Mozilla's Thunderbird

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I started using Thunderbird at work yesterday. I'm trying to move away from using IE as much as possible, since IE6 is the new IE5 (which, coincidentally, is the new Netscape 4). I know that the project isn't all that far along, all things considered, but I was still very impressed by how solid the build is. I imported my address book and messages from OE(Outlook Express) without a problem, and it's now running as my default mail client. I really like how configurable everything is. Want to quote the original email in a reply and start your typing underneath? Sure. Want to start at the top instead? Sure. Set preferences as far as sending HTML(HyperText Markup Language) email, plaintext or a combination of both? Systemwide or by domain? Sure.

A few small gripes so far (and ones I hope they'll fix eventually... after all, it's still in development):

* A keyboard shortcut for "Get New Mail", please! I'm very used to a little Ctrl+M action in OE(Outlook Express) to get new messages without having to use the mouse, which I'm trying to cut down on lately since I've noticed my hand hurting a bit. * Some sort of indicator in the message list pane to show which messages I've replied to. OE(Outlook Express) has a couple of different icons to show read, unread, replied and forwarded. I'd like to see the same thing here.

Jam-packed

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It certainly is an exciting day out there today. Let's run through it: * Today the weather was good enough (and I felt well enough) to ride in, and it was gorgeous. I made the 15 miles in just about an hour and 15 minutes, and it didn't feel hard at all. Last time I nearly collapsed when I got here, so this time I took it a little bit easier, worked on breathing, and had a wonderful trip in.

* One of my babies from the last job has launched. I'm pretty proud of this site; lots of fighting with creative to simplify the layout, and there's lots of neat .nizzle stuff going on with the product pages. (BTW, this is the client who's ramp I was prepared to "Jackass" on, and also the one that I was having all the "Poo" fun with)

* You would probably have to know Brian to find this as funny as I do, but suffice to say that he likes to give himself challenges, whether it's biking, climbing or computers. Here's what I think he'll probably do the _next_ time he has to install a new distro:

# Write the new Linux 3.0 kernel himself at home. Using vi. # Use very small magnets to align the 1s and 0s on the platters to create a bootstrap program to load Slackware. Off of a cassette tape drive. # Challenge Linus Torvalds to an Indian leg-wrestling match, and if Brian wins, he gets to change the name to "Brinux", and have Hemos and CmdrTaco come to his house and install it for him, while Brian sits back and uses CowboyNeal as a footrest.

* Mark Pilgrim can kick your ass. He's been on a tear lately: Dave Winer's upset about the "Winer Number"? POW! jwz doesn't like CSS(Cascading Style Sheets)? BIF! BAP! Tim Scarfe thinks Mark's CSS(Cascading Style Sheets) tabs are misguided? BLAM!
I can just picture his wife-to-be dragging him away from the computer, while his arms flail out towards the keyboard... "C'mon! Lemme at 'em!".

JWZ -vs- W3C

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so, over the weekend, everyone's favorite iconoclast jwz decided to take on the new trend towards standards-compliant sites. i disagree with him that designers fall into only one category these days:

"HTML must only be used for semantic markup, but that semantic markup must rigidly adhere to the pixel-accurate positioning in the spec, so that we can still design our web pages in Photoshop!"

i think something that he's missing is the fact that a lot of times designers do come up with their "paper-based print-layout design they learned in art school", but then hand them off to schlubs like me to bring these creations to life. the issues on my end look like this:

  1. designers i work with only care about the finished product. period. as long as the screen they see on their mac look like what they did in photoshop, they're happy.
  2. i might not be the only one working on a particular site. someone else has to come along and decipher my code at some point.
  3. accessibility of the site, both to search engines and disabled visitors.

and here's why i like the "anal-retentive W3C" solution:

  1. you can't beat css for making global changes which seem to be so common for designers. "oh, can you bump the headlines up a point size? can we decrease the font size on all these pages here?" in table-based layouts, <font> size at a page level does not carry over to inside <td> tags. if you want to do a global search-and-replace on potentially thousands of pages, be my guest.
  2. nobody likes to read tag soup. i've had enough of slogging through someone else's (bad) markup trying to figure out which fucking table cell is pushing everything over like that. what's more, semantic markup gives meaning to the content. granted, you could bump up the font size and just use <b> for a headline, but using an <h1> tag actually means something. what's more, having semantically correct pages makes them index better on search engines, and helps them return more meaningful and useful results.
  3. granted, giving lip service to accessibility is useful when explaining to clients why you want to shred all their current pages, but there are legal reasons to do so, as well. jwz's stance against css i find puzzling, especially since he's been such a proponent of function over form. if your browser supports css, you see a happy page design. if not, you see the content of the page, and if it was done in semantically correct html, it might even almost have the document hierarchy/structure that helps it make sense, even without all the fancy columns/pictures/fonts.

trials and tribulations (or, it's christmas time in hollis, queens)

