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musings of mark since 2001

The second draft of my CSS and XHTML tutorial is done, and if I must say so myself it’s a pretty darn good one. The finished code should satisfy even the purists out there, both the xhtml and css file come in under 4KB and the very minimum amount of cruft was used. There’s a number of improvements over the first iteration, the menu is moved to the bottom and just the original four container divs, (and one superfluous list div container), were used among other things - available now at www.mgwebservices.ca and slash-dot ready.

After a week of not looking at the css-xhtml tutorial, took a couple hours playing around with it taking into consideration some points made by some of the developers on the mailing list I presented it to for critique.

The writing itself was destined to be tweaked anyways, and one comment was to explain a bit more of the *why* something got done the way it’s done. A gut feeling, that most people trying to learn CSS are having the hardest time with the positioning of elements and the why is more related to float, padding and margin issues rather than how to get the hover colors and font-sizes etc., so am expanding on that issue for sure.

Not sure if it’s obvious to most how selectors cascade, but that’s basically an easy list to memorize for anyone that wants to learn it and haven’t touched that at all, and the gist of another comment. This time I was merrily going along with the commenter’s example of where I “missed” a chance to use same, and actually dropped some extra divs altogether instead. The css file itself is starting to get almost tiny, that’s pretty cool.

The most worrisome comment to me, was that I missed how the site was going to react when someone came along and bumped up the text size. Putting the thing together Saturday afternoon a week ago, I hit the Ctrl + just once to increase the text 100% and it was looking like things were going to hang in there and left it at that. I also used pixels to size the text, thinking that it would be better to stick as close as possible to the original example.

Problem is, this little project in the end should be *better* than the sample. It already is with what was done last Saturday, version one easily met the criteria of having half to two-thirds less number of files and bytes to download, and version two is of course a wee bit better.

The original example in it’s tabular glory “broke” it’s layout on the first text size increase, nothing unusual with the type of sliced table that it is. The technology at the time the mark-up methods used in the example simply didn’t take into account that now people do a Ctrl +, and Bob’s yer Uncle, bigger text to read. The css ver.1 from last week survived a one size up increase as mentioned, but going one more bump and things went all berserk as things are wont to do when floats get pushed out of their normal flow.

So, with ver.2 able to handle two text size increases now, (that’s pretty big:-) that’s a good enough improvement over the original to not go any further with that. I almost always use ems for font sizes everywhere else, but didn’t in ver.1 again mistakenly sticking to the original, and the new version is ems to keep that crowd happy, another improvement over the original. A bit of writing to do in the morning to update the actual tute and a tweak the screen-shots reflecting the changes I made to the background images and we’ll see how it goes.

In the end, although it would seem that it’s been proved that you can do any graphic intensive web site of this design style in css and xhtml, there’s no substitute for graphic design that lends itself to a fluid web site. The nature of the example’s design itself is a fixed pixel precision layout, and sans re-doing the design to create more fluidity which would be a whole ‘nuther exercise and not what we want to demonstrate, it’s greatly improved over the example both in file sizes and numbers, it’s semantic qualities, and all the other nice things you can say about css and xhtml. So, better stop writing this blog and get to updating that tute, and figuring out how much to charge to do it for other people…

Remember when scientists were saying that global warming would melt the ice caps and glaciers enough so that sea levels would rise as much as three or four inches? The sea level rise amount estimate has been increased, mainly due to studies done by NASA’s JPL crew that show the miles long tongues that have melted in the past decade and are no longer there, were at least partially responsible for stemming the demise of a glacier.

The speedup of glacial melting has been detected simultaneously in many glaciers, and they insist this is not a fluke nor a normal cycle at the rate they are going. The rivers of ice are melting so fast that Greenlanders are getting concerned that they are going to disappear all together in a huge rush to the ocean. Apparently, when the tongues of ice that stick into the ocean are gone, (they all melted in the last decade unexpectedly), that also takes away the slow conduit the water once used to reach the ocean. The ice starts melting where it normally doesn’t, creating crevasses in the thick sheets that allow rainwater to flow into it, greasing the skids so to speak for a faster glacial flow. It’s now estimated that with the loss of the Greenland glaciers sea levels would rise 20 feet. No need to go into what that would do to every city in the world on a coastline.

Been reading a nice work from Aldous Huxley called “The Perennial Philosophy”. Rufus M. Jones: “…it’s both an anthology and an interpretation of the supreme mystics, East and West. There are well-known books on Western Mysticism. There are studies of Oriental and Mohammedan mysticism, but this is the first time that anybody has adequately covered the entire field and showed equal familiarity with all fields.”

An example, he’s talking about Charity and lovelessness and how it’s affected man to this day, “the distinguishing marks of charity are disinterestedness, tranquility and humility. But where there is disinterestedness there is neither greed for personal advantage nor fear for personal loss or punishment; where there is tranquility, there is neither craving nor aversion, but a steady will to conform to the divine Tao or Logos on every level of existence…”

“Our present economic, social and international arrangements are based in large measure, upon organized lovelessness. We begin by lacking charity towards Nature, so that instead of trying to cooperate with Tao or the Logos on the inanimate and subhuman levels, we try to dominate and exploit, we waste the earth’s natural resources, ruin it’s soil, ravage it’s forests, pour filth into it’s rivers and poisonous fumes into it’s air.”

“From lovelessness in relation to Nature we advance to lovelessness in relation to art - a lovelessness so extreme that we have effectively killed all the fundamental or useful arts and have set up various kinds of mass production by machines in their place. And of course this lovelessness in regard to art is at the same time a lovelessness to human beings who have to perform the fool-proof and grace-proof tasks imposed by our mechanical art-surrogates and by the interminable paper work connected with mass production and mass distribution.”

“With mass-production and mass-distribution go mass-financing, and the three have conspired to expropriate ever increasing numbers of small owners of land and productive equipment, thus reducing the sum of freedom among the majority and increasing the power of a minority to exercise a coercive control over the lives of their fellows.”

“This coercively controlling minority is composed of private capitalists or governmental bureaucracies or of both classes of bosses acting in collaboration - and of course the coercive and therefore essentially loveless nature of control remains the same, whether the bosses call themselves “company directors” or “civil servants”.

“The only difference between these two kinds of oligarchical rulers is that the first derive more of their power from wealth than from a position with in a conventionally respected hierarchy, while the second derive more power form position than from wealth. Upon this fairly uniform ground-work of loveless relationships are imposed others, which vary widely from one society to another, according to local conditions and local habits of thought and feeling.”

“And the crowning superstructure of uncharity is the organized lovelessness of the relationships between state and sovereign state - a lovelessness that expresses itself in the axiomatic assumption that it is right and natural for national organizations to behave like thieves and murderers, armed to the teeth and ready, at the first favorable opportunity, to steal and kill.”

Best line I’ve seen so far about the MSM:

“Is there another America than the one i live in? And why do i get their TV?”