I Sleep in a Darkroom

Sucks about your car man.

I am guessing that it is going to be pretty packed at casey’s place for about a week.

Well, only for that weekend, most of the guys have to go back to their homes for the week.

Yeah… I meant to say the same to Daniel about his car as well in the comments of the last post. Of course, his situation is a bit more humorous, since I don’t exactly have to hotwire my car.=) Hehehe…

Off topic:

Is it scary when Michael Jackson is a voice of reason? (from Bluesnews)

Oh, and for everyone coming in on Friday night, don’t get here until around 6:30, I still have to work.

I read a lot about web standards from you and Zeldman is cool, but your site isn’t so pretty outside of IE for Windows 5.0+. You must be using a lot of IE specific “standards.”

Try your site on:
Mac OS X Jaguar
- Safari: looks great
- Netscape: indecipherable
- IE for mac: convoluted
Linux
- Netscape: what website? I don’t see any website?
- Phoenix: Burned Ashes of once glorious html
- Mozilla 5.0: No color, random placement.

Is this intentional? I’m not trying to be annoying or criticise for no reason. I, however, use these alternatives daily in places where thats all I have access to. I am well aware of the headaches of cross-browser compatibility, but I’m just letting you know in case you have no idea. I don’t think you’re using “standards” like you might think. I’ve written code for Mozilla and given the Open Source philosophy and general tendancies toward standards plus my own experience with Mozilla itself I know it implements all the real standards, even creating it’s own XUL and other extensible standards from XML technologies. In short is this on purpose, or unknowing? Does it not matter?

Whatever the answer, I just thought I’d let you know and find out exactly what you’re shooting for.

What’s funny is that before my current car problem, my car would often have trouble starting. Colby, what was it you said about my car not starting awhile back? Was it ‘The Blue Spirit’s only weakness is starting’?

Btw, it’s been a week since my car was raped, and i’m still having to hotwire it!

Ah… curse you, Robert… you and your overwhelming intelligence!!

Dangit… I’ll get right on it.

(And no, I don’t hate you… I knew someone would call me out on it eventually.)

Actually, I got to thinking about it, and I have some points and questions to ask you, Robert.

1) The point of using web standards isn’t to make a page universally “pretty” in every device/browser that can access it. The point is to make the content accessible to as many people/devices as possible. There is no better way (that I know of) to do that than with web standards.

2) If I’m using any “IE-specific ‘standards’”, as you put it, then could you point them out to me, so I could remove them and find the appropriate standards-compliant fix?

3) I could really use some screenshots of these different browser/platform combinations you’re referring to, as I’m sure you know, I don’t have access to these. Is that possible? Andy told me you only use some of them in labs, so I can understand how it’s not always possible, but I’m willing to accept pretty big files at my crazywalker e-mail address.

4) The truth is, I’m a proponent of web standards, but I know I fall short. I’m still learning a lot of it, but I think there is no better direction to go.

5) I really do appreciate the heads up. I’m not sure if I really fell down on the idea of implementing standards the way they were supposed to be used, though. I’ll check, and I might be (and probably am) wrong… but I need proof first. Those browsers not displaying my page as beautifully as it shows up in Win/IE (har har) doesn’t mean I didn’t design with standards. Honestly, I think the problem is that some of those browsers are pieces of crap. The browser makers should have been supporting standards all along, but they chose to take their own route in the form of proprietary tags and such… MIE was, and still is one of the worst. And we’re talking about W3C standards here, too… not just something the Web Standards Project came up with.

Andy told me that you think the idea of standards is great in theory, but that it could never truly work. I think that’s a correct assessment to an extent. I think it really could come down to the complexity of the page. For browsers that began supporting SOME standards early on, but failed to support others, you may end up with something that ALMOST looks like it works, but has a major flaw—like text not showing up at all. However, with a simple design, the page might work no matter what. Of course, I don’t really know… this is all hypothetical, and may not be the case at all.

