One last political post and then it’s on to my usual diatribes about browser problems, CSS, JavaScript, and the contents of my pockets (right now: chapstick, receipt, four coupons for local eateries, and a small quantity of lint). I just want to get something off my chest.

Disclosure: The candidate I voted for won. This is the first time that’s happened for me. The following doesn’t involve the candidates, however. Also, this is a bit of a ramble.

America (and to a lesser extent, the rest of the world), I’m really sick and tired of extremist/fundamentalist diatribes fueling all our conversations. At some point, it became impossible to simply disagree with someone civilly on any topic. Instead, whether it was about tonight’s pot roast or the national election, if someone disagreed with you they were a damned, dirty, ape. Possibly a communist dirty ape or a nazi dirty ape, depending on what angle you were spinning. It’s become all too common for everyone from newscasters to tweeters (tweet people, what the heck do we call those) to literally go unhinged and accuse anyone they disagree with of being un-American, nonhuman, or worse.

What’s wrong with this picture?

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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.

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.

I’m not going to write a massive post on the topic, as much more eloquent people than I already have. However, I’ll explain the essence of it. Twitter user Arial Waldman described recently in her blog the harassment she’s received via that service. Harassment that violates Twitter’s Terms of Service, mind you. Yet when she continued to file reports to the company about her harassment, eventually finally talking to the CEO himself, Twitter did the opposite of what one would expect. They refused to ban the user, and instead are merely changing their TOS.

Twitter is a fun, useful service. But if it allows itself to become a place where harassment (pretty lewd stuff, at that) is allowed, then I can’t imagine it’ll stay in use forever. Wake up, guys, you need to protect your users.

[Edit: Two new things I've learned since this entry went up. First, Arial is part of the Pownce team. While I won't say outright that working for the competition could have been a factor, it does bring the validity of the situation into question. Secondly, as Twitter team members stated, both sides of the story hadn't been told and they offer their viewpoint of the situation here. I don't know what to make of the situation, but it's clear that if harassment is happening that Twitter needs to follow up on their threats and ban such people.]

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.