We Were On A Break!

I miss the old Friends show, sometimes. Hapless Ross Geller catching Hell for his behavior during a time when, he thought, he wasn't romantically linked to anyone and therefore wasn't accountable. Still, I am thinking that it's time we took a little break.

As the calendar is laid out this year, between work and family and a host of commitments, it just isn't convenient to update the page here for the rest of the year. And I suspect that few would bother to stop by on Christmas eve or New Year's eve just to see what I happen to think about HTML.

So this is going to be it for the year. The last Imparting Of Wisdom and Revealed Truth as I see it. Kids, be good. Stay in school. Don't end up like your old Unca Mark. Don't build pages out of Tables. Words to live by as we close out the year, don't you think? There must be others….

Close cover before striking. One at a time, please. Buckle-up, for safety. This door to remain unlocked, during regular business hours. May cause itching. Wait thirty minutes before swimming. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. You'll put someone's eye out. It's always fun until something gets broken. Always make backups. Accept no substitutes.

Your browser does not appear to support JavaScript, or you have turned JavaScript off. InstanceBeginEditable. Please close other applications to free up more memory. Not to be taken internally. Not available in Wisconsin. This information is provided on an "as-is" basis. Consult an accountant. Consult an attorney. You may want to discuss this with your doctor. May cause drowsiness.

Dispose of properly. Keep out of reach of children. All rights reserved. Store at room temperature. You may already be a winner. How do we do it? Volume! Made in China. Avoid contact with eyes. Semper Fidelis. Do not use near open flame. Visa and MasterCard accepted. This is not a toy. Try it today! In God We Trust. Requires three AA-batteries (not included). Please. Thank you. Dial "9" to get an outside line.

Slower traffic keep right. Click it or ticket. Not to be taken internally. Your mileage may vary. And remember, your TV will stop working in February. It's up to you to determine if that will cause a problem, or not.

The Year in Review

Well, kids, it's been an interesting year, hasn't it? Looking back I found a few "Oh, yeah" moments that are mildly embarrassing this morning.

Remember when I was going to learn JavaScript? John Lennon told his son Sean, "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans". Stuff just got in the way. New releases of software, new ways of doing old things. The general ebb and flow of life. So that needs to go back on the spindle, for next year. I've made it all these years without knowing JavaScript. I'll probably survive another several months. But all of the new reasons for learning JavaScript, mostly having to do with AJAX, are still valid, so this is something I do still want to work on in the months ahead.

There was a brief scare when it looked like we would have to actually add non-standard markup to our pages if we wanted to be sure that our non-standard browsers operated in standards mode. Said another way, even though our page was technically perfect, and several good browsers would render it as intended, for a few weeks it looked like we might have to actually add a line of unnecessary markup to that page in order to be sure that one Name Brand Browser operated in standards mode. The scare quickly passed, as we received assurances from Microsoft that their upcoming Internet Explorer would, right out of the box, operate in standards mode. If the books said it should look like this, IE would render it like this. I love a story with a happy ending.

There were lots of references to Dreamweaver. You can change Dreamweaver. You can adjust Dreamweaver. You can select preferences and options and tune-up Dreamweaver just about any way you might like. You should learn keyboard shortcuts. You should learn anything you can about Dreamweaver. One of the biggest interruptions this year was the introduction of Dreamweaver CS4.

Now, suddenly, everything you know is wrong, right? Well, no, not quite. A great many things have changed, but there is plenty that is still very familiar about Dreamweaver. The workflow has been streamlined and improved quite a bit. But it's going to take some time to realize gains from doing old things in new ways. Some of us may struggle, but for the most part I believe the journey will be worth it.

We talked a little about accessibility. We talked a bit about alternate access methods. I got an iPhone and discovered I needed to almost entirely re-write a short workshop I'd put together on The Handheld Web, about writing Web pages for today's Blackberry and iPhone users. This is going to be an area where we see the most excitement in the years ahead, I'm pretty sure. Today's machinery is kind of a baseline. We should not expect that tomorrow's Treo or Blackberry or iPhone will be in any meaningful way slower or less-capable than today's. So there may come a day, soon, when most of our page visits are coming in via these little devices. We owe it to our audiences of 2010 and 2012 to create pages that can be used, and useful, in handheld devices. Don't include media in file formats they don't understand. Don't rely on old technologies that may not be fully supported or supported at all in handheld devices. And realize the key differences. It's not just a smaller experience. It's a different experience. You cannot "hover" over a link on a Web page with your finger, for instance, and have that link change color, size or shape to reinforce it's selectedness, the way you can in a Web browser.


Outside of the Web, the world either went to Hell or came back from the brink, depending upon your point of view. Our retirement accounts evaporated in the heat of the lawlessness Wall Street refers to as "deregulation". As the economy tanked in various cities we waited to see what the effect might be on us, here on The Prairie. Like one of those giant falling-domino displays, we don't even know for sure when things will hit here, let alone how bad it might get. But already the upper levels of administration are warning us to do more with less, turn out the lights and look for ways to save. In a system where one of the biggest expenses is payroll, that does not bode well for anyone Making Plans for next year.

All we can do is try very hard to become better. And if you can create a dozen pages in the time it takes me to build ten, there's a good chance you'll be here in two years while I might not be. Maybe that recasts things like learning keyboard shortcuts in ways that mean more to you now. I hope so. I'd hate to lose any of us, including myself.

How Do We Measure "Better?"

There are those who think software updates are there to provide an increase in revenues back to the Mother Ship. There are those who think they fix bugs, enhance features and streamline the workflow. After buying a new wide-screen computer and several boxes of wide-screen software, we should be productive all out of proportion to our former selves, right? Well, maybe.

As with most things businessy, you would reasonably expect to be able to measure an increase in something vaguely defined as productivity. The net effect of a lot of small increases is a mighty force on the economic landscape. In the middle-late 1990s productivity gains outstripped inflation, briefly. This allowed employers to raise wages without having to raise prices. Think about that and let it sink in for a moment. Wages could go up, but prices didn't have to, in order to cover the increase. Wages and profits rose, but prices didn't follow.

So what does this mean to us? Maybe we replace our computers on a two-year or three-year cycle, or longer. We probably update our software about the same time. Eventually, we get a configuration that is some multiple faster than the one it replaces. Instead of Dreamweaver opening in twenty-three seconds, it now only takes twelve. What do we do with our new-found almost-a-dozen seconds? I wish I could say in these troubled times that I use that moment to spell-check my page or that I start a new one or even that I use that fraction of a moment to familiarize myself with my daily calendar and try to orient the rest of the week in my mind. I probably take a sip of coffee, though.

But even if I charge right into the day, is there really some benefit from being done twelve seconds earlier? Probably not, but the cumulative effect of twelve seconds a day, two hundred and sixty days per year, adds up to fifty-two minutes. Nearly an hour "extra" and even though the individual gains of one minute every week may not yield much, they do yield something, even if it's only the ability to sit in on one more meeting for free, every year.

I had a boss once who wanted to count-up the number of lines of code and markup on a page every Monday, and assign that humble number to me as what I had accomplished. This led, of course, to my splitting up lines of markup or code that could easily have stayed on one line, to adding plenty of <!-- HTML comments --> documenting the work, and so on. It also led to bizarre situations where I would use less efficient means of accomplishing the same task, entirely because it would give me more lines of "work" every week. Even if I could replace a dozen lines of markup with a one-line function, the old work would stay so it looked like I was accomplishing more, at least to him.

But there was no accounting for the three or four false-starts, beginning a project and abandoning a logical path when I suddenly realized we might need to account for a negative number, here, or need more than twelve places for the final answer or whatever. How do you function in such a Dilbert-esque environment? You give 'em what they want. And if all they care about is lines, give 'em lines. I did wonder what his reaction might be though, if I suddenly optimized a page and reduced its line count by a hundred lines or more.

But real productivity gains are attainable. It really is easier to build Web pages today, using Dreamweaver CS4, than it was using older versions of the same program. And it's easier using Dreamweaver than using any of the other programs I've tried. And the more you learn about what you are doing, the faster and "more productive" you become.

