Jeff Chausse
Digital Strategy + Design
A List Apart Finds the Holy Grail (of CSS Layout)
With a URL like:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/holygrail
you know it should be interesting. In this article on the most revered of “Web-Standards-Based-Design” websites, Matthew Levine reveals the secrets for a clean, semantic, CSS-only way to create the page layout framework used by 90% of decent web sites.
If you don’t want to read the article, you can skip right to the example. Just do a “Save As…” and a huge amount of headaches can be avoided on your next project.
The only thing that bugs me about this code is that the side columns do screwy things when the browser window gets really small. This may seem minor, but I’ve always felt that although user interfaces shouldn’t always behave like real-world objects, when you’re using something that appears to implode and collapse in on itself under certain circumstances, you naturally tend to feel like what you’re using may be fragile and unreliable. Early versions of Groove were notorious for this kind of collapsing layout – even buttons would shrink down so that the text on them “fell off”.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure that a fix would only involve one or two non-semantic “container” tags (which Levine wen’t out of his way to avoid – I have much less of a moral issue with the occasional container tag). I’ll let you know if I come up with something.
Private Information Retrieval
There’s a new(?) privacy-oriented trick being cooked up by the true Computer Science brains out there, called Private Information Retrieval. The basic premise is this:
It’s possible to retrieve information from a database in such a way that the database itself has no idea what you were looking for.
If this sounds ridiculous, there is at least one easily understood solution to this problem: Just retrieve the whole database any time you want a piece of info from it.
Clearly, this has, er, scalability issues. PIR research seeks out mathematical tricks to this process far more practical. There are clearly some very interesting practical applications of this technology, such as making your search engine subpeona-proof. Of course, here in the US, we will likely develop DMCA-type laws against the use of PIR.
QuietAgent’s “Banned” Superbowl Ad
QuietAgent.com invites people to view the Superbowl ad they don’t want you to see. It was banned by ABC! Censorship! Political Correctness! You know, it’s a lot cheaper to generate publicity by having an ad rejected by the TV network than by actually running it during the Superbowl. If you want to go this route, like QuietAgent.com did, you may want your ad to include shots of:
- a dog taking a dump
- a set of horribly rotten teeth
- a pair of diseased feet
- a close-up of the innards of a dissected frog
- a man getting strangled
Oh, and put a picture of the president in front of it all. All I’m saying is that this “rejection” couldn’t possibly have been intentional, could it? Naaaahhh…
All that said, the concept is pretty funny, but in an “Ebaum’s World” kind of way (where it will inevitably turn up). Running it during the Superbowl would be unbelievably tasteless, and methinks QuietAgent.com knew that quite well.
However, now that I check on Technorati and Digg, the manufactured controversy isn’t spreading quite as quickly as I assumed while writing this post.
One-Element Graphical CSS Borders
Back in the day, if you wanted to put decorative borders around a chunk of text you did it using tables. Then, CSS came along and people devised clever ways to apply graphical borders to DIV tags without tables. However, I have never seen a technique that didn’t involve extraneous non-semantic tags (“inner”, “outer”, or what not). Well, until now that is. Here’s a neat trick, straight from W3C, for adding graphical borders (using five separate graphics) to a single CSS element. Cool!
And Speaking of Web 2.0
I took some time to make Chausse.org a bit easier spread around. Over on the right, you’ll find links to quickly add a feed of the site to your favorite RSS reader. (Please let me know if any are broken, or if there are others I should add). I’ve also added, to each post, the ability to add the post to deli.cio.us and digg. Should you, you know, want to do that.
Web 2.0 and Jazz
There’s a major backlash going on towards all that is known as “Web 2.0″. I don’t really buy into it. Sure it may be a poorly-defined, badly-named phenomenon, but there is definitely something different and real going on. And the way I see it, the fact that the Web 2.0 “brand” encompasses a lot of seemingly unrelated characteristics (“Site X uses AJAX, has a blog, and uses rounded corners”) is precisely what makes it interesting.
In a way, I think that Web 2.0 is to the web what jazz is to music. Jazz isn’t jazz strictly because of how the notes are lined up. Jazz is jazz because of the musical arrangements, because the musicians call each other “cats”, and because afficionados like to drink martinis. I’m stereotyping here, but my point is that Web 2.0 is about a culture, not about exactly what the code does. And a genuine culture it is, with its own heroes, aesthetic, and values.
