Monday, July 15, 2002

HDTV Battle Wages On

Brad King

The current fight centers on the "broadcast flag," an application embedded in a digital television signal. When television broadcasts all go digital, movies and television shows will come pre-packaged with meta-tags that allow devices like Tivos and PCs to parse, reshape and share files with relative ease. The broadcast flag would trigger technological roadblocks, preventing digital files from leaving the home.

posted at 8:44:08 PM — permalink

Measurement

Joel Spolsky

"Thank you for calling Amazon.com, may I help you?" Then — Click! You're cut off. That's annoying. You just waited 10 minutes to get through to a human and you mysteriously got disconnected right away.

Or is it mysterious?

posted at 8:35:33 PM — permalink

Day 26: Using relative font sizes

Mark Pilgrim

In the fall of 2000, Jeffrey Zeldman famously said that relative font sizing was impossible ("pixels, baby... or nothing") because of an overwhelming variety of browser bugs, starting with Netscape 4 and ending in the most modern browsers. Since then, Netscape 4 still hasn't gotten any better, and it still hasn't gone away, but at least we've all learned a thing or two about taming the browsers and making relative font sizing a reality. (Zeldman too; his recently reincarnated Web Standards Project uses the technique described below.)

Use relative font sizes in browsers that can handle them, and absolute font sizes in Netscape 4, which does not reliably support relative font sizes.

Uh oh. I knew this day was coming...

In my CSS stylesheet, I have this line:

body, td, th, p {
	font-size: 12px;
	font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
	background-color: white;
	margin: 0px;
	padding: 0px;
	border: none;
}

For this trick to work, I need to add the following, immediately after:

/*/*/a{}
body, body td, body th, body p {
	font-size: x-small;
	voice-family: "\"}\"";
	voice-family: inherit;
	font-size: small;
}
html>body, html>body td, html>body p {
	font-size: small;
}
/* */

I guess it works. In a house of cards sort of way...

posted at 3:31:30 PM — permalink