The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, as the saying goes. I am a firm believer in even Baby Steps getting you to some eventual goal. It's all progress. While you're saving-up for that new computer or the new software it craves, learn One More Thing about the program you use the most, every day. Adobe Dreamweaver? Lotus Notes? Microsoft Word? If you can find a way to save even a few seconds every day, the net effect adds up.

That New-Technology Smell

Is there anything better than a new computer? You crack open the packaging and… there it is. Full of promise. And absolutely Un-full of data, temp files and any kind of virus or spyware. People come by and congratulate you on your acquisition as if it was some kind of a real accomplishment.

I finally bought an iPhone. A while back, there were lines in front of Apple stores and AT&T outlets, as FanBoys from coast to coast waited for the first telephone to feature Apple technology. I wasn't one of those. The phones were expensive and slow and since I couldn't do anything with my phone but make calls, all of the other Magic Stuff didn't really mean anything to me. I didn't miss it, so I wasn't attracted to the iPhone. But over time, the TV commercials wore me down. How cool would it be to hold your phone up to a radio and have the phone say "Aimee Mann: Freeway" when you wondered what that song was? And more than once, I found myself looking at a house with a FOR SALE sign in the yard and wondered how much they wanted for it, saying "You know, if we had one of those iPhones, we could check their web site and see how much it was, how many bedrooms, etc."


So we got phones, my wife and I. iPhones. They are just $30 a month more than the plan we were on with another carrier's Family Plan and that is just 50¢ per day, for each of us. Fifty cents, or if you prefer, fitty cent gets us the e-mail and ease-of-adding-contacts and the GPS features and all of the rest of it, and we're already severely happy.

But it's not without pitfalls. I figured out how to synch my phone with my computer, but when I tried to synchronize Kathie's… well, she now has access to my e-mail, calendar, contact list and more. It would seem that an investment in a good book on the mysteries of the iPhone would not be money wasted.

At some point, I hope to carry, instead of my cell phone and my iPod, only an iPhone. And I expect to get better and better at running it, learning all of the tricks and Way-Kewl things it can do for me.

I completely understood only my very first cell phone. It was about six inches long, by an inch and a half by maybe three inches. It probably weighed three or four pounds, which felt like Real Value. It stored, I believe, four numbers. Maybe six. It made or it received calls. That was it. There was no calendar. There were no alternate ringtones. There was no camera. There was no headline news. There was no Yahtzee game. There was no satellite navigation. If I wanted to know where the local coffee shops were, I had to call someone from the local area and ask. That was the last time, though, that I completely got my cell phone. I know one thing above all else, concerning my new iPhone. I am already much farther along its learning curve than I have been in nearly twenty years.

A craftsman, the saying goes, is only as good as his tools. That often sounds to me like something Tim Allen's Tim Taylor character would tell his wife as an excuse to get the latest and greatest new gadget to hang on the pegboard at home. But one thing is true. Today's technology is vastly underutilized. Did you know you can make your fonts bigger by holding down your [Control]-key and spinning your mouse wheel? There are hundreds and thousands of features buried in our computers and our software that we don't know about and thus get no benefit from.

I've got some time off this holiday weekend. I hope to spend some of it with a few manuals, learning to do more with what I already have, rather than continually spending on the Next Big Thing. But damn, I really do enjoy this new phone.

Synchronize Your Watches! And Files!

There's a classic scene in many WWII movies where a bunch of guys are trying to coordinate an attack and to create the most surprise and chaos, everything has to happen at once. The tough sergeant pulls his sleeve up, revealing a $2 watch and tells everyone to "synchronize watches!" The typical watch of the era may have gained or lost a minute every day, but the point of the exercise isn't that everyone have the correct time, it's that everyone has the same time. There are times when you want the same thing on your Web site.

I take full advantage of Dreamweaver's .ste files, and create ways into places I'm likely to need to work on from everyplace I'm likely to work. So I have access to my work sites from home and from my laptop and, of course, from work.

But consider this situation: All of the files are the same. The same local files and the same remote files, on all three computers plus the single remote server. I get an idea at home at 9:00 Saturday morning, and change a page at work that said ABC into XYZ. I save this page locally and I put the file onto the remote server so it's live. As far as the world knows, now, the page says 'XYZ'.

At 10:30 that same morning, my wife decides to go to the co-op for a little shopping, and I take that as an opportunity to visit the local coffee house and catch up on my reading. I grab my laptop and head down there. While she's busy looking for organic rutabaga, I've got a head full of caffeine generating wonderful ideas. One of those is to change a page that currently says 123 into one that says 890. I make this change, and save the file locally on my laptop and put it on the server as well.

Eventually, I get to sleep, and rest up the next day while the memory of making these changes recedes into the middle distance. On Monday morning, I come barreling into work with my usual enthusiasm and change a page that had a picture of a kitty into a page that has a photo of a puppy. I save this page locally and upload it to the server as well.

What's my situation now? I have an ABC page on my laptop and my work machine, but I have an XYZ page on my home computer and on the server. I have a 123 page on my home computer, but an 890 page on my laptop and on the server. And I have a kitty at home and on my laptop, but a puppy at work and on my server. If not for synchronization, I'd be starting to wish I'd written some of this down.

Dreamweaver carefully inventories everything in and on your site. It remembers when you have made changes and what those changes are. And during synchronization, it compares what it knows about your local installation with what it sees on the remote server. If Dreamweaver notices a file is newer on the server than on your computer, it makes a note of that and suggests you might want to download the newer, fresher copy. And in the same way, if it notices the file on your computer is newer, it wants to upload that file to the remote server to overwrite the older one that it finds there.

Synchronization uploads or downloads files, depending upon the date-last-modified time stamp. The result is the same information on both a local and a remote computer. If you synchronize often, you will never move more than a few files, and almost always in the same direction, and you'll never confuse your ABC's with your 123's or your puppies.

A Spanner In The Works

Let's see how far we get with this one, shall we? From time to time I'll get a letter from someone confessing their ignorance of this or that "simple" markup term, tag or technique.

Typically, these conversations begin with "I'm so dumb" or "I just can't get this" which reinforces the anxiety people feel when dealing with this or that area of building out a page.

So first up: That is dumb. Look, there just isn't anything about doing any of this that is really what someone might call intuitive. Okay, maybe using <p> instead of <q> to indicate paragraphs, or using <li> instead of <xy> to indicate list items. That's helpful, but you still have to learn it, and not having learned it (so far) does not indicate a deficit in anyone's character.

Specifically (this is what's known as Burying The Lead), we are talking this week about <div> and <span> tags.

<span>

The <span> tag acts like an artificial inline tag. It affects only a subset of a larger block like a paragraph or a heading. Think of <strong> text. You start a paragraph, you motor along for a while and then drop in a <span> tag that assigns a class or an ID or actually contains styling rules that will be in effect for just this next few words or characters of the larger block. Something changes. Maybe the text changes color. Maybe the font is different. At some point, you end it with </span> and things will revert to whatever the formatting in effect was before the <span>.

<div>

The <div> tag is an artificial block-level tag. You will remember from our Introduction to HTML that block-level tags start on new lines, and claim the entire width of their containers. We use the example of a little paragraph with only a few words, that claims the blank space to its right after the period. If it didn't do this, the paragraph that followed would look like a second sentence in the first paragraph. Follow?

So what are <div>'s good for? Well, a lot of things. They are useful for corralling text that has a common purpose, or units that go together on the page. Think of all of your navigation links, for example. You would want them in some kind of a box that might be treated differently than the text above it, below it or around it. Maybe this could be a different background treatment, a border, different fonts or text-sizing or some combination of all of these. In the other example, you would probably want your photo captions to move with your photos, right? So you could wrap your <img> tags and your caption <p> tags together in a <div> and the two would travel together as their own block, no matter how big a monitor someone has or what text size they have selected. You can even constrain the width and/or height of a <div> and where it's placed on the page.

What do we mean by artificial in these examples? Well, the basic idea is that the behavior of a <span> or a <div> is undefined until you decide how to define it.

<div id="navigation"> begins a block-level situation on our page that we have to define for ourselves, probably by assigning one or more styles to the id of "navigation". The browser would encounter this tag and look up the styling information and apply all of those rules on every element of the division until it encounters the </div> tag.

