Sunday, February 17, 2002

Indie Mac Developer in Need Nobody at Apple will answer our question: "How to get a physical Watson product placed in the Apple Retail Stores." We're sure the fine people in Apple Retail are busy, but Watson is a tractor app. It moves iMacs. Ken? Reply 4:17:53 PM

And a second email to Dave on the same subject: One last thought. The html table concept is much easier to grok than the "Box" concept of CSS. That's the key. Ask someone to explain the CSS "Box model" concept in as many words as it takes for a newbie to get started. Oh, with tables, you can't get the behavior here. (Resize the window and watch the number of rows/columns change.) http://www.karelia.com/watson/watsonreaction.html 4:08:52 PM

Here's my contribution to the CSS debate (via email to Dave Winer): I just went through the pain of attempting to build a table-less site for Watson: Lessons: - There are lots of CSS bugs. Each browser has its own set of bugs. The spec isn't simple enough. The conceptual model--boxes--is not intuitive. - If you have even a small percentage of OmniWeb users, you'll piss them off to no end when you tell them to get a standards compliant browser. Worse, there's no way to tell OW to not attempt to use the css on a page. Worst of all, some OW users pose as other browsers--there's a preference to pose as many different browsers. We ended adding a bunch of tables back into the design to deal with OW's shortcomings. - CSS Boxes aren't as flexible as tables. They don't adjust to the size of your content as well as tables. If you're doing things dynamically, things break that worked in the nice clean world that you tested it in. Net-net. Table-less CSS designs are for people with time to experiment, not for busy people shipping product for a diverse user base. 4:07:14 PM

OK. I'm licensed now! Reasons I bought: - RemoteEdit from the Italian guys - RadioService from BBum - Dave Winer's work on behalf of indie developers - Because Brent Simmons is cool 12:00:33 PM

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