Archive for 2009

It was a hot Summer Sunday afternoon. I’d just stepped off the Acela Express from Boston to New York City, and I was confused as ever about HTML5. I thought I was alone. Impossible in mid-town Manhatt– no, alone in being confused about the next chapter of markup specifications. I figured something was wrong with me. Was I not reading up enough about HTML5? Well no, wait, I’d been doing a fair amount of reading up about HTML5, yet there was still this partial confusion about a number of aspects of the proposed spec.

Thankfully, a few friends old and new got together at Happy Cog headquarters to walk through the spec, noting along the way the areas that seemed problematic, confusing or otherwise unsettling.

Personally, I came away from that day less confused, but more importantly feeling more positive about HTML5 in general. Along with this newfound positiveness, came some clarity in specific portions of the spec that seemed troublesome. The rest of the group (I can take zero credit for its publication) crafted a “guide to HTML5 hiccups” in the hopes that the powers that be would listen and healthy debate might begin on these specifics.
A few of those items that stood out for me were:

• Offering an HTML5 syntax option when validating. This has nothing to do with HTML5 itself, but it’s important for the validator to simply and easily add an option for checking syntax that would help to foster good coding habits, avoid head-scratching rendering issues, etc. That’s why I choose to code XHTML today — it’s a personal preference that helps me maintain, optimize and troubleshoot code, and I’ll continue with that convention no matter the doctype.
• HTML5 introduces a lot of new elements. All at once. Some of which seem unnecessary (e.g. article, hgroup).
• While at first I was cringing at the idea of redefining the semantics of certain elements, it does start to make sense. Instead of introducing even more elements, HTML5 reuses and redefines. For example, the small element would now “represent side comments such as small print”, rather than a presentation instruction for font size.
• The concept of “sectioning content” I didn’t quite get at first from the high level overviews I’d been reading, but seen in practice, it’s quite excellent (e.g. where the section dictates scope of the heading elements it contains).
• That said, folks will use header and footer for exactly the areas that they’re now assigning IDs with those terms, while in HTML5 they can mean different things (header and footer of a section, for which there could be many on a page).
  I still have an enormous amount to learn about HTML5, am still concerned about certain aspects of it, but overall optimistic about the future of markup.

Well, we loved them all, and agonized over choosing two winners to receive a ticket to next month’s Handcrafted CSS workshop. But decide we did!

Winner #1 is @wilto, waxing poetic about a place we’ve all been, surely:

IE6 lives on.
Box model—and heart—broken.
position: fetal;

And Winner #2 is @squaregirl , who in three perfectly penned lines reminds us of the importance of validation during development:

Curly braces sound cute.
Until you leave one out. Oops!
I fracked my stylesheet.

Congrats to the winners! And thanks again to the fine folks at Campaign Monitor for sending them to the workshop. Which, by the way, is only a little over two weeks away. Spaces are being filled up, so grab a ticket and join us in Salem, won’t you?

Our friends at Campaign Monitor are sponsoring two tickets to the Handcrafted CSS workshop in Salem, Massachusetts next month!
Write a haiku via Twitter over the next 24 hours, and enter to win one of two free tickets to the event. Ethan has all the details on how to enter. Go go go.

Author copies of Handcrafted CSS arrived today. I took some pictures of it. Related: just 7 more days of early-bird pricing for the Handcrafted CSS workshop on September 14th here in Salem, Massachusetts. Book now. Book often.

We’ve printed up a new version of the popular Charge Tee. This time around, it’s a rusted battery on a Navy Blue, 100% cotton shirt from American Apparel. It’s also the first item in our newly relaunched shop.simplebits.com.

The fine folks at AcmePrints have been printing SimpleBits tees for us for years, and they’re now handling the order fulfillment as well. This will allow us to concentrate on more important stuff, like offering more designs, rather than packing and shipping shirts (even though we enjoyed that).

The shop itself runs on the excellent bigcartel, a simple, hosted shopping cart for independent merchants. We love it, and Meagan was even singing its praises while doing the CSS customization, which all means good things.

Stay tuned for more of the original Charge Tees, and some other new designs as we grow the shop a bit more.

Now that we’ve announced the book, we can also announce another exciting thing: Handcrafted CSS: A Day of Markup & Style will be a unique, one-day workshop presented by Ethan Marcotte and myself on September 14, 2009 at the Hawthorne Hotel here in Salem, Massachusetts.

You’ll get a copy of the book (the Video Edition, including the DVD), and we’ll present the content live, throughout four takeway-packed sessions, followed by Q&A. Breakfast, lunch and two snack breaks are also provided. And we’ll cap off the day with an after party at an awesome location to be determined.

The Hawthorne Hotel is located in downtown Salem, just 16 miles north of Boston. It’s also just a 10-minute walk from the MBTA Commuter Rail station which connects Salem to Boston in about 25 minutes.

This will be a unique opportunity to buy a book, then have the authors work through it live, with a chance to ask questions along the way. It’s sure to be a fun day — and we’re pretty damned excited about it.

Early-bird and student tickets are now available at a discounted price of $399 per person. Act quick! There’s limited seating for 100 fine people like you.

Oh, and interested in sponsoring the event? We’d love to hear from you.

I wrote another book. It’s called Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design, and it’ll be published by New Riders next month.

I had help this time. The unstoppable Ethan Marcotte contributed an absolute gem of a chapter on the fluid grid. And I think it’s worth the cover price for the pages he authored alone. You might remember Ethan’s recent article on the subject over at A List Apart, and his chapter builds quite a bit on that, while tying it back into the book’s case study. And fellow beverage aficionado and bon vivant, Brian Warren, handled the technical editing.

The book is largely a culmination of the talks I’ve been giving around the world over the last year or so. In some ways, it’s a continuation of Bulletproof Web Design, in that it was convenient to be able to jump right into examples and the core of what I wanted to write about. There are a lot of CSS books out there, and the last thing I wanted to do was just write another general overview.

So this one gets specific rather quickly. And the timing seemed right. The browser landscape is changing rapidly. Browsers are implementing new and evolving standards faster. It’s an exciting time to be designing for the web. Firefox 3.5 has just been released, and with it came a goodie bag of CSS3 properties that can now be utilized between Mozilla and Webkit-based browsers (as well as Opera). I’m using the term “progressive enrichment” to describe advanced CSS and CSS3 properties that work in forward-thinking browsers today. And that’s a heavy focus of the book.

A single case study for the fictional “Tugboat Coffee Company” was used as a common thread throughout the entire book, where progressive enrichment, reevaluating past methods and best practices and flexible, bulletproof concepts are stressed. Part of being a craftsman of the web is paying attention to the details that matter most, and the book is an attempt to share a collection of those details using current methods.

In addition to the book, I also recorded a DVD. A video crew from Peachpit came and set up here at the BitCave in Salem, and the result is Handcrafted CSS: Bulletproof Essentials. It covers concepts from my previous book and the new one, while relating all of it to the Tugboat design. There was also a ukulele hanging around the office and I managed to put it to good use as a background score. The video acts as a unique bridge between the two books, and either comes bundled in a Video Edition of Handcrafted CSS or by itself.

More info can be found at the book + DVD’s companion website and Twitter account, where Ethan and I will be announcing another exciting aspect of this project in the next day or so. Stay tuned.