How do I change fonts when I reference keyboard entries? I use a <span> tag that affects just a subset of the block that contains it. <span style="font-family: Courier, monospace; font-weight: bold; font-size: .9em;"> changes the text between the <span> tags from whatever it was to Courier. If Courier isn't found, your browser will use whatever the default system-resident monospaced font is. This text will be bolder than the text around it, and also just slightly smaller. This new styling rule will be in effect until the first </span> tag is encountered.

Constant Lurker will already be wondering why we don't just give this text a class, and assign the styling rules there. That would be the preferred method, allowing for much easier editing, if things go wrong. <span class="typewriter"> would put the class of "typewriter" into effect, and whatever styling rules applied there would be in effect until the </span> tag was encountered.

So that's basically it. Divisions, <div> tags, create block-level page elements where none previously existed. Spans, <span> tags, create inline differences from the surrounding page elements. Play around with them, and you'll get more comfortable with both concepts, I'm sure.

Again With the Change

Wow, we've had a lot to digest in the last week, haven't we? I am surprised by the number of international friends who have given us the "thumbs-up" in just the last dozen hours. But we will have a lot of time to adjust to things changing on the national, international and economic scene. But of more immediate import to us is the release of Adobe Creative Suite Four, and with it a new version of Dreamweaver.


Dreamweaver has grown up with the Web. It is what it is in large part because of the feedback of its users, who have complained, cajoled and wondered at every new release, and affecting the feature set and the workflow and nearly everything about the program. There has been a tendency lately for change to be incremental every several years and then Wham! there are very few familiar landmarks. Then the incremental improvement continues. We are now experiencing a whammy.

If you knew and loved Dreamweaver, you knew and loved Dreamweaver 2 even more. If you could work with Dreamweaver and Dreamweaver 2, Dreamweaver 3 presented little additional challenge, and so on.

What would have been Dreamweaver 6 was a Big Deal. Dreamweaver MX 2000 featured a new workspace and a new workflow. Things you needed were more readily available. Things you didn't need so much had been de-emphasized. Dreamweaver MX 2004 built upon that new platform and made it better. Dreamweaver 8 built upon that and we finished up with Creative Suite 3, and Dreamweaver CS3. If you knew Dreamweaver MX 2000, you could work within the CS3 environment.

Comes now Dreamweaver CS4. It features a reworked interface with a lot more options, and shows every evidence of a lot thought going into not only what we do, but how it all gets done. Where before we needed to navigate into our Sharedcode folders to find and edit footers and sidebars and such, now these (and other) documents are represented as buttons atop the workspace. Think of something you need to include in your footer? Just click the button for footer.html and that document is loaded up and ready to edit.

One frustrating thing over the past dozen years is that, in spite of how clever Design View is—you can drag and drop a photo over Design View and Dreamweaver will work out the image tag, the path information and so on—it still did only a fair job of approximating a "real" Web browser. We have struggled with Design Time Stylesheets and other hacks to try to make it better but the news is that now CS4 uses the WebKit engine, so you are very much in What You See Is What You Probably Get mode, now. In CS4 Design View, you can watch as menus change state when you hover over them! It's getting cooler and cooler out there, folks.

Another feature people have asked for, for years, is a split view that splits vertically. Now you can have Design View on the top and your code on the bottom, or your code on the left and Design View on the right.

Dreamweaver has always been good about bringing us Widgets, little ready-made gizmos that help to do complicated tasks simply—like building Tables and Forms and such. New in CS4 is a Forms Validation Widget, where you can sketch out, say, password limitations like every password must be at least so-many characters, or must contain at least two numbers, things like that.

Dreamweaver now believes the future belongs to standards-based markup, and to interactive technologies like AJAX. The Code Navigator and several new Coder workspaces are designed to help the hard-core feel more comfortable with Dreamweaver and may entice a few back from BBEdit, HomeSite and other page editors favored by Propeller Heads.

I am often asked about old versions of Dreamweaver. "Can I still use Dreamweaver MX 2004?" or "Do I need to upgrade? I'm using Dreamweaver 8, now" are questions that come up frequently. Normally I point out the differences and let them decide, but with Dreamweaver CS4, as with Dreamweaver MX 2000, I have to recommend that if you can afford it you upgrade right away. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

It's almost over.

In less than a week, we vote. It is one of the very best things that we as a nation do.

The little retired Granny in our neighborhood and Warren Buffett, the richest guy in Nebraska, each get the same say in the future of our government. And in a few months, whoever we decide takes over will do so—peacefully—and in full view of the rest of the world. It is an amazing thing to watch. It is an amazing thing to participate in. My father fought for my ability to vote. He went to war three times so I could vote. It's personal, to me.

Please, take a moment to look over the various positions that candidates hold and the various issues in play. Educate yourself about not only what people have said, but what they have done. And on November 4th, please go to your polling place and vote. Vote like it's important. Vote like people have died so that you could.

There are people in the world today who want to drive us apart. Even though we claim to be (and they claim to love) the United States of America, they want, almost pathologically need to demonize the other side. They don't just have better ideas, they actually think they are better people. We have seen this kind of politics rise from the middle 1970s and finally, hopefully, we may have seen it burn itself out this year.

Come on, people! There aren't half of us patriots and half of us trying to flush the country down the drain. We don't need, and we are not served, by that kind of thinking.

Look around at where we are, now. Look at our standing in the world. Our debt. Our health care and energy policy. Look at the world we are leaving to our daughters and granddaughters, to our sons and grandsons. Who is best able to build a better world for them, and for generations unborn?

Don't merely ask yourself if you are better off now than you were at some arbitrary moment in time, though that's an important yardstick, too. Ask yourself if what you are voting for is really what you believe in? Party politics is important, but Profiles In Courage teaches us that at times we all have to decide whether we are primarily Republicans or Nebraskans, whether we are Lincolnites or Americans, whether we are more concerned with our Party or our family. In any large group, you are going to find people who disagree. That doesn't make them bad, it just means they disagree.

Ask yourself who best will improve things, educate yourself about the people and the issues and vote.

Vote. Vote, like it was important.

Where Do You Come In?

Suppose a major bureaucracy. Many levels, and each level with plenty of detail. Think of, let's say, Plymouth, since they are out of business, now. We can talk about them without any one particular Pointy Haired Boss getting too upset. So, Plymouth.

You have an entire car company, with all the online concerns any company would have. Here is how to reach us. Here is where to go for a new car, servicing or parts, and so on.

Now think of each of the products, there toward the end. The minivan, the little Neon, the hot-rod Prowler, the Breeze young-family car. Each of those are independent enough to need their own Web sites, under the umbrella of the Plymouth site, itself.

The way Dreamweaver is organized, the Webmaster of the Plymouth brand site would have access to the whole thing, whether or not that was A Good Idea. You then create sub-sites for the gal who does the minivan, and another for the guy who does the Prowler and so on. The Neon Web person would have complete and total access to all of the Neon site materials, but could get no higher, could not affect the overarching Plymouth site, and could not monkey with the minivan pages, either. But the Plymouth crew, by merely opening up a folder, can get into the minivan pages, the hot rod pages—all of it.

You can create completely separate sites, and string them together online with different URLs. There are DNS tricks for colocating Web sites under one umbrella. The thing to take away from this is that there are ways around all of this, but it isn't always easy to see which one is best?

Plymouth itself was owned by Chrysler, so should the URLs be http://www.Chrysler.com/Plymouth/Neon/? Everything in the Neon folder would then be available to anyone who could work in the Plymouth folder, and everything there would be available to anyone working in the Chrysler folder. What about sub-sites like http://www.Plymouth.com/ or http://www.Neon.com/, then?

It ain't easy, bein' me. But we're working on it.

What has happened in the past is that we have had too many cooks in the kitchen. Too many ideas of what constitutes Good Taste, too many different levels of education and experience, too many different ideas of what is Good and what is Good Enough.

We are working on streamlining that, now, improving the workflow, the commonality of styles in writing and punctuation, navigation, the voice of the site, if you will. It's going to be an interesting project and I am looking forward to seeing how it all turns out.

Work continues apace on a new design for our own umbrella site. Committees are meeting to discuss whether this change will be radical, or more evolutionary. We have tested some preliminary mock ups for first impression scores and talked about things like whether we need [fill in your favorite feature, here]. At one point we even discussed whether we needed to redesign the site at all.

