I will state now that I’m all for experimentation with new web technologies - it’s done us pretty well so far - It’s just that, recently, I’ve been seeing more and more of these “CSS3″ showcases…

A couple of examples:

http://www.romancortes.com/blog/pure-css-coke-can/
http://anthonycalzadilla.com/css3-ATAT/index.html

Wow, amazing, they did that only using CSS? Well, yes, sort of (with a dash of propriety browser technologies in certain cases), but this is no more than e-stone soup.

While harmless enough shared around your fellow web geeks, these sorts of things can push budding developers in entirely the wrong direction, remember the massive hype around “tableless layouts”? A brilliant idea that due to a few loud-mouthed - misguided - individuals, saw a large number of web of developers in the early 2000s missing the point entirely.

Let’s use CSS3 and HTML5 as it was intended to be used. Let’s show the world what we have to say in an interesting, gripping, accessible and ascetic manner.

Take the public perception of climate change: Due to any, and all, crackpot theories being heavily publicised people have started to form opinions based on only a subset of the available data. Widespread ignorance ensues.

As geeks we know to question what we’re told and, if we’re not happy with the answer, we’ll attempt to find a new solution. However - unlike the scientific community - we’re too proud to accept a valid negative result as we do a positive. This is all the more pertinent as, in the field of web development, unlike many scientific disciplines, there is a definitive right answer.

Example time.

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=642149&page=2#36

This is a problem that is constantly rearing its damn ugly head. We all hate the solution which ticks the majority of boxes but we all know it meets the most important criteria:

• It works with images disabled
• It works with css disabled
• It works with javascript disabled
• It works with plugins disabled
• It works with any combination of the above
• It works in all browsers (yes, IE6 is still important, live with it)

The only downside is that it does not work with images that require transparent backgrounds (due to complex parent backgrounds) and it will not render an image when printed.

In the first case I suggest that using a img tag with a semantic alt attribute is a perfectly valid and acceptable fall-back solution. In the second I’d argue that if you need a text-replaced image to be printed then the design aspects of this image, the very thing that sets it apart from plain text, is content in itself and should be rendered to all media.

End example.

I’m ranting about this now, but it’s a lesson I learned not a year ago: We need to learn to stand on the shoulders of giants. We need to recognise when a problem has been debated, solved and the solution honed by the best minds in our field. Then we need to just fucking accept it.

Sure, strive to understand the solution, but please; don’t waste your time publishing your brilliant new find when it has already been considered, and subsequently rejected through years of testing.

There are still problems out there that don’t have answers. Work on these, and stop trying to best one another.

If you’re going to use the lovely UnitPNG script alongside Lightview, make sure you exclude the Lightview generated mess from UnitPNG’s node list…Otherwise you may wind up with some random error claiming that attribute only valid on v:image.

If anyone cares to explore this further and find out why, please noodle me and let me know, I’m only in the business of solutions these days.

Sadly I missed the chance to pop in and experience an Introduction to Astrophotography tonight but it did get me poking around the astroweb a bit more than usual, good thing too; I chanced upon this fantastic example of what the internet means to me. Look at it, in all it’s texty glory. It’s pure, unadulterated data.

Odd, I say.

Of course I’m referring only to pure EM based layouts, any monkey can slap together a pixel perfect site using whole numbers, throw some decimal places into the mix and you’ve got yourself some real web development.

If, at this point, the number 62.5 pops into your head; fuck off, you’re not welcome here.

Right, so let’s set the scene. You have a parent node, its font size is 16px, this is a constant. This element has a child, it’s 12.785em wide.

Here comes the science… 12.785*16 = 204.56

Ah, so, we all remember from school that anything greater than point five is rounded up to the nearest whole number, and of course we can hardly expect our browsers to render .56 of a pixel, so the child is 205px wide?

Ha.

Browser developers obviously didn’t attend the same school as I did. They take my careful calculations and carelessly throw away the .56; the resulting element is 204px wide.

I know I take things a little too personally, but this seems really quite patronising, as if the browser is mocking my silly pixel precision madness… “did you really mean .56 of a pixel, surely not?!”.

Yes, I sodding well did, round the fucking thing up, or at least store the values with as much precision as modern computing will allow, then, once you’re done traversing the DOM, add them together and round the result to the nearest whole number.

So, is Firefox correct while everyone else is wrong? Not exactly. The clever chaps at Mozilla have come up with their own way of handling pixel precision. Take the example above, add two further child elements with the same width as the first, check the result in Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera and you’ll end up with three elements that are 204px wide (that’s 612px… I know, stick with me here). View the same page in Firefox and you’ll see a 205px element followed by a 204px element followed by another 205px element.

That’s some crazy-ass normalisation.

Anyway, I suppose I should come up with some sort of conclusion…

1. For the love of god, don’t use 62.5%, you’re just creating unreconcilable rounding inconsistencies
2. Do your calculations before you start coding, don’t just jump in swapping pixels for ems willy-fucking-nilly
3. Try to keep your font sizes to whole-pixel equivalents
4. If you still foresee rounding issues, try to squeeze in some hidden overflow
5. No? Designer bitching about your extra pixel? Have no eye for design yourself? Sit down and explain the problem, I’m sure you can work something out
6. Still stuck? There’s no hope for you. Luckily web development is inherently pointless anyway. Be thankful that you suck at it, go enjoy your life.

Recently, while fulfilling a challenge (actually I think it was a joke, but I couldn’t help myself) I had to solve, what I suspected would be, a fairly simple programming problem; get the number of seconds from any arbitrary time and date until the next again Friday.

So I go ahead and Google it.

Turns out a few other people had tried the same thing (I was using PHP), there were numerous messy and processor-hungry solutions out there. I read a few, got the general idea, then wrote my own. So, here’s the end product: http://www.whyisitnotfriday.com/

Feeling quite happy with the result I decide to dive into the PHP manual and start digging a bit deeper into its Date/Time functions, just out of curiosity …. turns out I could of saved myself quite a bit of time with a little PHP function; strtotime(”friday”).

Anyway, the point of my rambling is this; why do people always assume the first solution they stumble upon is the best one? I see it everywhere, from religion to programming.

I really wish people would start asking more fucking questions.

Good thing too. It’s refreshing.

I can actually get t’interweb related things done without the guilt associated with accepting help from others. After all; I didn’t create PHP, I didn’t single-handedly invent the myriad of other lower level programming languages upon which it relies, I wasn’t the first to think of using transistors (or even valves) to express binary logic, I wasn’t even responsible for the big-bang (I know, this shocked me too).

I think I’ll make a habit of re-defining “scratch” and re-assessing exactly which giants I chose to stand on the shoulders of.

Anyhoo, on that note I thought I’d share (in the spirit of blogging and such) a little Wordpress Plugin I wrote during this site’s development. I call it textualise, and it does just that - perfect for those who don’t wish to show up their lack of design skill by attempting icons and such.

Post dates, after some craziness, become something like “monday, january the twelfth, two thousand and nine”. Similarly, it will consume your comment counters and adventually pass “three others helped” or “no one has helped”. Feel free to download it and do with it as you please. If you do happen to tidy up the code let me know, I’ll be more than happy to accept your help.

Welcome to Phenotypic.

You may notice that the site is somewhat flawed (you know who you are). For example; the link styles aren’t consistent, the text contrast is a little low, the comments form is nonexistent and, amongst other things, the entire site has no purpose. You may think that this a deliberate attempt to rebel, a mistake or simply a lack of talent. I just enjoy not caring.

So, I have a blog. What next, Twitter? Never. No one cares that much about my to-ings and fro-ings.

Do they?

No.

They don’t.