Somehow I doubt it (I'm 24). What I increasingly resent in HTML development is being forced to relearn stuff I've known forever and watching new and progressively uglier bits of CSS move into my lexicon.
Today I adopted the phrase "line-height:0px; font-size:0px;". The authors of the CSS2 specification in their infinite wisdom decided to flesh out the specifics of laying out inline elements within block elements with respect to baselines and such. What they decided has a big vague patch where images are concerned. Traditionally if I put a single pixel image into a table cell the dimensions of that table cell should also be 1x1. Not any more. The new standard implies that the image should be placed on the font baseline rather than at the bottom of the block and that the minimum height of the cell is that of the line-height value (almost always inherited from the page fonts you're using). This is retarded. Worse still, it's vague enough to allow the Microsoft implementers (Tantek Çelik in particular) to argue that the desired behaviour is actually that exhibited by older browsers and for the Moz team (championed by Hixie) and evidently the Safari team to go the other way. Read this discussion to see what I mean.
I haven't gone to the depths of employing the box model hack. That is a nasty piece of work that should not be used IMHO.
The whole point of CSS is to make to easier to develop pages and yet with things like the line-height and box model hacks the pages just become more and more browser specific again. With line-height it's not too bad because older browsers don't even consult that value on cells without text, which are the only ones it should be employed on.
I don't think the layouts I'm trying to build with HTML are particularly revolutionary, in fact, the opposite is true. The layouts I build are exactly the same as thousands of others that can be seen all over the web. Most of these layouts still rely on the state of play at HTML 4, with the odd bit of cunning CSS creeping in on sites like Wired. The thing is it seems to actually be getting harder to build a nice layout with the content divided up by designerly borders and stuff. OK, I can understand why they would want to make it harder to use tables for layout, but why haven't they provided the tools to build the sites everybody wants to build?
Examples: a scaling block of text with a red 2px border with 10px cut corners; a multi-column layout; a login box that is centred in the middle of the browser. All of these things are just about possible in CSS but they are pain and involve things like the box model hack. Why? These are three extremely common tasks. For evidence of this see Amazon, Yahoo or Lycos, all of which are members of the top 10 most popular sites on the internet.
A while a go I got annoyed enough about this to email Bert Bos about the column specification that might be in the pipeline for CSS3. I don't think I actually got a reply, but from all the discussion stuff I read around the subject it seemed to me that their reasoning for hamstringing CSS was that it is a system for marking up documents. Like HTML. Which is just crap, "we're going to tell you not to do what you're doing, but we're not going to give you any alternative, plus, how dare you claim that it is our responsibility to do so" or something similar.
Well, that's BS, the W3C is about finding solutions to the problems of real people both using and creating the web. If it doesn't do that it is irrelevant. 90% of the time it does a very good job (overlooking for a moment that whole SOAP malarky) including in the area of developing the CSS specifications. I just wish it would think a bit more practically and less conceptually on the issue of interfaces vs. documents. I guess I'm going to have to join the w3-style mailing list. Nuts.
16:43, Tuesday April 15th, 2003 • feeling reflective • no comments
Tomcat likes to cache things. I've just spent most of the afternoon trying to fix a bug which I thought was unfindable. I'd fix it ages ago, but Tomcat had remembered it, oh yes. Probably shouldn't have been using a jar file at this point. I'm sticking to classes from now on.
12:30, Monday April 14th, 2003 • feeling relaxed • no comments
In the UK it's illegal to possess a hand gun of any kind. We're introducing a minimum sentence of 5 years for people caught with them. We're also outlawing replica hand guns due to the number of people accidentally shot by paranoid police armed response teams.
I totally agree with this situation. Who cares that I can't hunt, hunting is not fun enough to justify the hundreds of deaths from shootings each year. Shooting is not fun enough either. I have no fear in my home, I don't need to defend myself, I'm pretty confident that no-one's going to break in. Even if they did I would be much happier for them to steal all my stuff than have it escalate to armed conflict resulting, almost certainly, in me getting horribly wounded or killed. Lower the stakes, stop the proliferation.
2:56, Monday April 14th, 2003 • feeling webmasterly • no comments
After installing several CPAN modules to dig Exif data out of JPEGs (including Image::Info) I was appalled that none of them found a thing. PHP's read_exif_data function found a mine of information (literally I guess) in my digital picture library.
I've been meaning to do a gallery section for this site for a while, but I want to keep my iPhoto library and my online library in sync and make it easy for me to add new photos to both. Plus I didn't want a database. iPhoto can export to HTML. It outputs an index page and a page with previous/next navigation for each image. It also generates scaled versions for thumbnails and for actual-size pictures if you wish. After toying with the idea of reformatting the output HTML in Perl or PHP, it occurred to me that this would mean that the design of the gallery section became static and that I would have to regenerate every time I wanted to tweak the pages.
So instead I've written a PHP script which reformats the iPhoto index page into an XML document and supplements it with interesting data from the Exif block of the images (e.g. date). The next step is to write PHP that will read these XML gallery definitions and produce an interface.
One note: Almost all of my images are 1600x1200, around 400k a piece. This is really too large for me to fit the several hundred I want on to my ISP's disks so I have scaled them all to 1024. I'd rather have the flexibility provided by the Zope gallery used by Mat, which is really nice, but I haven't the space. I will add a disclaimer stating that larger versions of images are available.
0:18, Monday April 14th, 2003 • feeling relaxed • no comments
We have just arrived back from celebrating Miles' (Ladislav on Hype) birthday and Laotian New Year with Miles, my sister Kate, Ruth, Charlie, Greg, Robert and others in Oxford. My sister now lives there having studied at Christchurch and moved back home for a bit. Miles is at New college and Ruth is at St Hilda's.
Last night we were fed to the gunnels by Miles and his team of crack Laotian chefs. The highlight was the fried chicken and ginger, which had more coconut than anything else it seemed, but was delicious. There was also a selection of other treats of many weird and wonderful varieties. We got progressively more pissed, pushing through the singing phase into Vodka and beyond to being phoned by the neighbours. It was a knees up alright. Miles' mates from the Oxford University Light Entertainment Society (OULES) were nuts and we were all on fine form.
We all crammed into my sister's house (Louise and I got a bed!), which is very nice. Today she took us around Oxford a bit, doing the tour guide thing, I've taken a ton of photos, which I'm currently HTMLising. We had a really nice pub lunch as well at the Turf Tavern. A classic English pub nestled between the dreaming spires.
Oxford is a funny place. It's almost like they knew they were building the ultimate tourist exhibit of old world England. It's wonderful in how purely ancient it is. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend to any visitor to the UK that they visit the place.
We had a lovely weekend. We spent the whole time locked in really good conversation and we had a really good group feeling going the whole time. Miles and Charlie had never met in the real world, but, thanks to the power of Hype, they were like old friends. Louise and I were both very much reminded of our student days and missed that kind of group activity. When we got home today and dispatched Greg and Charlie back to their houses we both felt sad and a bit lonely. We hadn't had a communal weekend party like that for a while before we left Norwich, but in London it's even less likely. When the summer comes we vow to undertake all types of weekend craziness, including but not limited to, messing around in boats, on beaches and in parks. Come one, come all!
