At work on Friday I gave a presentation to a few people on the power and benefits of using Cascading Style Sheets. It went really well. There were a couple of guys from our product development team and they were very impressed by what I can do.
It looks like I may be asked (I’ll see that I am) to have a similar chat with a couple of managers. If all goes well, I’m going to try to create a little niche for myself here – our products could certainly use my help.
For those gamers out there, you are aware of “leveling up” a character — that moment when the suddenly gain enough experience to be at the next higher level of development. Always seemed like a rather silly and sudden mechanic to me.
But, the thing is, it actually seems to reflect life. Or at least my t’ai chi. I go about practicing t’ai chi and after a while I begin to get frustrated. I won’t seem to be showing any improvement, in fact I often feel quite the opposite.
Then in one instant, I will leap ahead and feel that I have actually reached a new level of the craft. My form feels and looks better. My push hands is better. I seem to actually level up like some silly role playing character. I have gotten this feeling about once per year and I’m not alone. Some of my classmates have expressed the same feeling — lack of progress, then one big jump ahead.
So, I reckon I’m about 4th level now…. (I guess that’d be a 4th level monk.)
Oh, I just realized that I have been practicing the sword form for just over a year now. Wow, that went by fast. One year and I still haven’t learned the entire routine. Believe it or not, that makes me happy. I am in no hurry.
I’m referring to grackles and sparrows of course.
A couple of years ago, we put up a thistle feeder to attract finches. We were partly successful in that a couple of House Finches came by, as well as a couple of American Goldfinches. The Goldfinches didn’t stick around much and the feeder has mostly been occupied by the various species of sparrow.
Over the weekend we picked up a second feeder — this one for the classic “generic bird seed mix.” I filled it with a pound or so of seed and within minutes the feeder was covered by sparrows, finches (both House and Goldfinch) and the Common Grackles. Mourning Doves were also in attendance playing their usual ground cleaning role.
Now the idea was for this feeder to attract the Cardinals and Blue Jays that are in the neighborhood. The Jay did, in fact, make a brief appearance, but the sparrows, finches and grackles mobbed the feeder.
Within a few short hours it was empty.
To give you an idea of how voracious these birds were, during the Really Big Storm that blew through in the evening, I looked out back and a couple of sparrows and crackles were still on the feeder. This wasn’t just a rain shower, we are talking driving rain, flooding yard, 40 mph winds, thunder, lightening and the tornado siren.
And still they ate seed.
Sarah and I have decided that we will only fill the feeder twice per week, max. These birds are going break the bank otherwise.
Addendum: I originally identified the male and female House Finch. I now believe that the what I thought was the female may have actually been a Pine Siskin.
Lach and James had some good comments regarding my classing of <em> post from the other day. Lach pointed out
As for <em class=”strong”>, that’s a bad use of a class there. That’s implying presentation in your class. Let’s say at some point in the future, you change your site design, and your strongly emphasized elements need changing. In your stylistics you’d then have the weird situation of setting em.bold to have a normal font-weight.
James helped clarify this for me with his simple “basing class and id on structure, not style.”
I think I still have a valid idea, I just presented it sloppily — I used class="strong" and class="italic" for convenience. What I should have written was something along the lines of class="e1" and class="e2". This would eliminate the odd confusion that Lach pointed out, and sort of covers James point. These classes simply point out that there are two different types of emphasis.
But I’m not really convinced by my own argument. That still seems to be using a class for style, it’s just hidden behind some semi-meaningless syntax.
So, let’s look at the elements again — <em> and <strong>. They both are used to add some sort of emphasis to text. Style them how you will, browsers will by default typically style them with italics and bold respectively.
But again, the elements do the same thing: add emphasis. So, what if there was simply an <emphasis> element that had different allowable states? Something like:
<emphasis type="important"> = this is important
<emphasis type="strong"> = speak loudly now
<emphasis type="lang"> = je ne sais paswhere type=”…” could be treated like a pseudo element. The corresponding style sheet would then define the types:emphasis:lang {font-style: italic;}
Perhaps foreign language don’t belong as a type. Perhaps book titles do. Perhaps there should be some defined allowable list of types. Or not. I’ll leave those picky details for another time (and more qualified people). The heart of the matter is, do we need two elements that provide emphasis or is there a better way?
In the meantime, I will go about using <em> and <strong> for italic and bold, and I will deal with book titles, foreign language, etc. as best I can when I come across them.