And let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that Phoenix (which I know nothing about) renders DIV tags the same way most other browsers render an HR tag. This might make it impossible for a body of text to be displayed between <div> and </div>. Does that mean that standards don’t work? I guess in that instance, it does. But it still doesn’t mean standards aren’t a worthy cause… I think it’s the most worthy cause in modern web design. In almost every device available today, a page implemented with standards will probably get the content to the user. I think that’s worthwhile… even if Phoenix screws up in that one instance.

So, I’m not trying to excuse the fact that I might have messed up on my page. Luckily enough, this is my personal site, and if anywhere, I should make my mistakes here. It just sounds like you’re saying that things don’t look pretty in other browsers, and I’m saying that’s only a secondary problem. Can you read the content in each of those browsers? If so, then I’ll move on to making the page pretty in more browsers (as long as it falls in line with standards).

6) I hope this doesn’t come across as me being pissed off, because I’m really not and I’m sure this will generate tons of awesome discussion. No one else around here ever brings up standards but me, so I’m excited that you took the time to mention it.

Reply to (1):
I agree that it isn’t necessary to be “pretty” and that the point is content delivery, but the degree to which some of those browsers mangle content really pushes the envelope on saying the content was delivered in a form coherent enough to be value to the user. I think web standards go a long way toward doing that, but some designs and tags aren’t displayed in a standard way and can be avoided to ensure cross-compatibility over elegance on one platform.

Reply to (2):
I would need some time to figure them all out specifically. tags are problematic in design because they aren’t implemented in similar ways on different systems. I use them sparingly and try to force content into areas with tables to maintain form. I can’t honestly comment right away on much, but if I ever got the chance I could show you. IE is one of the worst about implementing things in proprietary or non-standard/arbitrary ways, which cannot be helped except to avoid what you can, which takes testing above all. Which brings me to:

Reply to (3):
Screen shots? I can probably get you some, but for the most part you can get your own. I know you don’t have access to a Mac, which is excusable…especially since Safari is so beautiful(Anyone now using Mac:IE with access to Safari is a masochist who is no longer fit to continue being such a poor excuse for a human, in my humble opinion =).

Getting your own:
Mozilla -> Open Source version of Netscape with some really cool additions and redesigning. Mozilla is stable and very standards compliant, more so than IE can dream of. Dowload your copy from mozilla.org or google it.

Phoenix -> Cleaner, Faster, Meaner Mozilla. Mozilla is based on Netscape. Netscape is slow, so was Mozilla, so Phoenix was a project that branched off to be faster. Download your own copy, same story. Phoenix and Mozilla also support tabbed browsing, something you don’t have with IE, but that is most decidedly delicious. (My imagery about the “ashes” was mostly because of what a “phoenix” is, not that it is worse than Mozilla significantly)

Safari -> You wish you had it. Shame it doesn’t do tabs.

Netscpe -> You can try to fix things for Netscape, but I wouldn’t. Netscape is one of those browsers that just sucks.

Reply to (4):
Everyone falls short of ideals, and you took my post to be too critical, it was really just a heads up and a discussion starter. I didn’t want you to think or act as if you had Web Standards in your pocket and not know you didn’t. It wasn’t attempting to attack you or bring you off of some pedestal in my mind and make myself feel better, it was for whatever good comes of my mentioning it. I was not being inflammatory though. I will call you out on most anything though, so watch out.

Reply to (5):
I’m glad you appreciate it, and I like your response to someone you don’t know well criticising you. It shows some poise and it was cool of you. I’m glad we can create dialogue instead of “editorial review, revision, and deletion.”

I already addressed the browers sucking issue. As for tag implementation, that is NOT a W3C standard. XHTML or XSLT is, but not HTML tag display and implementation. It has to be independent to allow for a lot of things, including exstensibility, openness, and flexibility. HTML is being replaced by XHTML for some implementation of HTML display and parsing reasons. As you must know HTML can be poorly typed and not fail. That takes a lot of parsing effort and really ruins any attempts at standardizing things. XHTML is more strongly typed and makes it a lot easier to implement HTML parsing and display as a result.

I think I only agree with myself to some degree too, I think it is true though. As in a lot of arenas though, ideals can’t be reached, but must be attempted. Approximations become ideals in terms of what is possible, and everyone can understand that.

