:Archive Of May 2002:
Thursday, May 30, 2002 - 3:22 PM -
In June of 95 I was in a coffee shop reading WiReD. They had Gibson's view of the new Johnny Mnemonic flick, a retrospective on Xanadu, interviews with Vernor Vinge, Kirkpatrick Sale, and Gilman Louie, a blurb on star gamemaker Acclaim, an enter-torial on floating-point arithmetic, mention of new wireless PDAs and Wacom's tablet, and Nicholas took another bash at the media establishment for not getting digital.
It was a fun read, but they missed the real story: Jeffrey Zeldman went live.
Tuesday, May 28, 2002 - 10:09 PM -
While I'm dreaming, one of the things i'd like is a little desk picture frame that holds a webcam image. Select a meadow in Iceland. Late at night here, it would begin to glow as the sun rises.
- 10:32 AM -
Fudge. My reliable mail server has been shut down by excess traffic. Nice thing to wake up to. I hope not much gets lost. Meanwhile, if you meet a script kiddie, please break his fingers.
Monday, May 27, 2002 - 6:35 PM -
Opera 6.03 fixes bookmarklets.
Ignore the 'Latest News - May 15 - Opera Launches Opera 6.02 for Windows' on the front page, and don't click the Windows OS button on the top of the front page. Use the 'Free Download' button on the sidebar to get 6.03.
At least staff help on their newsgroup was very fast.
- 3:58 PM -
Oh crud... bookmarklets aren't working in Opera 6.02. Augh.
Sunday, May 26, 2002 - 2:47 PM -
Opera 6.02 PC is out.
Netscape has a preview of 7 up, but what I'd really like to know is there any difference between 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, 6.2.1, 6.2.2, and 6.2.3 that a developer has to look out for? Anyone keeping track of this, similar to how evolt keeps a nice browser archive?
Wednesday, May 22, 2002 - 8:05 PM -
Well, that's odd.
I'm still messing with the font thing. I had meant to dissect a rather interesting suggestion tonight, but got sidetracked on a glitch.
If you change
body {
font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
}
p {
font-size: 0.7em;
}
to this,
body {
font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 100%;
}
p {
font-size: 0.7em;
}
you wouldn't expect much to happen, except it does.
Netscape 6 behaves, and doesn't change a thing. Opera 6 reduces body text and paragraph text. IE6 behaves when on 'medium', but on 'smaller' the paragraph text is enlarged slightly so that it is no longer a line of grey fuzz.
If I change things again to enlarge the paragraph text in Opera to match the original case,
body {
font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 100%;
}
p {
font-size: 0.75em;
}
then the paragraph text in IE6 on 'smaller' gets even more comfortable to read, essentially becoming just a little smaller than my choice for Opera, and a little larger when IE6 is set on 'medium'.
Weird. Here's screenshots. I guess the next thing to do is test on everything else. Wish I knew what was going on. But meanwhile we might have another option to widgits for sub 1.0em text here. Maybe. Here's links to the code so you can play too.
Wednesday, May 15, 2002 - 8:41 PM -
So the problem is ... the problem is I want to use ems instead of pixels. Pure ems, not ems leading back to a base pixel. Because I want people who need to resize the text to be able to, and IE PC doesn't let them do that with pixels. So fine, I took the time and converted everything to ems and tested across the main browsers. Looked pretty good. 0.7em seemed to be close enough to my preferred 11px size.
Except I forgot that many people like to set IE PC to 'smaller' so the average website doesn't look like the worst of geocities. Fair enough, I did that too when I used IE PC. And for those folks my 0.7em sentences came out as lines of grey fuzz. Sure you could put the onus on the viewer to set their default back, but come on, it's not like hitting the volume on a remote with IE PC. They've got to unearth it from the toolbar. I'd rather be nice and figure out a way to make things look okay at 'smaller' too.
So it looked like I was going to have to read all those articles on font size that I've been avoiding because I have the unfortunate belief that making decent web pages should not be so hard. I'm a fool, yes.