A lot of that is good and healthy. I come down on the side of those who would hate to think that we would adopt a look and keep it for a generation. The Web is too new for that, and nearly everything about it is changing. In the past we have changed designs not merely because we were bored with whatever is current, but largely due to changing technologies and user expectations. The first few generations were just link farm sites, gently pointing people in a very boring way toward whatever information they were looking for that we actually had, online. But we quickly got better.

There have been rapid improvements in display technologies, and today screens are wider, taller and offer more vivid colors. But they are also, thanks to mobile technology, smaller and narrower and offer fewer colors. Transmission speeds, by and large, are faster than ever before. And the user expectation has gone up. If we can place the current temperature and forecast in the corner today, then why can't we put my scholastic and social calendar on the first page, tomorrow? I have European Novels at 9:00am, Economics at 1:00 and then nothing until Pledge Night at 6:00pm. Other sites already do things like that. Shouldn't we be at least a cool as other sites?

There's almost never a dull moment.

The Olden Days

I was asked recently about "the new way" of building Web pages, and someone overhearing asked "What was the old way?"

It's a fair question, but one I am always reluctant to answer. The old way was bad, very bad. Let's just leave it at that. But that's always like when the little kids start asking about where babies come from. Anyone with enough curiosity to ask is going to be able to pursue the story, so we might as well get our side out there at the same time, so they can see the benefit of doing it right.

I hope.

So, if we set the WayBack Machine to 1997 what would we find that we don't approve of, today? Things stand out immediately. First, there was widespread use of spacer .gif files to get things to line up, visually. When we wanted to change anything about the type on a page, we used the <font> tag. And when we wanted to restrict the layout of page, we used tables. This was new in the new version of HTML, v3.2.

HTML was evolving at a rapid pace back then. The original specification, HTML, only lasted a year or so before HTML v2 was born. From there, HTML v3 struggled to keep up with the competing titans of Netscape and Microsoft, who were releasing new versions of their browsers twice a year, often with support for proprietary tags, which gave rise to another annoying trend of the day, the dreaded "Best Viewed In…" badges. Whatever Web page you wanted, you would think you would have a 50:50 chance of having the right browser open at the time, but it never quite worked out that way.

Spacer .gif files were small, at least. Typically only a single pixel, colored as transparency. These 1×1 image files were then presented with height and width attributes as necessary to fill out some area of a page that would normally be given over to what we now know as block-level tags. In the days before we realized that paragraph text online looks better without indentation, people would use:

<p><img src="images/spacer.gif" height="10" width="25">Here the paragraph begins…

This would have the effect of scooching over the starting text by twenty-five pixels. Other more elaborate effects could be generated, but they all worked basically the same way—the transparent image took up space on the page and caused other elements to flow around it. It wasn't optimal, but it was all we had at the time.

The <font> tag was the driver for anything having to do with type on the page. If you wanted to make your text larger or change the font (which you did often, to prove you could and show off how cool you were), you did that with the <font> tag.

<font face=Verdana size=+1 color=blue>

This would, even without double-quoting the attributes, set the text on your page to appear in the Verdana font, just a little bigger than surrounding text, and color it all blue. When you were done, you issued a </font> and the text reverted to the last size and color and so on. This could get very confusing, very quickly, especially as you adjusted only the size or only the color or only the font face, leaving the other attributes as changed. And this of course is what made it all such a bear to edit and maintain.

And lastly, we used the <table> tag whenever we wanted to restrict a layout. We took the tool designed only to present tabular data and turned it into a framework for our pages, with <td>'s for navigation, headers, footers and even columns in our main content areas.

We didn't do all of these things because we were jerks. We did them because these were the only tools we had at the time. Today's CSS gives you much more control over margins, paddings, borders and colors than we ever had, using tables. And today we gain the benefit of smaller, faster-loading pages that are much, much easier to maintain. It's a good life. We've come a long way and I'm going to trust you now. Kids, don't try these things at home. I'm a trained professional and you could hurt someone you love if you adopt techniques like these.

Check Your Work

Are you still checking your work in as many browsers as you can?

For some reason, people tend to feel like if you are using the Templates, it means you no longer have to check your pages. This isn't as true as we would like it to be, yet.

The rules for how HTML tags are supposed to work were written many years ago. You can check them out for yourself today at the W3C. But, somehow, everyone managed to read them differently. In some cases, the differences were minor, but in other cases they are pretty major. The bottom line is that we are still a long way from the television model, where a TV program looks pretty much the same on a Sony or a Toshiba or a Panasonic television.

If you haven't checked your pages in several browsers, you may be surprised at how different they look in Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Chrome or Netscape[!]. And even across platforms. Pages look different on PCs and Macs, too. Some of these differences are due to the size of the viewport, some are due to video resolution and others are differences in rendering.

Suppose you have an egg carton, and suppose you have thirteen eggs (for the bachelors in the audience, an egg carton is built to hold only an even dozen eggs). That's a situation a lot of Web browsers find themselves in from time to time, when a Web designer has stipulated limits on a box, but then come up with too much content to fill that box comfortably. Some browsers will honor the content, stretching the box as necessary to fit it all in—like an egg carton that suddenly has thirteen spaces for eggs in it. Other browsers will honor the container and cause any extra content to disappear. You end up having to scroll that box to see everything.

Some of the rules are written in a way that invites trouble. The standard does not limit sizes, weights or styles for headings, strong or emphasized text. It only states that the new text must be sufficiently different from the surrounding text that the reader understands there is something different about this word or phrase. This stems from the Olden Days, when we only had text, and only two of anything that looked like fonts, and only about sixteen colors. Today pretty much everyone renders an H1 heading at 200% of normal size, and in bold. But by the time you get all of the way down to the H6, there is little in common between Safari and Firefox and Internet Explorer and the others.

I routinely work on a Macintosh, and develop pages in Firefox. Then I check the pages in Safari on the Mac and switch over into Windows mode to check them again in Firefox for the PC and in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. When there are problems, I usually find them in IE. Most often it's a simple fix but there have been occasions when I have had to abandon something because I couldn't get it to work in all browsers.

We may one day get to a point where everyone is either using the same browser, or every browser is using the same interpretation of the rules. There was never a time when Milton Berle came on TV with a graphic saying "Best Viewed on Zenith Televisions" and Jack Benny came on with another graphic saying "Best Viewed on Admiral Televisions". All of the TV folks were able to read the published specifications and come up with cameras and receivers that worked, no matter what. Maybe one day we will get to that point on the Web, when pages will look the same on iPhones and iMacs and PCs. But I suspect we'll be fighting this battle for a long time to come.

Until that day, check your work in as many browsers as you can find.

Only a Quarter Remains

No, not a 25¢ Quarter. These are interesting financial times, but I refer to the Calendar, in this instance. And we'll take up the slack on a few other items that have been rattling around in the junk drawer for a while, too.

A while back we talked of the grand plans we had made for this year. Well, we have only these last three months now, to make a difference. If you were planning on learning a new language, or a new piece of software, or a new technique for doing something you have grown comfortable doing the old way, your sands are running out, now.

Adobe announced the coming of Creative Suite 4, recently. You should probably decide if you are going to upgrade, and when. I strongly dislike having to do anything important under deadline pressure for the first time, so I will want to get my copy installed right away, but there are good reasons to wait, too.

Think about the coming year, too, and not just the one that's ending. With the recent financial turmoil, are there things you may want or need that would be easier to get or accomplish this year than next? Maybe some priorities need to be shuffled or swapped, to make it all happen.

I'm always fascinated by how we use our time. There is a book, somewhere, that holds the dates for the academic calendar going out for years and years. You can go to that book and look up the first day of school for the fall of 2011, I'm sure. And I'm equally sure that someone, somewhere is going to be running around with their hair on fire in early August of 2011 when it suddenly hits them: the kids will be here any minute, now!

Designs On The Future

A committee is already meeting regularly, designing the next new page templates. We anticipate rolling out the new design and all of its supporting pages and materials in August of next year.

If there is some widget or gizmo on the current pages that you absolutely love, or hate, or if you have seen some widget or gizmo on one of the pages you regularly visit and you definitely do or definitely don't want to see it here, this is your time. Let someone know how important the weather is, to you, or the QuickLinks drop-down menu. Or, whatever. The designers are on their own schedule, but you can participate in the Web Developers' Network discussions every second Tuesday of the month, at 2pm, in the City Campus Student Union building. Note that this month's meeting is being held on October 21st at 2pm, due to scheduling conflicts that couldn't be avoided.