Page complexity does change things, but I was only referencing your page. You’re mostly right, but it’s trivial to say that trivial examples are simple.

Phoenix rocks my socks. Leave it alone, you bad bad man. Actually, it’s just okay, but possibly the best there is.

Pretty is secondary? Yes, but to delivery, which depends on coherency and coherency forces some “pretty.”

Reply to (6):
I’m glad you don’t hate me, now I can make more quasi-annoying posts. Hopefully stimulating good discussion.

Note:
HTML is flawed inherently. XHTML is a step up, but backward compatibility will hamstring it for the forseeable future.

Sorry, Phoenix should be Firebird. I was thinking of the wrong name for some reason.

There are lots of replies to this… I wanted to make one too.

1) Agreed. Of course, I haven’t seen a version of my page yet (in any browser I can get my hands on, at least) where the content is so incoherently delivered that I don’t understand what’s going on. So far, everything works at *least* fairly well.

2) See, this is where you’re doing things backwards. Tables are a hack… you *forcing* things into place with tables might make pages look right on some browsers, but it’s just excess code for other types of devices. And the tags aren’t the problem either… the styles are. Most tags are pretty well supported in the same way no matter what system you’re using.

An exception might be something like <object>… which microsoft misuses for things like flash. This could really cripple the XHTML 2.0 (if I remember the version number correctly) spec.

3) I’ve used all four of those browsers you mentioned, and none of them have made my page appear the way you’ve said it does. It *could* be that there are some differences between the Mac and PC versions. IE for Mac and IE for PC (even when their version numbers matched up) render pages dramatically different sometimes, so that’s why I asked for screenshots. And especially the Linux stuff… as I’ve never used Linux at all.

4) Nah, I didn’t think you were too critical at all. I think we’re on a good track here; I just wanted to make sure and cover all my bases. And honestly, if I came across as offended, it was only because I felt I might’ve been calling the kettle black when talking about crappy web sites… and here my own might just be sucking right along with it.

5) This certainly comes from what Andy’s told you about me. And I’d imagine it would take you long to find a post or two I’ve made in the past that was the complete opposite of my behavior nowadays.=)

“As for tag implementation, that is NOT a W3C standard. XHTML or XSLT is, but not HTML tag display and implementation.”

I’m not quite sure what you’re referring to here. Are you saying there are no HTML standards at all? Because if so… well, that’s just untrue.=)

“Pretty is secondary? Yes, but to delivery, which depends on coherency and coherency forces some ‘pretty.’”

That’s only somewhat true. A page that’s all fluff and no content is essentially useless outside of an art contest. You won’t get any significant traffic from a well-designed, content-less page. On the other hand, there are pages like http://maddox.xmission.com/ that get enormous amounts of traffic, while the page is obviously quite poorly designed.

Go to http://www.finaid.swt.edu/ (not that pretty, I know… but I don’t have a lot to work with) and turn off the style sheets. You’ll see the content listed straight down the page with very little to make it attractive. Yet, as a financial aid hopeful, this page might have all the information you need, and you should be able to get all of it. If it’s well-designed, that helps, but is definitely not necessary. Believe me, as a former design student, I understand the importance of having a well-designed form of content delivery. But I won’t back down on the opinion that the message should come before the design.

6) Agreed!=)

Note on your note:
I’ve always hated that about HTML. I used to think how nice it would be if HTML would just not work when I did something wrong. That way, I wouldn’t have to constantly go back and forth between the W3C validator and my HTML source, trying to fix the problem.

Oh sigh. I think we only disagree in one place. I’ll also clear up some things I think you took in a way I hadn’t intended. Like Sun Tzu said, “Your enemy will be presented with three options, and of these he will always choose the fourth.”

1) Double Agreed. Though your page is still ugly on other OS’s. I know thats hard for you to see, but you’ll have to wait a while before I can send over any screenshots. I’m afraid the lab was my sunless prison for a couple of weeks while I toiled away at ExciteBike in Java. I don’t want want to go back before I have to. I might do something before then though, I have an iBook and RedHat on this box…I’m just exceedingly lazy.

