third of my city is doing all at once. That’s just messed up. Seriously, even if that account is ran by a human and not a machine, he’s clearly not actually paying his attention to the feed.

So do some Twitter activism. Block stalker-bots (or stalker people) from your Twitter account. That’ll be one less tweet notification that their overworked server will have to deal with.

Let’s get the disclaimers out of the way.

This week’s comic is not about Microsoft. The history of Internet Explorer’s many issues with standards compliance is well documented elsewhere, including various frustrations listed in this blog and in many of my posts over at Mindfly.

This week’s comic is about expecting a certain standard from someone when you are not living up to those standards yourself. In this case, of course, I’m discussing web standards and the big flap they cause in the development/design world due to the various browsers’ speeds at implementing them.

If you’re a designer, and you’ve ever had to make a website trying to find out how to make a website look correct in Internet Explorer, than you understand how important web standards are. It saves us time, which means it saves businesses money, and ultimately all the happy little people surfing the web get to see their favorite website about cute puppies the way that the site’s designer intended it.

So when someone says: “Hey, browser makers, get on board with styles already,” I’m going to be right there holding a sign and trying to pretend that protesting in the middle of winter in Seattle isn’t cold and demoralizing.

Everything in moderation, though. When Opera went to the European Commision to try to force another browser maker to change it’s feature set through legal actions, we start to muddy the line between “good activism” and “bad business behavior”. When Håkon Wium Lie, Opera’s CTO, then at several different points (including in this article/rant at The Register) outlines a very specific, detailed list of what Microsoft needs to do in order to be compliant to Opera’s view of a browser maker’s responsibility, things go from bad business to hypocrisy.

Why hypocrisy? Simple. Mr. Lie’s little list is incredibly specific, as expected of a programmer, and includes several points that must (his word) be adhered to. The one of most interest to me at the moment is the closing one:

“5. Commit to interoperability. It is important to ensure that Microsoft remains committed to supporting web standards, even beyond Acid2 and Acid3. If two or more major web browsers, in official shipping versions, add standards-related functionality that’s generally considered useful to the progress of the web, and described in a publicly available specification, Microsoft must add the same functionality.”

Is this a good idea? Why yes, yes it is! Nothing frustrates me more than finding a good CSS3 property (or CSS 2.1 property) that would solve a design issue I have with a website, only to discover that a couple of the leading browsers don’t have it, thereby making it of limited use. This is something I experience on a weekly basis (if not more frequently), and probably the largest source of frustration with my job.

However, Microsoft isn’t the only browser that needs to do this. After all, what good is it if only IE was keeping up with standards? Yes, it has the dominant share in browser usage, but there’s a good 25%-30% of users who are using other browsers like Firefox, Safari, and Opera. We wouldn’t want them suffering because their browsers aren’t keeping pace.

Generally, of the four browsers, IE is in fact the one that typically is behind the game. But while going through several CSS3 properties last week, I found myself looking at three that Opera was not yet using, but that were in use by at least two other browsers.

What’s that? Is Opera not living up to the standards it’s expecting of others? Why… that would be very hypocritical of them, wouldn’t it? They’d NEVER do that!

Well, as it turns out, yes they would.

The properties in question (and this isn’t a complete list, I’m sure, just one that came up from only an hour or so of looking) are as follows: border-radius, outline-offset, and word-wrap. The first two are implemented in Firefox and Safari. The last one is implemented in Firefox and (gasp!) Internet Explorer. All three are documented in publicly available specifications.

Opera can’t render any of them.

Now, granted, outline-offset will appear in Opera 9.5. As of yet, though, I’ve seen nary a peep about those other two, and I doubt that’ll change before 9.5 goes gold.

Frankly, Opera, you need to stop focusing on legal action against your competition. This kind of behavior is belittling, and ultimately serves as little more than a PR stunt as long as you’re failing to actually keep your own browser living up to the standards you’re yelling at others for failing to uphold.

We get it already. Microsoft sucks. Now stop poking the big dog with a stick and go grab a larger share of the market by showing everyone how cool Opera really is.