Your Papers Please?

Is all of your software legit? I mean all of your software. It's tempting, when you know how easy it is to go out on the interweb and find a "cracked" version of just about every program, to download the one you need for free. Quite a few of us are probably really good at justifying this kind of thing, too. "We buy so many copies, they won't miss this one" or "I only need this three times a year and can't justify the cost" or something similar. Some of the excuses are quite good, but they are each, potentially, career decisions. When the company finds out you've stolen a program and sues, it won't be you they sue, it'll be all of us. And it won't be you that gets the black eye. It'll be all of us. And it won't be you that gets the next paycheck, it'll be all of us. I am forever amazed at the upright (uptight?) citizens who sit in their lofty perches and make moral pronouncements on the fitness of all of the rest of us… while their hard drives are littered with stolen programs, movies and music. I always wonder what they teach their own kids about stealing, and how they resolve the two situations. Don't be That Guy. Cut the check and do it right.

Unca Mark's Bookshelf

I read probably more than is healthy. Really. If I didn't spend so many hours with my nose in a book, I could be out doing Other Things that might require the burning of calories. I remember as a young boy, my frustration at not knowing how to read. I just knew there was a whole world out there that I was missing out on. Before I had even started in the First Grade, I can remember my dad helping me sound-out the various symbols on the side of a Scotch Tape dispenser. Okay, that episode ended in tears, as I never got "tapee" right for "tape" but it's still a pretty good illustration and reminds me that sometimes teaching isn't easy, either. Still, I love to read.

From the very beginning, I have bought computer books and Web books. But I probably acquired four or five Web books for every computer book that came in the door. The discipline is just so broad and requires so many skills and I found myself lacking in… most of them.

I knew good design from bad when I saw it, but I didn't have the knowledge or tools to explain why this or that page was better than the next. I didn't know the language of Design. I could tell you this page made me feel happy and that one angry, but I didn't know how to talk about color. I understood there was too much Green in this photo, but I didn't know to adjust it, in Photoshop.

I had to learn the HTML markup language. I had to learn page-editing software like Dreamweaver. I had to learn image-editing software like Photoshop. I had to learn Design. I had to learn a little bit about a whole range of subjects, and I'm happy that I did. I am really glad that I don't have to spend the rest of my life looking at just some subset of the whole, like Navigation. Instead, you have to know something about nearly everything.

I learned HTML from three women: Molly Holzschlag, Laura LeMay and Elizabeth Castro. Molly wrote a giant HTML reference and then another covering XHTML, and finally a third toe-breaker that combined the two languages, Special Edition Using HTML and XHTML. Laura LeMay has a similar volume, which is also available in hardcover, as Sams Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML and CSS in One Hour a Day. And finally, I have owned several editions of Elizabeth Castro's HTML, XHTML, and CSS, a Visual QuickStart Guide.

Some of you may be asking if you need three books, and the answer for you is, probably, no. I got three because I loved to read and at the time I was learning all of this stuff I was primarily a freelance magazine writer working overnights when I had no access to any other help—everyone I knew was asleep at the time. But I had noticed that different authors will often explain the same thing in different ways. If one confused me, the odds were good that reading another would clear things up.

If I had to pick only a single book, it would probably be Castro's. Some of the illustrations are a little small—an entire computer screen reduced to three inches across—but the information is solid, and delivered in nicely-sized chunks with very good explanations.

We'll talk more about my bookshelf, I'm sure. But there is other reading, too, if you're interested. I hope to spend some time soon talking about my favorite magazines and Web sites. If you have a resource you are happy with, why not share it with the rest of us?

How'm I Doin'?

Ed Koch was famous for that line, uttered whenever he would meet someone as Mayor of New York.

How am I doing? I have given it a lot of thought, recently.

How are we doing, at providing training? Maybe even moving beyond that, slightly. Are we getting you to think? Are we sparking a little inspiration now and again? Have you been moved to Google this or that as a response to something you have read here or heard in a workshop? How about that face-to-face training? As Dr.Phil would say, "How's that workin' for ya?" Man, invoking two bald Americans in quotes before the first 100 words? This week ought to be good!

Where do you think we are coming up short? Would you be interested in an hour devoted to a discussion of fonts? Or would you sit through an hour of em-units, percentages and pixels? If there is something you would like to know more about, the odds are pretty good someone else would like to know more about it, too. Maybe you have heard about a new product and would like to see what all of the noise is about. Or maybe you have never quite gotten around to something that's been around a while? Garage Band? RSS? Keynote? Skype? Those freebie Office Suite knockoffs?

Probably we should not take anything for granted here. How about training locations? Are those convenient enough? Some people have asked if we couldn't do something now and again at the Student Union. They have small and large meeting rooms as well as a nice auditorium, there. And of course, there is always support for training (at the dairy store) on East Campus.

We have limited our training to daytime hours, so far. Is that okay? Would you come in for a breakfast workshop? Would you stay late for an After-School Special? Most of the workshops we do now are an hour or two hours long. Would you prefer half-hour hit-the-highlights discussions? Could you maintain focus for a whole morning, or a whole day? We have tried to offer workshops in the mornings and in the afternoons, on Mondays and Wednesdays as well as on Tuesdays and Thursdays, to accommodate the many various schedules we all keep.

I know that when Leona teaches Photoshop and when Ranelle teaches Microsoft Office, they have the application open as they demonstrate the various features. When I teach Dreamweaver, I am almost always the only one in the room that doesn't have it running on my computer. When you see it, whatever "it" is, you see it right in front of you in my workshops. One benefit of doing things my way is that you can always go back to the training site and click on a link or re-read something that confused you at first. I have heard from about half a dozen students that they really enjoy being able to go back for quick refresher looks at various pages. Would it help if I had Dreamweaver open on one screen as well, to show where something is as well as talking about how to find it, instead of pointing at it?

What about personal training? I love it when people stop by after shopping next door for a new computer or software and ask a question or two. I have shown a lot of people how this or that works, in person. Would it be valuable to you to have someone come directly to your office or cubicle for training?

Do you think we need more training? More up-to-date training? More topics? Fewer? Would you be willing to pay more, to receive one-on-one training or a book to take back with you?

We have tried so far to keep Friday's free. Would it be worthwhile for you if we held a Friday afternoon HTML HelpDesk? You could drop by the New Media Center with a URL or some screenshots, or bring in your laptop and have your questions answered?

Are you happy with the lighting, the sound and the weather in the classroom? We currently give out Wintergreen LifeSaver™ candies before class. Would you prefer another flavor?

In short: How are we doing?

The Weather is Changing

The weather is changing, again. I love this time of year. I have lived on both coasts and several places here in the middle and I can tell you this: There is nothing like an eastern Nebraska autumn.

Lumpy people like me can hide some of those lumps under layers of clothes. The air smells fresh and crisp in the morning and we can turn our air conditioners off. The cars still start and there is dew, not frost, on the windows. In another week or two we'll start to notice the colors changing. There are any number of end-of-summer holidays and harvest events and celebrations. It's a good time to be here. The wheel keeps turning, though, and if your favorite season is coming up, it'll be upon us soon enough. But for me, I love the fall.

The technology weather is changing, too. Adobe have announced that they will announce Creative Suite Four on the 23rd of this month. So we have been warned, there, I guess. I have been using the Dreamweaver CS4 beta for a couple of months and it's interesting. This is the first version that Adobe had time to get into, really, and gives a good indication of where they are taking Dreamweaver... or pointing it, anyway.

The biggest improvement that I have noticed is the ability to split-screen Code Views. We have always been able to split our workspace into two units. One was always the Design View and the only other option was Code View. You could drag-and-drop things into Design View and Dreamweaver would work out the HTML for you. You could see comments in Code View, as well as all of the various tags affecting your markup. Cool.

What's new this turn is that you can have two panes of Code View. In one, you can be displaying lines 23-75, say, of your page. And in the other you can be showing lines 320-365. So if you're repeating something you did earlier in the page you can actually see the markup you're trying to replicate while you're working on the page. You can work equally well in either pane—making edits in the top pane changes the document you scroll up in the bottom panel, and vice-versa. It's a little thing, but it's a nice feature for those of us who are spending more and more time in Code View. There are other changes, though I'm not sure everyone will see them as improvements.