2) I don’t think I’m necessarily wrong. I don’t set exact locations on a page for a table like you can with a so that it isn’t hackish at all. It is a tool for relative positioning. I’m not aware of a browser that my page looks good in because for the time being I’m busy and it sucks. I am also not aware of a platform it doesn’t display correctly on. Wireless it isn’t all setup for, but then I doubt this page is either? It will soon be setup for wireless as my page will be moving over to XSLT and servlets. Anyway, tables may not be something you or Zeldman use, but it is implemented in every browser ever(including wireless browsers I’ve played with: see note below). It’s in the XHTML standard and I don’t see where your “hack” argument flies at all. What do you mean exactly by the “style” is the problem? Of course all this arguing is kinda funny as I probably won’t use tables with XSLT.

3) I’ll get you some shots eventually. Linux has problems with your site and IE for Mac is radically different from IE for Win32. It is virtually unrecognizable(IE on a Mac). I wouldn’t worry too much over it, they should use Safari..or FireBird which I’ve never tried on OS X. Hmm.

As far as Linux goes, I’ll try to help. I do use Linux regularly as I’m a CS major. I don’t think it is particulary useful as a desktop OS though. I do love it for writing software. Especially in C and Java.

4) Okay. Nothing to see here Folks.

5) I’m not sure how to explain this. Basically the way one browser implements a tag isn’t always covered by the W3C.

I do love looking at the HTML grammar though, especially after having to write an assembly language grammar and parse it later on in a project for a compiler type class. (This is a joke, though grammars are pretty cool, this would be like taping the Weather Channel)

After the “Pretty is Secondary” thing, I feel like you said something I agree with. I just think readability/legibility was what I meant by “forces some pretty.” So I think we agree here?

Note on your note to my note:
Oh the woes it will cause.

Note referred to above:
I’ve been doing research this summer into power comsuption models in mobile computing devices. I’ve had access to Compaq iPaq H3600s and H3900s models, and while we use a distribution of Linux on them called Familiar, I did play with Wince (Windows CE) and it’s IE implementation which actually did an admirable job with tables and divs. So take that, “other devices.” I mean maybe your toaster won’t display tables, but thats hardly my problem.

I guess I referred to tables as a hack because they were never meant to be layout devices. They simply did the job fairly well, and people began using them for that… mostly because CSS wasn’t supported in the major browsers for a long time (even though the spec was created in like 1996).

It’s like finding a hockey stick (just go with me here) and using it as a bat to play baseball, because you can’t find a real bat. Then finding a real baseball bat, and continuing to use your hockey stick, even though the bat is made specifically for that purpose. Technically, you aren’t “wrong” for using the hockey stick, but it’s not made for that, so you should really only use it if you have to. Of course, this analogy would only apply in an instance where there aren’t any real rules… like, say, in a sandlot.

I think this short article does a pretty good job of explaining it: http://www.modulo26.net/daily/062303.php

When I said that the styles were the problem, I meant that using <div> or <span> won’t break your HTML for a browser… but using some certain style in your stylesheet might. There are some things that can really trip up browsers like IE or Opera when you use certain positioning elements in your style sheets. I can find examples, if you really want me to.

So most everything else is stuff we agree on. No more numbering.=)

Also, I didn’t mean to say that tables wouldn’t work sometimes… it really just comes down to what their intended use is. (Don’t you love ending sentences with a preposition?)

I can mostly agree with that, though I think your analogy is strained.

It’d be more like broomstick ball. You use what you have that works(Hockey sticks wouldn’t work in my opinion). And it isn’t necessarily that it wasn’t designed for it, I can’t believe that the developers didn’t see the possibilities of nested tables, more that something else is better at it or more specialized(there weren’t always baseball bats), a bat or CSS. And I do have CSS stylesheets in use, but like I said earlier my site sucks and is just waiting for me to have time to move closer to what I want. So I think we mostly agree.

As a question, are you interested in or have you looked into XML transformations?

And, why does the comments preview screen use a different(MT provided I think) stylesheet than the rest of the site? Just a heads up/question.

