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musings of mark since 2001

The hilarious writers over at Kiro5hin have done it again, introducing us to a new cell phone feature called “voice chat“.

A sure sign that the real estate bubble in North America is about to burst is the number of puff pieces the compliant New York Times publishes for the real estate industry. The latest uses a ’study’ from a ‘research’ company that’s really just a credit company trying to drum up business, the article reads like a glowing time share ad.

Over and over again they say it’s easier to buy a home than it was a generation ago, except they don’t go back a generation, but to 1980 when the numbers make it look good for their article. Forget about them mentioning that at one time in North America one man could work 8 hours a day and pay for a mortgage on a home, and that now it takes a couple, two people working, to own a home. They do a good spin on: “in the past, a home buyer often needed to make a down payment equal to 20 percent of a house’s value to get a mortgage; today, little or no down payment is common.” without mentioning that almost no one makes enough money to come up with 20% of a small fortune. A couple paragraphs late a couple is taking out two mortgages, just so they could afford the down payment.

Further, they talk about Portland, and how an apartment, not a home, sold for 81k in 1990, and 169k at this point in time. But not to worry, according to the article, incomes have risen over 50% in Portland to match the doubling of the price. Hmm, I was making $12/hour just out of high school in the 70’s, and now get $13 forty years later - wonder how they do it in Portland? Amazing what kind of spin you can get out of numbers, one fellow thought he was getting a deal by paying double what he would have a decade ago, and fifteen or twenty times what he would have paid fifty years ago. Not until the second to the last paragraph of a two page article is it mentioned that a couple today would end up paying half their income for a home instead of a third, as recently as 1985.

Just finished converting another web site to all CSS, that I had originally built using the technique of creating a single table, (one table to rule them all), with just the four or five cells in it for header, footer, menu, content etc. and then using CSS for the rest. Serve that up as something with a Transitional Doctype and no worries about most things as long as you just pad stuff and not use too many floats or other positioning properties. Quick way to build a site layout, but not exactly strict CSS and xhtml.

That makes four sites done completely with all CSS for positioning, no tables needed, and getting fairly confident that virtually any web site can be redone without tables. It sure makes for smaller file sizes, and browsers seem to be able to draw CSS positioned elements much faster than they can nested table cells so the surfing experience is more seamless. It’s almost too fast in some cases, can see a use for the W3C to come up with something standard for fade/transition effects similar to Microsoft’s’ proprietary browser effects, but with CSS instead of JavaScript, that everyone can use.

One does have to think out of the box a little creating all CSS layouts. I did a fair amount of reading on Big John and Holly Bergevin’s web site, and rather than use the hacks found there, made notes of what needed to be worked around instead. A ton ‘o good information to be found there, but no use trying to fix something that isn’t broke and just needs to be done different, or at least how Brian Wilson has determined they work, correct or not.

I also found the 456 Berea Street web site to be incredibly helpful. Not quite as hack orientated and their techniques led to other insights in general. The equal height boxes was really good, used a variation of that, using just one extra div to make a large section of the page containing a couple divs, causing both to stretch out 100% just like tables. Didn’t use the display:table property though, min-height works too for what I needed, (one box will always have more content), but it’s something to keep in mind for next time. A List Apart has a page that is also just chock full of examples.

A couple other things that can help a lot, is using whatever:hover from my fave NL javascript coder for drop down menus that work everywhere, and conditional comments. For example, the one I just finished works the same in all Gecko browsers and IE 6 and above(7?-hopefully!), but nothing I tried makes IE5.5 and below get rid of that default 15px padding on an un-ordered list… enter a one line css file that gets called up with the conditional, and everyone’s happy and future-proofed.

Putting together a page for the mgwebservices.ca web site to sell CSS / XHTML upgrades/conversions now, almost ready to go. Doing the samples/screenshots and links and writing the copy, and will add a link for that when ready. The dearth of web sites that have not been converted, and the high profile of some of the ones that have been upgraded along with a strong business case for upgrading, seems like something that could keep me busy for a couple years while everyone gets on the bandwagon. Still haven’t come up with the price points for it, though it seems that about $250 per copy would do it, it’s about a day for each one in the long run. As there are a lot of similar web sites out there, that time would drop and some decent wages could be made in time. Keep php/mysql work at the present $45/hour level, and content work at $25/hour as always; it’s a whole ‘nuther skill set doing these CSS layouts, and a flat rate to begin with smooths out the rough spots that are bound to be there at the beginning.

There’s a new RSS feed icon in town, created by Mozilla and endorsed whole heartedly by Microsoft. The reasoning is that those tiny little icons every one was making weren’t very standard and imho, kind of hard to read sometimes too:

Just back from a morning walk, and it’s a classic ‘Wet Coast’ Boxing Day out there with plenty of rain and dark. The only noise in the cove is the ferry dieseling out to the Sound with a very light load this early, it will be full of shoppers later looking for the perfect after Xmas sale item that one can’t do without. It’s a pretty little cove at any time of year, a little surreal this morning with all the twinkling lights and not a soul to see anywhere.