Growing pains with CSS and Manila…

David Donald raises some interesting issues with the new design. Namely, a lot of the edit forms that Manila puts up if you want to post a comment are wider than my center column on most resolutions. As I don’t have much control over how wide those forms are, I may have to rethink how I’m doing the page layout. I think another issue was my design environment—I designed on a 1024×768 monitor, but readers like David are likely reading at 800×600. Maybe the best thing to do is to take everything back to two columns? What are people’s thoughts?

Going nuts with IE 6

Here’s a sneak peek of a problem I’m having with the site redesign in IE 6 on Windows. It works fine on the other browsers I’ve tried (mostly readable in NS 4, ugly in Mac iCab but that’s OK), but on IE 6 it starts doing funky things with border and text position. I’ve been over the stylesheet lots of times and can’t find the issue…. Interestingly it only does it on the second and subsequent news items.

More killer CSS resources

I’m very taken with A List Apart. They really have the sweet spot between coding and development—and between what the CSS spec says and how it is implemented. One complaint: there’s a lot of value in their series on transitioning to CSS from older forms of design (tables), but it was written in 1999 and a lot of the practical issues they mention have evolved with Netscape and IE 6 on the table.

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Yesterday: Heads down in CSS

I spent all yesterday (when I wasn’t in class) working on the CSS redesign of the site. I was about ready to give up on being able to view it in Netscape 4 until I found this site, which offers a free stylesheet for a fluid three-column layout (fluid meaning it resizes to fill the available browser width).

I had to tweak it a bit because of the Manila calendar. Manila automatically renders the calendar as a table, so it doesn’t resize. This is a problem with small browser width as it extends past the edge of the navigation div. I had to make the left navigation fixed width to solve the problem. This in turn meant the middle and right divs overlap at some smaller browser widths. I’ll do some work in 800×600 today to see if I can isolate the problem.

But most of the structural work is done. Now I can move on to aesthetics — colors, border widths, font leading — oh yeah, you can do leading, aka line height, in CSS. This old digital typographer is thrilled.

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Today’s CSS learnings

Working on the redesign in earnest today. I’m teaching myself CSS from trial and error and the specs, so I don’t have a lot of authority, but I thought I’d share what I’m learning anyway.

CSS Learning #1: When trying to display a border around a <div>, you must specify the border color, size, and style (or have specified them as a default somewhere) or the border will not display.

CSS Learning #2: CSS allows you to specify dimensions of elements in a number of ways, including ems (an em is approximately equal to the width of a capital letter M in the font being used). Distance measurements in ems are great when you’re just working with type. However, when mixing images (fixed size in pixels) and type, ems may cause problems. The cause: slightly differing type dimensions across platforms, or different fonts installed in the user’s system.

CSS Learning #3: Float is your friend. The float attribute of a <div> around an image allows you to wrap text around that image.

Adobe gets SOAP religion: New Web services

Infoworld: Abobe opens Web services publishing door. I’d love to comment more than just the press release, but I can’t find a URL for the service and Adobe hasn’t published anything about it on their AlterCast page.

“… Adobe AlterCast software is designed to automate the production and workflow of Web images and graphics. For example, AlterCast can resize a picture or manipulate layers of text dynamically.

The addition of SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) support to AlterCast will allow developers to access the software functionality over the Internet using Java or .Net APIs, which will enable dynamic Web image updating and production from a single command, according to Adobe officials, in San Jose, Calif.”

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News is free…

Well, as a Radio user I have no more gripes about dearths of news feeds, having just found NewsIsFree. The only question remaining is, why don’t the newspapers go out and build their own RSS feeds to share–why do sites like NewsIsFree and Moreover have to do it for them? Seems to me they could disintermediate these guys in a heartbeat. And I would think that newspapers, above all, would understand the importance of syndication.
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Hooked on Radio

So I have to confess. I’m not using it for weblogging, but I’m finding Radio to be invaluable in feeding my news addiction. I love getting my favorite blogs plus headlines from CNET, Wired, Slashdot, and others all on one page. There are some really cool people out there building RSS feeds.

My question is, why don’t the major news sources (WSJ, NYT (yes I know there’s a scraped feed available), Washington Post) hop on the bandwagon? It would be fairly trivial, and I would think good business, to set up an XML headline link listing that would bring people to your site.
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Morpheus: Classic story of tech strategy gone wrong

Among file sharing programs, one strange menage a trois stands out: Morpheus, KaZaA, Grokster. All three run essentially the same software, owned by KaZaA. Last week something happened to Morpheus — it’s not clear what. According to Slashdot, the ownership of Morpheus (Music City) has claimed that individuals “launched a DOS attack and tampered with the morpheus network in order to disallow logons to the FastTrack P2P filesharing network through the client. ” According to this message, KaZaA sold out to another outfit and started kicking the Morpheus clients off the network.

Where’s the cautionary tale here? Well, there are two parameters that determine how well you can capture the value you create (i.e., stay in business). Is your product’s uniqueness easy or hard to maintain? Do you hold the complementary assets you need to realize that product’s value tightly or loosely? Well, let’s see. Morpheus licensed its technology wholesale, so uniqueness was hard to maintain. And their network was connected to its competitors (all three P2P clients connected to the same big FastTrack network). I guess they didn’t have too tight a control over their complementary assets. So how was Morpheus going to capture any value??? Somewhere, though, someone thought they were a good idea…
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Not MySQL, says Boston judge

I’m delighted to see that Judge Patti B. Saris in my home town of Boston, a town not normally renowned for avoiding confrontation, is ducking the question of whether the GPL can be enforced. She does appear to be practicing good jujitsu on the negotiators, though, by turning around the injunction issue:

Before pushing the parties toward a settlement, the judge previewed a likely outcome of the preliminary injunction if a settlement is not reached. For a preliminary injunction to be granted, she said, the plaintiff must show that it is being done irreparable harm.

On the GPL issue, Saris told MySQL that “I haven’t seen the irreparable harm to you and I have seen it to Progress,” if its business were shut down.

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