Adobe seems to have spent a lot of money trying to make Dreamweaver a tool more of the hard-core developers would be interested in, again. There are workspace options and panels we've not seen before. There were four workspaces, plus one you could save on your own. Now there are eight: App Developer, App Developer Plus, Classic, Coder, Coder Plus, Designer, Designer Compact and one called Dual Screen. The insert ribbon is now a panel. The Properties panel and Search panels, apparently, are always visible now. You used to be able to drag those off or hide them. Command-[F3] hides Properties as it always has, but the top of the chrome is still there. And we've done away with the manilla-folder tabs. Now you select button/boxes. The effect is the same, but they are no longer "tabs". This is carried through to opened documents, too.

It'll take a little getting used to. But, so does the weather. And the crew that brings us CS4 apparently all still have jobs. So there will one day probably be a Dreamweaver CS5. And the great wheel keeps turning….

With a Little Help From My Friends

I am sure there have been people who learned all of this on their own, from books or Web sites. People who never had the opportunity to share a URL with someone and ask for help. They never got the chance to sit at Chipotle or Barnes&Noble with a friend or colleague and say, "Okay, walk me through this like I'm nine." Strictly speaking, learning it all from books or Web sites involves at least one other person who authored the material, but let's leave that for the moment, as I struggle to make my point: There may be people out there like this, but I have never met one, and I have been doing this since 1993.

Molly Holzschlag worked with me, during an evening or two when we both worked on the old, dead GEnie network, and then again in a series of Saturday morning online chats when we both worked at The Microsoft Network, msn. It wasn't just the two of us—Molly has always been very generous with her time and there were several of us in both instances, but it is after all my story, here.

I owe a lot to Molly and Elizabeth Castro. I owe a lot to Eric Meyer, who unravelled the mysteries of CSS several years later, when we all moved away from tabled-layout designs. Along the way, I have asked for and received help from Jeffrey Zeldman, Steve Champeon, Rachel Andrew, Larry Ullman, Patrick Delin and countless, anonymous posters to the Webdesign-L or CSS mailing lists.

In every case, I have met with a spirit of "I won't do it for you, but I'll show you how" which left me richer after every encounter. I have tried to hold up my end of the bargain, as well, answering questions as soon and as well as I could. And of course now I am teaching half a dozen workshops of my own. But we can't all write to Eric or Molly. We can't all even write to me. And that's why it's great to have a resource like the UNL Web Developer's Network, WebDevNet.

In a group the size of WebDevNet, there may not be two people who use the resources available there in quite the same way. We meet on the second Tuesday of every month, face-to-face, or "sharing meatspace" as the kids say. You are welcome to bring a problem (or a solution!) to these meetings, and they're a great way to meet new people who can help you with Dreamweaver, HTML or the Templates. From actual experience to lofty theory, I can't remember a time someone asked something and got back "I dunno." But there is much more available. You can discuss issues in real time via a special IRC channel. Or you can leave a question in the Bulletin Board and come by days later to see the response. There is a Wiki, there are e-mail contacts and phone numbers.

And you might recognize someone you regularly pass in the hallway, too. It's nice to have someone new to share lunch with. I'm a fat man. I know these things.

WebDevNet meets at 2:00pm every second Tuesday of the month. Usually, we're in the City Campus student union. Check the web page to be sure, but plan on joining us. We might even put you to work on the next design!

Back to School

This week, I saw "Back to School" specials on tires, clothes dryers and truckloads of things that have nothing to do with going, or sending someone, back to school. Okay, maybe tires. If my daughter was going off to some faraway college in a shaky old car, I'm sure I'd want her to do it on new steel-belted radial tires. But not to pick on tire dealers, these guys are exceptionally ruthless. They are out there for every holiday. July 4th, Memorial Day, Veteran's Day, even: "Hey, grandpa! Thanks for taking that bullet on Iwo Jima. We got you a set of snow tires for the Studebaker!" But a new washer-dryer?

Having said all of that, have you checked your pages for Back To School? Are you still touting Fall, 2007 or Summer Session?

Peanut and Jocko showed up every week when I was a kid, promising a future where computers made our lives easier. Computers, they told us, would lead us away from drudgery, from repetitive tasks, from having to remember things. And maybe one day this will finally filter down to Web development in a way that automates dealing with expired information. Easily, I mean. We can do it now, with the application of enough time, talent and money. But why can't we just highlight a paragraph in Dreamweaver and set it to expire on the umpteenth of October?

Check the page on October 7th, and the information would be there. Show up on October 20th and it would be gone, with no further attention from the developer. It could be great. It could also be awful, when someone edits out the </expire> tag and the entire page from the <expire="10/14/2008"> tag on just… evaporates.

See, the thing about automating various events is that computers will always do only exactly what you tell them to do, and not necessarily what you want or what you mean. Computers won't know when special circumstances should change the rules you have carefully crafted. Computers won't know or care. They'll just do what you've told them to do.

I used to leave my computer On all of the time. Research (that's pronounced anecdotal evidence) of the day said that they didn't use much electricity keeping everything spinning and warm, especially if the monitor turned itself off when not in use. But when Chancellor Perlman said to turn 'em off, I got religion. My computer now turns itself on and off every week day. It comes on at 7:28am, when I'm usually taking off my jacket, or putting away my lunch for the day or something similar. And it shuts down every afternoon at a quarter to 5:00pm. It sleeps all day Saturday and Sunday. It's a great time and I guess a great money-saver. But it's not (yet) smart enough to know about Monday holidays.

Sometimes I wonder about my poor, lonesome computer. All alone in a darkened room, obediently waking up to tackle the days chores. Anxious, maybe. Like a little puppy. All alone in a darkened room until finally, in frustration, it shuts itself off in the afternoon, to try again in the morning.

I don't mind a macro or two. I love keyboard shortcuts that can save me from drilling down into a menu or three. And a simple macro that kicks off a repetitive action or chaining together something like "Save As…" and moving the file to the Desktop, and maybe even how to name the resulting file. That's fine. I'm there when that's all happening. I can control it. I even bypass it during special circumstances and "Save As…" my file somewhere else, if I need to.

I'm looking over my pages this week, to make sure they are still up to date. But I'm taking Peanut and Jocko at their word, and waiting for the day when computers make our lives easier.

Little Changes Make a Big Difference

If we learned anything about the recent Olympics, it's that just a little extra effort pays off. When Phelps scored his sixth (or was it the seventh? ninth? umpteenth?) gold medal, he was .01 seconds faster than the anonymous swimmer who earned silver.

Point-zero-one. Think about that, for a moment. Twelve or fifteen years of training, study, practice, doing without pizza and french fries. And the difference was only point-zero-one? If you took home the silver that night, how could you live with yourself? If you had eaten one more Wheatie that morning, it may have made all the difference.

Much of Life works like this. Especially in athletics, but it shows up in many other areas, and you can be sure that in another five hundred words I'm going to try to bend it around to Web work, too, right? You betcha!

Think about money, for a moment. You earn $100 and you spend $98. You can do that for the rest of your life. But if you earn $100 and spend $100, or worse, earn $100 and spend $101, you will be miserable in just a few years, and potentially for the rest of your life. All for the difference of only two or three dollars a month.

Eating is the same as money, really. Take in a hundred calories and expend a hundred calories and you can wear the clothes you wore to prom for the rest of your life. But if you eat a hundred calories and only manage to burn 98, eventually you will end up looking like, well, me. Think of the implications of that, for a moment.

From the Mark Hiatt Big Book of Business Clichés: "There is never time to do it right, but there is always time to do it over".

We have to start taking this one back, folks. Spell check your pages. Validate your markup. Have someone else read your new page to make sure it says what you think it says. These are each little things. Collectively, they may add another three minutes to the time it takes you to build a Web page. But the payoff is that you soon gain a reputation for building dependably great Web pages.

There are many worse reputations to have, kids.

