licentious radio

Sunday, May 25, 2003
[9:22:49 PM]

Further adventures of ....

For those of you just tuning in, licentious radio's NO JUSTIFICATION in HTML campaign is sweeping the web.

Why? Because justifying text without hyphenation typically leaves uneven. gaping holes between words, where a single, small space should be. Even though the right edge is nicely even, the gaping holes and running rivers (a hole at about the same place in several lines) make reading difficult. If you intend for people to read the text on your website, making it harder to read than normal is a bad idea.

Of course we can't say X without pondering the opposite of X. When could you justify text? Newspapers get away with it because of hyphenation and narrow columns. We postulate that with sufficiently narrow columns, the eye doesn't scan along the line as much, so irregular and large spaces between words wouldn't be such a big problem.

Not content to leave well-enough alone, we had to hack. Putting soft hyphens () in text is easy. Modern browsers will at least ignore the  -- we thought. Sigh. There's no end to the blundering of browsers. (We're complaining, not accusing. Browsers are hard and making browsers fast was harder, and all of this would have been fixed long since had the development pace kept up.)

WinIE 4+ will use  to hyphenate. Mozilla ignores them gracefully. Alas, MacIE 5x (on one Mac with OS X, anyway) displays a U with some queer accent for every .

Not content to leave bad enough alone, we hacked onward: write a script in Javascript to go through and remove the soft hyphen characters. (We had thought Javascript was finally stable enough to be useful....) Alas. Our simple-minded hack freaked MacIE out completely -- throwing margins off and twisting the font-family. (Why in the world didn't they test this?)

Reluctantly, we abandon the concept. (The coolest bit was we got to align headings to the right. You don't get to do that every day.)

Fact is, WinIE's hyphenation was pretty bad -- not hyphenating often enough -- and our view is that hyphens should hang -- be placed just beyond the right margin -- which WinIE doesn't do.

This design had very short lines... we might try again in a design where the lines are a more normal length and the server is smart enough only to give s to WinIE browsers.

Wednesday, May 21, 2003
[12:09:00 AM]
Just for the anti-zeldman record: the latest addition to the local stylesheet for Zeldman's primarycontent is "color: black". Oh. Nice, readable, black text.

Saturday, May 3, 2003
[12:59:49 PM]
Random Rant on the font tag....

Putting a font tag in every freaking table cell was pretty silly.

On the other hand, it worked. "Worked" in the sense of letting users pick the default text size, and reliably scaling the text size from there across platforms.

The fact that some designers picked the typically unreadable "font size=1" for body text was not the fault of the font tag.

CSS has a way to do essentially the same thing, but Microsoft broke it by picking different relative sizes than the rest of the world. That is, the CSS equivalent of size=2 is one step different on Windows IE than on most other browsers.

Then there's a Windows IE bug for sizing text with em units in CSS -- some users will see .9em as unreadably small.

I'm sure Billionaire Bill's heart breaks when he hears about these bugs that make it vastly more difficult to create websites that look OK on both Windows IE and other browsers.

Thursday, April 24, 2003
[7:03:35 PM]
A Conversation With Marty Neumeier [meet-the-makers.com].

Marty Neumeier was the editor of Critique, a quarterly magazine about "graphic design thinking".

Critique was great. I miss Critique almost as much as I miss prosperity. Since Critique folded, when I'm near a magazine rack, I just sigh and turn away.

Thursday, February 13, 2003
[11:17:51 AM]
What to click. I watch movies on DVD sometimes. I have this 19-inch monitor. The clickable areas are *tiny*. They're hard to find. Just make stuff clickable, darn it.

With stylesheets and a bit of automation, we can do better than we've done so far. Say your homepage has headlines and one or two paragraph summaries or leads. The headline should be clickable, sure.

But why not the text of the paragraphs?

First, you don't want the text underlined, and you don't want the same *loud* hover indication. We can do that with stylesheets.

Second, you don't want non-CSS browsers to have the whole paragraph underlined (because it's so much harder to read underlined text). So you have to be able to send *different* html to CSS and non-CSS browsers. You have to automate, and you have to have some server-side browser-sniffing. (Or easy client-side opt-in.)

Third, you can't nest links. If the paragraph contains a link itself, that would require special handling. But *that's* OK, since you already have to automate. Just end the paragraph link before the link in the text, and start another link after. The specific link in the text should be obvious when you hover, so customers know that they're getting the right link when they click.

As ol' Jakob says, most customers spend most of their time at other sites, so not everyone will make use of a feature like this. Some people may even get confused by it, though they're more likely to wonder why other websites don't work like this, rather than why your's does. But some people will be helped, and that's what we're here for, right?

