CSSquirrel

This will be the last post involving Twitter for a while, I swear. Unfortunately discussions about the service have dominated the various watering holes of web development for the past few days, so this is the only way I can get the topic to drain out of my head.

This one isn’t a deep commentary on corporate hypocrisy or a glam shot of Andy Clarke in his knickers, sorry.

Ultimately, I like the Twitter service. Although I don’t know if it’s best described as “micro-blogging”, “shopping list”, or “mutual voyeurism”, it’s an interesting service that lets you update details of your life or clever thoughts with a minimum of time investment. The 140 character limit helps provide limitations for people (like myself) who’d rather blather on about an inane topic for paragraphs.

I wonder if we could get politicans to do their talking in this fashion? It’d save us a lot of time.

The main problem with the service, which Twitter has become infamous for, is the tendancy of their whole server to buckle on a daily basis. I’ve come to expect it to be in an afternoon state of shock when I get back to the studio after lunch. It’s so predictable, it’s sad. I can’t help but wonder at this point what desperate straights they must be going through to reverse this trend… and this week’s comic is my theory on that topic.

And now, back to the rest of the world of web development.

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.

With Internet Explorer, there seems to be only two opinions: people love it or hate it.

When it comes to web developers, it seems to be pretty much hate. Granted, I’m on that page, as I’ve spent more than a few hours of a client’s budget trying to get IE7 (let alone IE6) render a site properly. Or even close to properly. I’d say almost half of my posts so far at my Mindfly blog are a testament to this fact.

But there is a point where people get rabid. I explore that theme in this week’s comic.

I understand that crucifying Dean Hachamovitch (the dev team’s general manager and author of this heavily hated/loved IEBlog entry - and no, I can’t pronounce it) might be going a bit too far. For that matter, displaying Jeffrey Zeldman in a Pontius Pilate role might be taking metaphors to excess. But I can’t help but feel that when it comes to browsers, we’re so full of rhetoric that any actual message, be it pro or con, usually gets lost in the rabid barking. Ultimately, they’re not evil zealots, nor saints. They’re just guys making code. It just happens to be code for the most widely used browser on the web… which probably means they need more coffee breaks than most of us to stay calm.

In case it needs to be said, I’m not encouraging anyone being hung up on a cross. That’d be bad form.

The comic was supposed to be up early this morning, but a schedule shift yesterday (and a long phone call to my mother) delayed it. Should be up later tonight.

For the record, “Hachamovitch” looks like a beast to pronounce. Good thing I only have to type it in a comic, not say it.

I thought I’d update everyone since you’re all clearly waiting with baited breath.

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