A nationally-famous Web site made fun of some of our pages, recently. Deservedly, which really stung. The author probably knew the pages were, um, bad, on delivery. Imagine needing Flash to navigate a page. Now imagine needing to click on moving links to get from page to page. See what I mean? Someone, somewhere, and probably several people, should have caught this one early. "Uh, that's a bad idea" is all it would have taken. But the pages went live and some measure of our reputation has been tarnished. But I know one thing:

It won't happen to me.

I build compliant pages within the approved Template. I validate the markup and I check my speeling. I try to have someone else look it over, preferably someone unfamiliar with the material and someone who does not have a connection with it. If I were making pages for Athletics, I would not ask a coach to look over my pages, for example. If I worked in training, and hey, I do, I would not ask another trainer to read my work. Get a civilian, and then listen to how they respond.

Maybe one day I will be recognized for my work. Maybe one day someone will say, "Hey, Mark? Thanks for keeping us out of the papers for having bad pages" but even if no one ever does, as the saying goes, Virtue is its Own Reward.

It's a little extra effort. I can do a little extra effort to make sure I don't embarrass myself and my peers. Maybe one day I'll win a gold medal, too.

The New Guy

We got a New Guy this week. Our guy really is a guy, Dan Noennig, but that's not important. It could just as easily have been a New Gal and it wouldn't change things.

But you know how I'm really big on checkpoints, those "From here on, it'll be different" moments that we use to measure our progress, or at least our journey. This was of course one of those. But it is a good time to take stock, too. What are we doing and why, and how?

I have never learned so much as when I sat down to teach someone something. It really is the best motivator to learn that I have ever encountered. Someone, somewhere, will ask the Incredible Question and expect me to have an answer. I hate to disappoint people, so I always try to give them one. Taking someone around to meet all the new people they will be working with is another opportunity for that. "We do this, then we do that." "Really? Why do we do that last?" Geeze, I dunno. We've always done it that way.

But is it really the best way?

Back in the era of the Steam Powered Computer, I was a mainframe computer operator. Everything I was required to do came out of a Job Book. Tonight is Job Cost Accounting night, so we turn to that page. It says mount this tape on that tape drive, put this kind of paper into the printer and then at the console type >> GO JCA. Very detailed. But I was always troubled by one part. I was called upon to print a report on three-part NCR (No Carbon Required) paper, which was not known for its high print quality. But so far, so good. The instructions further called upon me to burst and decollate the three copies of this report, to put the first-generation report here, the second-generation report there, and to throw away the last copy. This job had been run in exactly this way for at least three years before I showed up.

I asked why we couldn't just print that report on two-part paper, which was cheaper and much better quality and would take less time in post-printing processing. You would have thought I was bringing them Fire.

I am not saying I am some kind of a genius. I'm just saying there is value in seeing things through new eyes. Scott Adams has made a fortune poking fun at all of the institutionalized inefficiencies in American work life. This was just one of those.

At one time, I'm sure, there were supposed to be three people who got that report. Maybe one of them was promoted, or fired, or was moved from one project to another. For whatever reason, the third person no longer needed to get a report every week of how the business was doing, and they stopped coming to get the printed report when their need for it ended—but the word never got to the machine room. After a few weeks of the third copy going uncollected, the word got back to the job book that solved the problem the computer operators had: throw away the back copy. But that's not a very Big Picture view of the situation as a whole.

I was amazed. They didn't even shred the third copy. It was routinely thrown away for three years, wasting paper, time, ink, printer hours and some measure of the environment, and it turns out exposing the company to all kinds of risks, should a competitor happen by to do a little dumpster-diving. They'd never given it any thought.

I am sure that there are Stoopuhd Things that we do here every week, but that we've become accustomed to. We did it like this last semester. We did it like this last year. We got from last year and last semester to here, so it must be okay, right? Maybe. Probably, even. But it's good to have someone check your work. It's good to have someone question your assumptions, now and then.

We got a New Guy this week. I hope you get one soon, too.

The New Computer Blues

I find myself lately thinking about getting a new computer. Again.


I am not interested in getting into a religious argument, here, about Apple Macintosh versus Microsoft Windows PCs. The two are much more alike than they are different, by now. And make no mistake, it really is a religion with some people. At various times, I have had a Mac desktop and Windows laptop, or one kind of computer at work and another at home. It really is up to you and there is little that you can do with one that you cannot also do with the other, no matter what the brand name. At some point you, too, will start to think it's time for a new computer. Here are some other things to think about when that day finally comes.


See, there are struggles ahead. The path is fraught with terrors that survive long after that new-computer smell has abated. For the last few years, all of my work has been on this computer. All of my work is in this computer. Every computer today is easily customized, personalized, to your own liking. Out of the box, most Macs have the main programs they run visible on the bottom of the screen. Me? I have mine over on the left side. Why? Because I like it that way, and because I can. If I get a new computer, I will need to spend some measure of time fiddling with it so that I can operate it without thinking too much about what I am doing.

I am going to have to move that bar of programs again. It's going to take some time, and I may have to go looking for help as I try to remember how it was done, years ago. If not for the bar, then for any of dozens of other tweaks I have performed over the years. Carried to an extreme, there are utility programs that will re-map keyboard shortcuts and automator doo-hickeys that will fire off various scripts and jobs at various times. You can "build" a computer today that is so personalized that you may be the only person who can use it.

Again, you can do all of this with PCs and Macs and probably to some degree with Linux computers, too. And once you get the computer set up to your liking, you then have to mess with all of your programs. Set aside even more time to get your word processor tuned-up the way you like. Plan on a few minutes to get your Web browser settled-in. Each program today seems to feature a Preferences section where you can choose a favorite font or color or size of type, or how things will print. All of that will have to be moved to, or replicated on, the new machine. Got a custom dictionary? An address book? Everything must go!

And then of course, there is the work. The whole reason for all of this exercise. Each of the files you have so lovingly hand-crafted since your last upgrade needs to be moved from its home in the dusty old computer to the new computer of your dreams. You need to be able to get into all of your old Web sites. You need to be able to get into all of your old word processing documents. You need to be able to get into all of your old calendars.

The result of all of this effort is that as our careers age, we tend to make both our computers and our programs ever more personalized, and we tend to make increasing use of more programs, resulting in settings files and data files that need to be transported. Any computer available today is going to be better than any computer you could get three years ago, but you have to be willing to cross off a whole day or more, it seems, to begin to use that new speed, that bigger monitor, etc.

Maybe this is A Good Thing. Maybe it puts the brakes on upgrading every six months or every year. I know I am not looking forward to the move. I am looking forward to a newer computer, but I don't relish the process of moving everything over so I can get to work. As a kid, we moved a lot and every time something got lost and something got broken. Today, with new computers, it's exactly the same.

I Wish I Could Write Better

I wish I could write better. Don't you?

See what I mean? What am I asking, there? Am I being cute, and asking "don't you wish I could write better?" or am I asking if you, yourself, also wish that you could write better? The two simple sentences are just vague enough together that if we walk away from them and move on, some people can reasonably be expected to explain it either way.

I have been writing a long time. I have never come up with anything anyone would remember, probably. I'm kind of proud of a paper I did in college. I got a kick out of a few commercials I did when I was involved in radio. I am very proud of my father's eulogy. I did well with a few articles and reviews for Computer Shopper and some other magazines. But nothing I have written has ever been immortalized on a T-shirt. Nothing is in danger of appearing in Bartlett's Quotations. Still, I have always been a fan of good writing, wherever I may find it.

Have you ever wondered how some people can tell a story in a dozen words, while others need an afternoon? Have you noticed which story is generally better? Brevity is always a goal, but never, as we see above, at the expense of actually conveying an idea correctly.

Some of the best writing being done today is in advertising. Some of the very best work is in single-panel comics. Think of it—you have only the time it takes to turn a page to convince someone they need an entirely new car. You have only thirty seconds to convince someone they need to change the toothpaste they use. An enormous amount of work is brought to bear on the task, when skillions of dollars are at stake.

There are different types of writing. Writing a book is different from writing for a magazine. Magazine writing is different from writing for radio. And of course, writing for the Web is different from everything else. Please try to keep it short.

