licentious radio

Sunday, February 2, 2003
[11:07:46 PM]

More zeldman.com hacking.

(The original hack, by the way, was overriding text-align: justify. We *hate* justified, unhyphenated text -- because it is harder to read with the gaping whitespaces in the lines. We wouldn't have bothered with today's hack if we hadn't been pushed over the edge by the justified text.)

Being old-fashioned, I have a *narrow* browser window. So narrow, that when the zeldman.com content column is on the right, the lines of text go right off my window. They're harder to read that way.

Shall I scroll over, every time I look at the page? Shall I change the width of my browser window to suit zeldman.com's layout?

userContent.css to the rescue!

For me -- on gnu linux -- the file is at:

~/.mozilla/default/bictshp6.slt/chrome/userContent.css

I added the following lines:

#primarycontent {margin-left: 0px !important; margin-right: 150px !important}

#secondarynav {float: right !important}

The float: right puts the navigation on the right side, overriding the website's stylesheet.

One problem with the user stylesheet for Mozilla is that you have to exit the browser completely before changes take affect. Since I usually have several windows open, I don't like closing them all, and opening them all again. Plus, I'm lazy. I mention this to explain that I don't think !important is necessary for any of them, and the margin-right setting is probably unnecessary. But what I've got there now works, and it's time for bed.

Another option would be to make the secondarynav display: none. That would prevent the waste of screen real estate. I hardly ever use the navigation, and when I do, I could just use a different browser.

Good news, though. Zeldman stopped justifying the text. My previous hack is no longer necessary. The bad news is that it points out the potential for user stylesheets to go out of date, and accumulate junk.

Update: I more or less failed in my laziness. I had to restart the browser again, anyway, and so I fixed some of the above.

[3:06:27 PM]
HTML and the various related technologies have been a nightmare to work with, for several reasons.

Unfortunately, one of the reasons is that numerous seemingly inappropriate decisions have been made by the standards committees. Sometimes you wonder if *anybody* there has a clue.

Consider line-height. In real-world type, we think of "leading", which was extra lead inserted *under* a line of text. People have been putting characters on paper for thousands of years. We do it like this for a reason.

The CSS specification says half of the extra line-height should be added *above* the line of text. The flaw is that you can't align the top of the text of two columns that have different line-height settings.

Is this a big deal? How often can you just work around it, after all? It's just that one seemingly clueless decision subtracts value from the web, and forces *all* designers to work around it.

Just get the decisions right the first time.

Leading and half-leading [w3.org]: User agents center glyphs vertically in an inline box, adding half-leading on the top and bottom. For example, if a piece of text is '12pt' high and the 'line-height' value is '14pt', 2pts of extra space should be added: 1pt above and 1pt below the letters.

You can search back throught the email archives to find that the committee was given the appropriate feedback:

"This is going to cause massive confusion with people who come from the dtp-world or traditional typography. I like to think of leading as added space after the line. I've never seen it referred to as space above and below the line. Its counter-intuitive."

But there's no hint of why they did this to us in the first place.

Netscape tried to make up for it, by the way, by *dropping* the half-leading above and below paragraphs. Totally crazed.

There's a work-around. Say column one has line-height: 1, and column two has line-height: 1.5. In the div for column one, set padding-top: .25em. Of course it gets more complicated from there... when the first lines have different font sizes, for example. Pretty soon you're back to specifying everything in pixels.

Another seemingly fundamental feature.... Ideally, the length of lines in a web page is allowed to adjust somewhat for different browser window widths. Commonly in "liquid" layouts, the text column width can range from very narrow to very wide. At the extremes, the amound of line-height that is appropriate is very different. Short lines, no extra line spacing is needed; long lines may need a lot.

So why not let designers specify a *range* for line-height? At <= 10 ems, line-height is one. At >= 30 ems line-height is 1.5. Interpolate for other lengths.

[10:16:13 AM]
The shuttle was a bad design to begin with. Now the shuttles are old, and we keep diverting money from shuttle maintenance and safety to the military and Republican Campaign Contributors. Boom. Very sad.

The San Francisco Chronicle is freaky. It's a Hearst paper. The "news" section is clearly run to avoid news -- the front-page is mostly given over to sports and other circus-style distractions. Today, the *entire* news section is on the shuttle. Section A. Nothing but shuttle.

Here's an article I didn't see in the Chronicle -- maybe it was there somewhere, but maybe not:

Nasa chiefs 'repeatedly ignored' safety warnings [observer.co.uk].

Of course this crash might not have been caused by any of the claimed safety problems, right? This could be a fluke. It could even be pilot error. We don't know, and we might never know. But it's hard to make a case that enough is being done for shuttle safety when two percent of flights end in disaster.