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i drove out the day before xmas eve right after work, and went to my best friend's house. his parents are like my adopted 3rd set, and i always spend xmas eve with them. rather than making the drive all the way out to their new place (which takes about 6, 6 1/2 hours without traffic), i went to philly to go meet ryan, who was staying at his friend jane's house in center city. the drive there was fairly uneventful, except for the otherworldly radio reception i was getting. i don't know if it was atmospheric conditions or alien visitors, but i was getting crazy am reception on the drive out. i was about midway across pa, and picking up broadcasts from boston, nyc, chicago, cleveland, and d.c. i even got to listen to most of the exciting tie between the rangers and devils. we went out for a bit in philly that night, hit a few bars, and then went back to jane's and passed out.

christmas eve we drove to ryan's folks' house, and started doing some christmas-y stuff. ran out to the liquor store and picked up some presents as well as supplies for that evening, and ryan even managed to do all of his shopping for xmas presents at 5 p.m. at the eckerd. you'd be amazed at the sorts of things you can find there when you're a bit desparate. ryan's brother showed up a short while later, and we started taking our xmas pictures, which every year involves some props, and usually the dog. this year we had some bum polaroid film, so we had to make do with triplets of izone pictures, instead of just one of the 600 variety. too bad, because we had some really good ones. we all wore cloth napkins on our heads (sorta like the flying nun) (the dog included) and posed with various gifts for baby jesus; an apple, a box of godiva truffles, what have you... we also had a really good one of us posing by the *ahem* posed wooden reindeer. ryan and i take great delight in posing them this way every time we're at his house over xmas. you know the ones, thin wooden cutouts, and one has their head down. you can sorta make the one with his head up straight mount the other one, and it's extremely funny. too bad we weren't the first to think of it, or at least the most famous to think of it.

xmas day my plans went all to hell. the nor'easter prevented me from making it to see either my mom or my dad, so i just hung out at ryan's house all day, watching "a christmas story" (and researching the actor from it who became a porn star) at least 7 times during the marathon, eating prime rib, and in general being lazy.

the drive back to pgh was similarly uneventful, although when i was flipping across the dial i did come across this nutjob on a "rush limbaugh" station... his comments were so amazingly sexist that i wasn't quite sure what to do; talking about his wife's "job" as cooking and cleaning, and how he doesn't want her to have any sort of free time or anything. my guess is they put him on to make rush seem that much more moderate in comparison.

anyway, got a couple of pretty cool presents. although i didn't see my mom, she had mailed me my present a few weeks ago, some new pedals for my soon-to-be cross bike (which reminds me, i really need to give paul some benjamins for that). along with that, the slf got me this awesome windbreaker, which will come in quite handy for the bike rides on the chillier spring mornings.

so, the stress of the holidays is (mostly) over, but i still have a bunch of work to do on the project i'm trying to finish before the deadline. i'm happy that i get to redo such a highly visible site using all the hot new xhtml/css web standards and everything, but it is quite an undertaking. there's tons of legacy content in the db, and time is just so short that i don't know if i'm going to get to it all. very few of the pages validate (if any), but we're still much closer to a compliant site. there are just so many issues to be addressed; here are some of my fun problems of the moment:

--problems with character encoding (pages that are "utf-8" encoded can't handle "glyphs", which are special characters which have a character for them, instead of using an html equavalent; i.e. ™ instead of &trade;). i can change the encoding from "utf-8" to "charset=iso-8859-1", but that causes pages to barf in the validator since they're being encoded utf-8 in .nizzle by default. it also throws a monkey wrench in all the product and category detail pages, which are using xml/xslt transformations (with the xml data being utf-8). the "right" thing to do would be to re-code these pages in .nizzle, but i just don't have the time right now. actually, the Really Right Thing(™) would be to expose category and product data as a web service (which was my original intent when we redesigned last year, except i used a VB COM object to create an xml string using the msxml4 dom object, which works fine, but it's clunky and does not easily lend itself to having that data reused by other sites/applications). (a little note: i think i might have found the answer while looking for relevant links for this post... i can set a global attribute for output response encoding, as shown here. set the encoding to iso-8859-1 in the web.config, and that should solve much of my problems.

--font size. i'm trying to stay away from hardcoded font sizes, and using named base fonts and just percentages in my stylesheets. one problem so far with that is the store locator page... it uses some funky mapquest webservice-esque process to get its results back, which would be fine except that it puts some html comments in the top few lines of the page, which means that my <!DOCTYPE> tag is not the first line in the html, which causes weird font size problems in ie, but not netscape/mozilla or opera.

so, i worked for about 7 hours today (as did amy, bless her heart), and i figure i'll be back in the office tomorrow, too. thursday (new year's day) the office is off, and we launch wednesday, and if all goes well i have a feeling i'll be "sick" friday.

xhtml (or validate me! validate meeeeeee!!!!)

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work was a little bit slow yesterday, so i redid the styles on this page. i was inspired by the wired news redesign; their new design is clean, and without html tables. you can see some technical details of the pages here, and a bit of the philosophy behind it here. designs that rely completely on css seem to be the way that the web will go, as this article in webmonkey points out (the article also advocates dropping support for 4.x browsers completely, which is fine with me). So, as of right now, this page is xhtml 1.0 compliant. the only issue i have right now is the right column is showing up one pixel too low in mozilla, but i'll work on fixing that. below are some sites that were very helpful in setting up the layout and styles for this page.

http://www.glish.com/css/ http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/ http://theblivit.net/templates/

Valid XHTML 1.0!