Tuesday, February 11, 2003
[6:15:51 PM]
Silly zeldman.com hacking update.... For no *very* good reason, I want the secondarynav on the right. float: right, right? But the latest style tweaks switched to absolute positioning. position:absolute trumps float:right in Mozilla. (At a glance, that seems to be the way the spec is written, too.) To over-ride the absolute positioning, my userContent.css looks like this:

#primarycontent {margin-left: 0px !important;} #secondarynav {position: static !important;} #secondarynav {float: right !important}

In principle, this is a silly business. But it's maybe the way of the future, so I indulge. The only bad thing is that I usually have five or ten browser windows open, and every time I tweak the user stylesheet I have to close them all and restart Mozilla. But if I do that once a week, it doesn't seem too bad.

I was only driven to this stylesheet hacking back when Zeldman was justifying his text. At licentious radio, we brook no justification of html text.

[3:10:48 PM]
Greg Palast has updated and re-published his book. He'll be at Kepler's on February 27. Palast digs up dirt on the Bush people, which is published in newspapers in England, but black-holed by the Republican-owned media here.

Greg's interview with Buzzflash goes into some of the gory details: Bush is blackmailing Blair to support the war. Poppy Bush himself set up the Iraqi nuclear weapons program in the 80s, with $7 billion from the Saudis.

Greg is also the only known/suspected victim of licentious radio's campaign to stop justification of text on the web. We're not taking credit for it, but we *did* email a suggestion that it would be easier to read his articles if they weren't justified. And today, the articles aren't justified.

For now, we'll spare you the anti-justification manifestoing.

But mark your calendar for Greg at Kepler's.

Sunday, February 9, 2003
[11:58:09 AM]
Update: This post was fundamentally wrong. You *can* use a transitional DTD without being thrown into quirks mode. You just have to know *which* way to specify the DTD. *Without* a URL, you get quirks-mode. You can get standards mode, or Mozilla/Gecko's 'nearly-standards' mode, by choosing the right DTD declaration. You just have to know. Here's the Mozilla/Gecko behavior [mozilla.org].

Cost of DTD hijacking.... (Choosing quirks mode based on transitional dtd considered costly.)

We have this problem of a gazillion web pages that were tailored to now-old browsers that were definitely quirky about rendering. "Quirky" being partly a euphemism for "non-standard".... A browser that does things *right* will suddenly gag on these old pages (render them ugly). So you might want the new browser to be able to render an old-fashioned page the way the old-fashioned browser rendered it. But how will the browser know to use quirks mode, not standards mode?

You use the DTD, was the answer. The DTD had (practically) never been used for anything, so why not?

I'm glad *I* didn't have to make a decision like that. For me, I would have been glad if a transitional DTD let me make pages that would work pretty well in non-CSS browsers, *without* enforcing old bugs (etc.) when someone uses a new browser to look at the page.

The example is you might want to use bgcolor, link, and vlink in the body tag, and even the despised but functional font tag. But if you use a transitional DTD, Mozilla duplicates various nasty 1997-era bugs. So now if I want to use transitional tags, I've got to do all the work-arounds that we hated before. In order to avoid the old bugs, you have to give up usability for old browsers.

Here's an example.... You put a div around the "content" part of the page, and style based on the div. Everything within the div looks fine, until you have some tabular data -- in a table. Because you use a transitional DTD -- in Mozilla and other browsers -- the text in the table cells doesn't get the styling of the div. That's not necessarily so bad, because you can style the contents of the table cells. But with the cascading nature of CSS, if a browser comes along that *doesn't* support quirks mode, the styles could be applied twice: .9em times .9em. So don't use ems, right? Ouch.

I have a different perspective on this than some. I don't care if old pages look bad in new browsers. People who want their websites to look pretty can update their pages, from my perspective. I would rather that it be easy to make new pages that follow standards with a bit of a nod to downward compatibility.

Like I say, I'm glad *I* didn't have to make these decisions, because I would have leaned the other way.

[9:41:11 AM]
Interesting claim on the Opera/MSN story.... They suggest MSN tweaked a stylesheet to work better with Opera 6. When Opera 7 came out, the tweaked stylesheet broke the layout, because of changes in the browser. I haven't tested this, but it sounds plausible (slashdot comment).

First, make your browser follow the standards. Second, when browser-sniffing, be aware that new versions will come out eventually, and the new versions will be specifically *different* than the current version. So limit your targeting to known versions. When Opera 7 comes out, give it some generic stylesheet until you take the time to figure out what you need to do to support it.

[9:12:33 AM]
I guess that makes it official, then. I am the Anti-zeldman [google.com]. (ha ha)