CSSquirrel

Everyone else has linked to it, so the following isn’t precisely a new scoop, but here is a really fascinating article by Cameron Adams about the handwriting of typographers. I found the article timely because I’ve been corralling up information about what I see as the enhancement of typography in web pages with the current and upcoming CSS @font-face support for some sort of blog entry thing, which should be bursting forth somewhere in the near future. (I make no promises about it being insightful, mind you.)

I wasn’t shocked to discover that a lot of the typographers featured have horrible handwriting. After all, house designers allegedly have bad livingrooms, and web designers frequently have blogs that aren’t quite put together yet. There’s something about being involved with something professionally that causes a person to give up on any application of the career in their personal life. Mind you, my own handwriting is chicken scratch, so I’m not much of one to talk.

However, after some tragic scuffles with legibility the article comes to Nikola Djurek’s sample, which looks like something that was used to draft the Constitution. Handwriting of that quality makes me feel like my own attempt at imparting words to paper is a stillborn abomination that was tossed into a dumpster somewhere around the third grade.

Actually, I’m pretty sure my handwriting was better in the third grade than it is now. I’d hit the high point of mastering cursive, and had yet to begin the downward slide in legibility that would coincide with my obsession with keyboards and the flickering glow of monitors.

I need to add an “elsewhere in the web” sidebar or section to this site, I think, for stuff like this. Hardly a novel concept, I’m sure. I’m sure there’s a WordPress plugin (or twelve) for that, considering the many blogs I’ve seen equipped with such. Does anyone have any suggestions? I guess I could stop being lazy and look for myself, actually.

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.

Perhaps it was unwise for me to create the newest comic, as I hope to attend An Event Apart eventually, and poking fun at the event’s creators/hosts/organizers (Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman) isn’t exactly the best way to go about doing that. However, I will admit, the first time I saw Zeldman in person, at Web Directions North ‘08, I couldn’t help but think “Gee, give him an axe and some chain mail and he’d fit right in in Khazad-dûm.” Mind you, I’m referencing the place when it was home to the dwarves, not its later days as Moria, home to a bunch of jerk orcs.

I’m not sure if that distinction is helping my case.

I did not, in fact, attend AEA: Boston. I greatly wish I had, but such was not meant to be.

Thanks to the very nature of the conference’s attendees (aka web people), though, I do get the opportunity to experience a great deal of information about what it was like to attend! There are flickr feeds, detailed blog posts about attendees‘ impressions of the event, summaries of each session’s relevant info (quite a few good ones by Luke Wroblewski), and slides being shared by the presenters. This is in addition to the various conglomeration of tweets that occurred during the conference itself, forming a real-time record of what was happening, while it was happening.

I’m still getting around to sitting down and trying to digest this cornucopia of second-hand information. With the speed at which technology changes, I can’t help but feel that there’s no such thing as taking a month off learning more about the industry I’m in. It’s a never-ending process. That’s why I think conferences like AEA are so important, as it provides a continually-refreshing wellspring of new, relevant views and information about what we do.

One piece of data that I have had the chance to digest, however, is the frequently repeated opinion that Jared Spool is an amazing speaker. I can agree, as I had the pleasure of listening to him at WDN08. I don’t know how someone can have that much energy when talking about user interfaces, but I’m glad he does, because it keeps the rest of us interested about the topic, which is admittedly pretty important.

I’ve spent the past two weeks being either sick with the flu (in the middle of summer, which makes it twice as fun!) or recovering from said flu thanks to my sickly asthmatic lungs. Woo hoo!

As I survived, expect rants and comics to occur in the near future, in particular related to AEA: Boston. Which I did not attend, but wish I had. What I find really cool about these sort of conferences is how much data from them gets out to the web thanks to the type of participants present. It allows for vicarious learning, which is a neat sort of thing.

Am I the only person annoyed by how the CSS opacity property is automatically inherited by an element’s children, and it can’t be overridden in the child elements by any means? This is one of the most obnoxious limitations to a CSS property that I’ve ever encountered.

Seriously, why prevent that? I’d initially hazard a guess that it was due to technical limitations, but CSS3’s rgba colors don’t suffer from the same limitation. Too bad rgba colors aren’t universally supported yet.

Then again, neither is opacity.

-sigh-

I wonder if IE8 will support either, although frankly, if they’re going to step up to the big kid’s table, I’d rather see them implement rgba colors first.