So I’m slowly being addicted to a new browser:
I’ve been using Mozilla for quite a while now and really love it. But I decided to give Firefox (Moz’s cousin) a try a month or so ago and it is slowly becoming my default here at work. The main thing it has going for it is speed. I find Mozilla/Firefox/Netscape X.x to all load pages faster than Internet Explorer X.x, but Mozilla (and Netscape) tend to take quiet a long time to load the actual application. Not so Firefox. It has proven to be a small and snappy little browser with (mostly) the same functionality I love in Mozilla.
If you haven’t tried one of these, you owe it to yourself. Just use the tab feature for a day and you will never go back.
During the past week there have been a number of posts about semantic markup (see: Andy Budd), specifically about the use of <i> and <b> (see: sidesh0w.com, Matthew Thomas, Luminosity, bestkungfu and cookiecrook).
Since I have recently been changing the way I code by paying more attention to semantics and using the best, cleanest CSS that I can, this has gotten me to thinking.
To sum up the various arguments, the bold and italic attributes shouldn’t be used (according to the Semantic Coders Guild) because they are purely presentational (ie: visual) and provide no meaning. Instead, they say that we should use the “semantically correct” <em> (emphasis, typically italics) and <strong> (strong, typically bold) elements. These elements are useful for things like screen readers for the visually impaired. They literally tell the reader to add emphasis when reading, just like you do when talking.
So how do we convey that via the visual media of the web? CSS allows us to style <em> and <strong> anyway we want to add visual emphasis.
So far so good.
But I began thinking. Is <strong> really a necessary element? It seems redundant and/or meaningless to me. The point of marking something out in bold/strong type is to add emphasis. So why not just use <em>? It would be just as easy, and I would argue just as semantically correct, to use something like <em class=”italic”> and <em class=”bold”> to change the visual nature of the element while still retaining the semantic emphasis. [Note: the classes mention would, of course, be properly styled in the style sheet with font-style: italic and font-weight: bold. Call the classes whatever you'd like.]
My thoughts snowballed from there to the ever-present <span> element. Does it ever serve any semantic purpose? I think the only time I use it is when I need a hook in order to visually style a section of text. (See the note in the previous paragraph.) So, if the Semantic Coders Guild is calling for the end of all non-semantic markup, what do we do with spans? I’m sure that somewhere, someone has managed to use a span in a semantic way, but I personally can’t think of any at the moment.
[For those of you who may be looking at the code for this site, don't bother telling me how bad it is. I already know that the code has problems. I haven't bothered to clean it up because I am working on a full redesign - or more correctly, an actual design. While I have been working with HTML for a few years, it is only recently that I have begun to understand and care about the code. At work I am constantly improving my coding habits, moving away form HTML tag soup to proper coding. It is so much easier to maintain. This will be reflected in my new site, whenever it gets done.]
[Oh, I made up the Semantic Coders Guild. If anyone was wondering.]
I began the task of installing, partitioning and loading the new hard drive.
Part of the reason I decided on the Samsung was its reputed quietness. They aren’t kidding. So far, in all of the partitioning, formatting and installing I’ve heard about two clicks from it and that is it. The case fans are about 3 times noisier than the hard drive.
Hmm, maybe I’ll look into quieter fans and get a silent-running system.
I scored a bit of a victory today at work: I’ll be rebuilding our product site template using cleaner, more modern code and CSS.
I’m planning on using a hybrid layout with a simple table structure to position everything, but all of the styles will be handled via a linked stylesheet.
This is a nice little victory for me as it is the first push to modern mark-up in our company. Plus, I’m not the lead HTML developer. I’m not sure how he’s going to take it, but he does acknowledge that I know CSS a lot better than him. He is learning….
7x is getting another upgrade in the next couple of days: a new hard drive. We’ve managed to fill of the 25 GB currently in the machine, so it was time for something new.
Since the new motherboard has Serial ATA capabilities, I’ve ordered a 120 GB Samsung SpinPoint P Series SP1213C (gory details: 7,200 RPM, 8 MB cache). It should provide plenty of space for the foreseeable future. I picked the Samsung based on reviews I’ve come across. It isn’t the fasted drive on the planet, but it has gotten nothing but 5 out of 5 for reliability. It is also suppose to be one of the quietest and coolest drives out there.
Finally, if you care about the geeky details: I’ve laid out an initial partitioning schema consisting of partitions for main programs, games, audio/visual storage and documents. The other half of the drive will be set in a partition and serve as a back up storage/image spot.