Online, we don't have the pressure to complete an idea or an argument by the bottom of a page. We don't know how big our "page" might even be. So there is a tendency to put too much on the page. Most people online don't really read the information they seek, they skim what's available, looking for bold or emphasized text, sidebars and lists:

• Strong, bold text
• Emphasized text
• Lists of key items

Always remember your audience. Are there many readers for whom English is a second language? Maybe you will want to lighten up on both idioms and cultural references. Lighten up? Under the weather? Over the hill? Is it possible two people discussing a Hot Car and a Cool Car are both discussing the same vehicle, and both in the same way? What would Maxwell Smart think of a situation like that (if you don't know who Maxwell Smart is?).

Put your stuff away for a day or so and re-read it before publishing. Seeing a page with new eyes is an easy way to catch mistakes. Sure, you meant to tell them A, B and C. But did you? Did you ever really get around to C at all? Make sure your true meaning is clear. Pass the work around and let others see it—and listen to their comments.

There was a Saturday Night Live skit where Ed Asner, as the manager of a nuclear power plant, had to leave a new crew in charge. He cautioned them on the way out, "Remember, you can't put too much water on the reactor core!"

Sure enough, as soon as he was gone, alarms started blaring and lights started flashing and the new guys had to respond. But were they supposed to put all of the water they had on the reactor core? Because, after all, you can't put too much water on the reactor? Or were they supposed to add it a gallon or two at a time, because you can't put too much water on the reactor? Hilarity ensued.

I wish I could write better. Don't you?

Where Do You Go For Help?

I'm a reader. Specifically, I absorb most of my information from reading books, magazines and Web sites. A selection of a few of my favorite books is at right. From the magazine rack, I enjoy .Net Magazine ("Dot-Net") and Web Designer, both from England (By the way, how is it that there are no USA-based Web magazines?). These are both expensive, but offer a fresher perspective than the books and most come with handy tutorials and even CD-ROM collections of fonts, utility software and templates for exercises detailed in the issue.

But what about online?

There may well be more good information available online, for free, than is available on a printed page, today.

You often hear me preaching about validating pages, and directing people to the World-Wide Web Consortium's Web site, http://www.w3c.org/. These are the people in charge of our various Web standards. These are the people who decided what should happen when you place a <p> tag on a page. They must know something, right? Well, yes and no. If I were to set about the task of writing a book on HTML, I would start here for my source material, but while the site is a great reference, it's not really a good source for learning things. Every page of the site just drips with committeeism and almost Dilbert-speak. Even that would be okay, but it's just so dry. Here's the W3C, on the subject of visited links. Now you know why I make the Big Bucks, huh?

There is a W3Schools Web site, not affiliated with the W3C, and there is a lot of free material there, but it is crowded with advertising.

So where do mere mortals go for help? Especially busy mortals? Back in the Olden Days, we had a resource that was fantastic, called WebMonkey. Plenty of mere mortals showed up here and, for a few years, learned the in's and out's of Web Design and Development, but it didn't last. Now, it's back, and off to a great start. You can read about all of the various tags, just as before, but the Web is bigger and more complicated than it was, and you can also find out about content management systems here, now. You can learn JavaScript. You can learn MySQL. You can learn PHP. You can learn blog publishing. You can learn RSS. You can learn more than you can learn, if that makes sense—and it's all free.

Microsoft maintains a lot of Web training and related resources. Unfortunately, I can never find what I'm looking for when I start at Microsoft.com. When I have been sent links via E-mail or stumbled upon a page in a Google search, I have been very impressed. I just can never find what I'm looking for there. Understand, please: It's not that it takes me twenty minutes or half an hour. I can never find what I am looking for, there.

Adobe, on the other hand, have a great site. Maintaining the terrific standards of the Macromedia folks, their Dreamweaver resources are outstanding. It's a Framed site, which is too bad. There was a time in the late 1990s, when we feared that one day every page might look and work like this. But at least this is a Framed site that works. You can learn some Dreamweaver here, folks. I know I sure have.

The Kewl Kids hang out at A List Apart. This is the crowd that is dragging the world, kicking and screaming, to the Promised Land of Web Standards. I don't care much for the earlier stuff, and the site has been around forever so there is some very early Early Stuff. But if you pick things up around ALA098 and work forward for a few issues, you will see how far we've come, and why (and who to thank). Articles on A List Apart come from authors you have heard speak at conferences and on podcasts, authors who have written many of the books on your own bookshelf. You won't find tutorials on which <HX> heading to use where. But you will find some wonderful discussions on how to best style your pages, or even parts of pages, like styling your Forms.

And of course, if you have any questions, you can always pop in here and ask me anything. As I say in many of my workshops, "If I don't know the answer, I'll make something up!"

Meet It Head On!

What is difficult for you? Tables? Columns in CSS? Adding Padding?

Maybe the better question is How do you deal with this difficulty? Do you just ignore it? Do you try to excuse it with a nervous chuckle "Hehe, I'm just not good at Tables?" Do you use other means to overcome the deficit?

Why not learn Tables? Why not learn columns in CSS? Why not learn about adding Padding?

I'm serious, why not? There aren't a dozen things to know about most tags and attributes and I can guarantee you that if you can drive a car or bake a cake or even order dinner from a menu, you probably have already mastered things that are much more difficult than whatever it is you lack in the world of HTML or CSS understanding.

Let's take tables, for example. Tables are our most common compound tag. Compound tags require two or more tags to "build" a page element. In the case of Tables, we have <table> tags indicating where in the document our Table begins and ends, but then we must describe the actual table itself. In a way, the <table> tags are no different from any other tags. <p> tags indicate the beginning and </p> tags indicate the ends of paragraphs. Whatever it is that a paragraph is and does, we know where it begins and where it ends. With Tables, it's no different. We use <table> and </table>.

So, we have indicated where the Table starts and ends. Now we have to describe the Table itself. This is done left-to-right, in rows. You cannot have anything in a table if it doesn't appear within a row. That is, there must always be at least one row. Table Rows, in keeping with HTML's easy-to-remember tag naming scheme, are put down as <tr> and </tr>.

Once again, while it is necessary that these tags occur within the original <table> tags, there really is nothing special about Table Rows. These tags indicate where on the page, and where within the Table, a Table Row begins and ends.

Finally, the Table Data cells need to be identified. Hmm… Table Data. Do you suppose that's how they arrived at <td> and </td> as the tags involved? And do you think, as straightforward as all of the other tags are, that things would suddenly get jumbled and complicated, now? Or do you suppose that <td> tags merely show where within each Table Row a Table Data cell begins and ends?

So what have we built, so far? Well, we have indicated where on the page our Table should begin and end. We have indicated where within the Table a Row should begin and end, and within that Row, where the Table Data begins and ends. So taking that knowledge, just that little bit of understanding, what kind of table do you think this creates?

<table>
<tr>
     <td></td>
     <td></td>
     <td></td>
</tr>

<tr>
     <td></td>
     <td></td>
     <td></td>
</tr>
</table>

If this looks to you like a single Table, with two Rows, each with three cells, you're correct. See? It's really not that difficult. Just a few simple rules need to be followed: The number of cells in each row must always be the same. And we should not use Tables for page layout.

You can create some very intricate designs on your page using Tables. Columns, headers, borders and so on can all be created and manipulated at will. Where two, three or more boxes need to be reduced into a single box, we can use attributes such as colspan="" or rowspan="" to get the numbers to balance. In our table example above, if we were using the entire first row as a heading or some other single-column entity, we could have added a colspan="3" attribute to our first <td> tag. This is saying that the first Table Data cell actually spans three columns. This balances the number of cells in every row. The first row includes a single Table Data cell that now spans three columns, while the second row actually includes three <td>'s. The two are equal, so everything is fine.

There are several attributes we can apply to Tables. Cellpadding, cellspacing, a border width for example. And of course Tables can be styled using CSS to a degree that Table attributes don't allow. You can elect to have all borders appear as a single pixel, by applying border="1" to the table. But using CSS, we could style the bottoms of the boxes one way and the sides another. We could even make the left-side different from the right-side border, alternate background colors in rows, etc. CSS rocks, remember!

There are many little things involved, but none of this is as hard as doing your own taxes or taking the training wheels off of your child's bicycle. If you can dedicate only fifteen minutes every day to the task of Learning About Tables, you can learn it all within a week, probably. And, once you know it, you can keep that knowledge for the rest of your life. That's a bargain, isn't it?

And then you can get on with the task of learning The Next Thing.