Well, it’s only strained because I figured I’d at least use two objects used in sports…

Well, I think the overall point is to use as little markup as possible for the actual design of the page. By placing the design (layout, typographic attributes, etc.) in a separate file that could be referred to by many different documents, you could easily make changes to a single file, and the every file making reference to the CSS document would change in presentation as a result. It’d be akin to having “tables in stylesheets”.

“As a question, are you interested in or have you looked into XML transformations?”

I really don’t know anything about that. To me, XHTML just seems like the next version of HTML, but I’ve read that it’s really more than that. And when discussion of XML and other stuff begins, I’m completely lost. So, tell me what that is, and I’ll tell you if it sounds interesting to me.=)

And what is XSLT? See, I really know very little.

The comments preview page uses the default MT layout. I’ve just never even touched it. I guess because I don’t preview my comments. Yeah, I know it’s laziness, but I really should do something with it.

Your overall point is very correct and XSLT will solve my problems with design mingled in with content. Actually it’s generally referred to as “abstraction” in a computer science sense.

XHTML is the next version and it matters in more ways than I know or am prepared to explain to anyone.

XSLT is basically XML transformations. The acronym is from XSL and Transformations. XSL is eXtensible Stylesheet Language. XSL and XSLT are a large part of the XML stylesheet specification. These stylesheets will largely in my view replace CSS as XML technologies replace most raw data formats. XML is for raw data. XSL and XSLT provide a way of formatting that data either for creating XHTML, taking XML and changing it

example, say you have:

<name>
<firstname>John</firstname>
<lastname>Scofield</lastname>
</name>

and the client expects:

<name> John Scofield </name>

You can transform the XML to do that with XSLT.

or to generate XML data from other formats like databases or comma delimited files (sometimes used as rudimentary databases).

On the ExciteBike(original NES sidescroller clone in Java) project I did recently I was in charge of XML parsing. We had “level files” that described what the track looked like and what obstacles were where. We also had to edit said level files and be able to create new ones, through a very slick GUI(graphical user interface, the logic was all on my end he did a great job though) my teammate wrote. I also wrote a DTD for a “player stats” XML file that we subsequently used and got extra credit for. After all this I found that I knew XML pretty well, especially how Java interacts with it in terms of parsing and serializing(writing out XML text files).

I started looking into XML technologies after that and found that previously foreign XSL and XSLT made a lot of sense and that Cocoon(a “webframework”) is amazingly cool. So I started planning how to recreate my site using Java and XSLT. XSLT is similar to CSS except it has more flexibility and can actually be processed by say a Java servlet. XSLT also has a lot of decision making capabilities in that depending on the end user platform I can deliver different data and a different format, not to mention that I can have completely different XSL sheets for say IE, Mozilla, and wireless devices. So I’m going to initially use XSLT to transform XML documents(which I’m going to write an XML Schema or DTD for my webpage’s XML docs that describe a page) into XHTML for viewing through a servlet, which opens up a lot of dynamic application type possibilities and allows me to create pages on the fly with a DTD or Schema and even to write my own Java software for generating XML files for my website that have the right content. The servlet will probably also handle some database stuff I’ve been adding.

Web frameworks use XSLT sheets to transform XML directly to XHTML. So I’d have a bunch of XML documents to describe the content of my pages, XSL sheets for style, and XSLT documents for transforming this into XHTML appropriate for the user. Frameworks are cool because they’re transparent. So Cocoon is an example, and if you had it setup with your XSLT stuff too, then you’d just point the browser at www.crazywalker.com/index.xml and Cocoon would automatically take that XML and transform it giving you XHTML to view. Servlets are more of active programs that would allow more logic and dynamic possibilities like back-end database access.

DTD: Document Type Definition which describes what rules an XML document of this type must follow to be valid

XML Schema: DTD gone to the next level

Just ask any questions you have, or anything you’re curious about.

The name example got screwed because you’re ripping out markup, it should have name, first name and last name tags in the first example and just a name tag in the second.

Wow. You just reminded me why I’m a fine art photography major at Texas State and you’re a computer science major at Georgia Tech.

Hehe. It’s an important distiction, but you’ll have to understand XSLT someday to remain within standards.

i like cheddar cheese

I’m a fan of Monterrey Jack myself.