Part of the argument against the Web 2.0 “meme” is that it’s all marketing gibberish. That’s not true at all. What is true is that marketers are exploiting a real culture, and co-opting its lingo and selected characteristics, tacking them onto projects that have nothing to do with that culture. To bring it back to my analogy, think of all times you’ve seen marketers apply words like “jazzy”, “swinging”, or “groovy” to things that are not remotely jazzy, swinging, or groovy. Just because the invitation to your office’s company party grossly misused the word “swinging” to describe the promised vibe of the evening doesn’t mean that Duke Ellington and Count Basie didn’t exist. Just because your great aunt Esmerelda likes to describe her multicolored stretch pants as “jazzy” doesn’t negate the immeasurable impact of Miles Davis and John Coltrane on the world of music.
Saying Web 2.0 doesn’t exist just because you can’t nail down exactly what it is, or because or because the term “2.0″ doesn’t mean exactly what it implies (call it Nouveau Webism for all I care), just means that you really don’t get the point.
I hate to use “you just don’t get it” as an defense of anything, but in this case I think it’s entirely apt. As Louis Armstrong said, “Man, if you have to ask what it is, you’ll never know”. He wasn’t talking about Web 2.0 – but he could have been.
OK, last MyBigRiver.com post for a little while
Sorry to sound like a dorky fanboy, but I’m excited to announce that Evan Williams, inventor of Blogger, CEO of Odeo, and personal hero of mine, has kindly granted MyBigRiver.com a link on his personal blog. W00t!
MyBigRiver.com on Ajaxian
MyBigRiver.com just got its first major blog write-up on Ajaxian.com. They point out (correctly) that I attach my own referral ID into the generated Amazon link. The way I see it, people who don’t have any interest in using referral links won’t care at all, and people who do use Amazon referral links will be well aware that they can (very easily) switch it to their own.
I don’t mention it on the site because I have a feeling that could cause people in the first category to strip out my ID out of spite, without considering the fact that its existence does them no harm and provides me an incentive to continue providing and enhancing the service.
In any case, the site was just launched yesterday. If there is great interest in allowing custom referral ID’s, I will certainly add the feature. I’m sure there would be enough users without their own referral ID’s that I’d still make some bucks.
InstantDomainSearch.com – MyBigRiver.com for Domain Names
Wow, I either started an instant trend, or unknowingly joined into an existing one. While trying to discreetly pitch MyBigRiver.com to influential folks who might find it interesting, I stopped by evhead, the site of Evan Williams (creator of Blogger). I was trying to figure out how to tell him about MyBigRiver.com without sounding like a press release, when I noticed that his latest post is about “InstantDomainSearch.com“, a site which works in almost exactly the same way to search available domain names. Huh.
Introducing MyBigRiver.com
Today, I’m proud to announce that one of my crazy ideas has actually seen the light of day. MyBigRiver.com is an online tool that searches Amazon.com using web services and AJAX. The general idea is that, as you type, it automatically shows the top search result for that item. It’s like “incremental search” for all of Amazon.com. This may sound kind of unnecessary and pointless, but once you start using it, I hope you’ll find it as fun and addictive as I do. There is also a very practical use for the tool –for which I’ve optimized the site. It’s an excellent way to quickly snag a link to a product you want to recommend on your blog or other website. There will be much more functionality along these lines rolling out in the future.
One quick tip for people looking to launch little projects like this. Focus on the really unique part of what you’re cooking up, and focus on releasing SOMETHING that does only THAT. I actually had the foundation of MyBigRiver.com operational for months now, but I got carried away adding a bunch of other features, which I never could manage to quite wrap up. So, I finally went back and stripped away everything that wasn’t essential. I have a feeling that once people start using the site, it’ll give me much more incentive to roll out cool new features than I could generate for myself, toiling away in anonymity.
Well, check out the site, and if you enjoy it, please spread the word! If you have a blog, double-please spread the word there. If you have advice regarding where I can promote the site to a receptive audience (AJAX enthusiast sites, etc) I’d love to hear that as well. Have fun!