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Self Promotion Day

May 10, 2004, 12PM PST

A whole lot has been busting through the pipeline lately, to the point where I can start talking about what I’ve been working on recently. Here’s a bit of a roundup to get some of this out there. (If you can’t get away with horn-blowing like this on a Monday, then honestly, when can you?)

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One Year

May 07, 2004, 11AM PST

One year ago today:

With a few caveats and a bit of apprehension, I present to you my latest pet project: The CSS Zen Garden.

Since I just about missed it (I could have sworn it was May 8th, 2003, but my archives don’t lie) I don’t have anything much planned to mark the occasion. So lacking that, I’ll take you through some of my design process when I was building ‘Tranquille’, the default template.

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Javascript Bonsai, Conclusion

May 05, 2004, 8AM PST

What have we learned in the last 24 hours? When you’ve got a good thing going, don’t tinker with it.

My initial reaction to hearing Rares’ proposal was an immediate ‘no way’: it’s too late in the game to start thinking about changing the rules. I was, however, curious enough to wish to see a proof-of-concept, so a big thank you to Rares for taking the time to build the beautiful demo. (which, if you feel like tinkering a bit more Rares, should be added to the Garden-proper sans script)

My feelings still leaned towards ‘no’ for all the reasons I summarized yesterday, and some more that I didn’t (which were adequately covered in the comments). But in the interest of progress, I was curious to see what the consensus was. And most felt the same as I did.

Do I think the idea has merit? Of course, otherwise I wouldn’t have posted it. Do I think there’s some good opportunity for experimentation of separation of behaviour and structure? No doubt. But it just doesn’t fit with what we’re doing now.

I still get suggestions for improvements over the existing Garden. A lot of them are good ideas. Many of them are incremental, although some could be revolutionary if they were done right. I’ll keep advocating anyone who has a spark of an idea to run with it and see where it goes; I don’t discourage anyone from creating a similar project. But changing our established goals for the Garden obviously isn’t a good idea now.

Oh, and I did delete quite a few comments — don’t take it personally, some were valid, just off-topic; hence the warning. I’m playing with methods of making the comments on this site a little more relevant. More on that later.

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Javascript Bonsai Tree

May 04, 2004, 10AM PST

I had an interesting question put to me the other week: what about making use of the null <script> element in the Zen Garden’s markup (so placed to avoid the flash of unstyled content IE bug) and open that up for submission as well?

The idea goes like this: separating presentation from structure is a good thing, and makes for better accessiblity (and all the other benefits of standards-based code, of course). Taking this separation a step further, and filtering out the behaviour as well should surely be a step in the right direction.

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Thunderbird 0.6

May 03, 2004, 9PM PST

While I’ve been using Thunderbird as a mail client since version 0.2, today’s 0.6 release feels less of a toy and more like the first really solid revision.

Installation required the same rename-the-old-one then drag-n-drop-the-new-one that’s proving to be a trademark of early software releases from the Mozilla Foundation. It’s easy, but not for the masses. We’ll see an installer soon, no doubt.

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A Roadmap to Standards

April 30, 2004, 8AM PST

This afternoon I was asked by a friend what I would recommend to an old designer who wants to learn more about web standards, CSS, XML, and XHTML.

This is a perfect example of when an email response is better posted here for a wider audience (and Google). So here’s my answer: this is a comprehensive, informal, and somewhat long-winded roadmap for anyone who has heard about web standards, thinks they might want web standards, but doesn’t know where to start.

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Happiness Is...

April 28, 2004, 10PM PST

Recent acquisition:

Screenshot of new LaCie Firewire drive specs, 160GB

Which brings our household data capacity to a quarter of a terabyte. I’ve long claimed that 5 petabytes is all I’ll ever need, for life. Which provokes bemused expressions on the faces of those around me. No one ever seems to factor in the increasing demand for storage…

My own personal storage history, distributed across drives and systems:

  • 1988 - 1994: dual 360k floppies, no hard drive.
  • 1994 - 1995: 40MB
  • 1995 - 1998: 850MB
  • 1998 - 2000: 4,000MB
  • 2000 - 2001: 30,000MB
  • 2001 - 2003: 70,000MB
  • 2003 - 2004: 100,000MB
  • 2004: 270,000MB

5 petabytes. It’s all I ask.

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See all of this month’s posts…