Let's say I did not find wisdom on the mountain. Let's say if you wish to use pure relative fonts, you're screwed.
It appears what the cool kids are doing right now is using a base pixel and getting around IE PC's stupidity by attaching a font sizing widgit to their page. I can't tell you in calm language how moronic I think putting a font sizing widgit on a page is. I can't think of anything that better screams 'designer failure' and 'this medium is not ready for prime time'. Let's just say I'm not going to use a font sizing widgit.
Things didn't look so good. Things started to look like I needed to serve a different set of numbers to IE PC. Browser detect and all that, which I also despise, but I'd like to get a fix here.
This handy chart shows the child selector is not supported by IE PC, plus a couple of browser I don't care a fig about. Okay, it's a kludge, and one that will fall apart at some future date no doubt, but it's something. Hence I added this:
body {
font-size: medium;
voice-family: "\"}\"";
voice-family:inherit;
font-size: large;
}
html>body {
font-size: large;
}
html>body {
font-size: small;
}
The last bit is what I wanted. 'Small' made no change in the page on my prefered browser, Opera. 'Large' is for IE6, and 'medium' is for the funky old IE5 and 5.5. Now people with IE set to 'smaller' could read things, though it is on the small size, and when set as 'medium' the size would not be outrageous. Yay, said I.
Not yay. Netscape 6 and IE5Mac came out like IE6 set on 'smaller', instead of looking like they did before all this. Opera didn't change, why did they?
Probably because Opera is using 'small' as default, and N6 and IE5Mac are using 'medium'. Which I then tried, and they were. Sweet.
I'm not sure if the W3C specifies that 'medium' should be default. I was going to check, and then thought, why bother. All three browser makers laugh at the specs. What if the W3C does specify. Who cares. Fact is we've got a browser that doesn't match the others so I can't use this either. Yay. So for today anyway, those of you using IE PC set to 'smaller' still see lines of fuzz. Maybe I'll have time to work on it tomorrow.
Tuesday, May 14, 2002 - 12:24 PM -
So of course I forgot that most people surf with IE set to 'smaller' instead of the default 'medium'. Okay, I'll fix that.
Monday, May 13, 2002 - 11:28 PM -
Okay, let me see if I've got this straight. To take a screenshot on the mac I have to press the key with the clover scribble, and shift, and 3. Whereupon the mac makes a file of the image on the drive somewhere. Right, that's intuitive enough. Clover-shift-4 lets me make a rectangular selection screenshot. Clover-shift-4-caplock lets me snap a window. To get a screen that is a copy so I don't have the extra clicks of finding the file, and can just paste, I need to clover-shift-4 and then press ctrl while I make the rectangular selection.
So why the zark does the keyboard have a "print screen" key? Wow.
It's okay. No one needs to send me email defending their favorite platform. I'm sure if I started with a mac I'd like it too. Maybe.
I did make peace with the incredibly slow mouse. (Yes, I had the speed set on high.) I chucked it and installed a trackball.
Years ago, when there was still competition among word processors, some of them would let you change one setting to have most of shortcut keys work like the competing product you were familiar with. I ache for something like that every time I need to get a task done on the mac. Or at least a Berlitz guide.
Friday, May 10, 2002 - 9:25 PM -
One of many things I've been putting off is hacking a little bookmarklet for translating Japanese webpages. If you've been procrastinating that too, take this one. I haven't tested it across browsers, but it might work for you. Drag or copy or whatever you normally do for your browser.
- 3:53 PM -
Finally... I made the mistake of starting to upgrade the blog code and then getting side-tracked by my other backlogged projects. So I've been reluctant to post and then have to move the newer posts in the old code into the new code. So it's been pretty quiet. But a quick fix has been completed and I can be a public embarrassment in ems now. Probably scrap the whole design later, but that can wait. Right now, it runs, despite IE6 being a pig as usual.
Owen Briggs ©2000, 2006
