http://meyerweb.com Things that Eric A. Meyer, CSS expert, writes about on his personal Web site; it's largely Web standards and Web technology, but also various bits of culture, politics, personal observations, and other miscellaneous stuff Thu, 24 Jul 2008 03:04:52 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en In support of the still-to-be-finished proposal for allowing most HTML 5 elements to become hyperlinks, I've written a quick proof-of-concept demo for your perusal. Basically, it's a page with some JavaScript that captures the whole document tree, looks for any elements with an href attribute, and then sprinkles some ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/07/23/any-element-linking-demo/ At one point during An Event Apart Boston---for which I finally uploaded my few pictures, to add to the much larger pool---I observed that Boston, like parts of New York City and most European cities, is a place where maintaining a relation to the cardinal compass points is almost impossible. ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/07/08/phone-for-direction/ Kat and I are now doubly parents. Earlier this week, we welcomed Rebecca Alison Meyer into our home and our hearts. We chose Rebecca in honor of Kat's late grandmother, a grand old lady of enormous chutzpah who taught Kat her near-legendary bargaining skills. The middle name, Alison, honors ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/06/18/welcome-2/ The "href everywhere" document (which is officially titled "HTML5: More Flexibile Linking") has been updated, so kindly give it another look and challenge my assertions, use cases (or lack thereof), and any weak points. Unless you consider the whole idea of extending linkability to be a weak point, in ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/06/12/linking-up/ In response to my request, the indomitable Hamish Macpherson has created NeverForgetcerpt, a plugin for WordPress 2.5+ that will warn you if you're about to publish a post that lacks an excerpt. I'm already using it on meyerweb and it's working like a charm. He's also expressed interest ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/06/12/excerpts-exacted-shielding-the-admin/ So after I once again published a post without filling in the excerpt, thus forcing me to go back to fill it in later, I tweeted in a fit of pique: I need a WordPress plugin that won't let me publish a post until I've filled in the excerpt field. Anyone ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/06/10/wanted-excerpt-exacter/ Just when you thought the whole embedded-video thing couldn't get any worse, here I come with videos featuring, well, me. The most recent is a short clip from one of my presentations at An Event Apart back in April, debug / reboot, where I comment at my usual pace on the ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/06/10/caught-in-the-camera-eye/ As a follow-up to "The Missing Link", I've written a fairly lengthy document that presents a number of alternatives for creating a more flexible and robust linking mechanism. The important core of the piece comes first, identifying a generic problem and covering some pros and cons of various ways ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/06/05/strengthening-links/ One of the few things I think XHTML2 got absolutely, totally, 125% right was freeing the href attribute from the few elements that accepted it and spreading it all over the language. It saddens me that this isn't happening in HTML5, especially since at least 1.5 of the four ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/06/02/the-missing-link/ Here's a late-week call for assistance in the JavaScript realm, specifically in making IE do what I need and can make happen in other browsers. I'd call this a LazyWeb request except I've been trying to figure out how to do it all [censored] afternoon, and it doesn't [censored] ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/05/29/need-help-with-table-row-events/ Just because the world hasn't suffered enough bad PHP coding, I released two WordPress plugins today. One pares down some of the admin UI, and the other is a Twitter plugin. Because the world doesn't have enough of those, either. You can find links to them on ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/05/27/wordpress-adminimize-and-latest-tweet-plugins/ In the course of building my line-height: normal test page, I settled on defaulting to an unusual but still pervasive font family: Webdings. The idea was that if you picked a font family in the dropdown and you didn't have it installed, you'd fall back to Webdings and it ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/05/22/characteristic-confusion/ I am, as ever, woefully behind on posting. (Then again, maybe it's not just me: Greg Hoy recently tweeted that it's happening all over.) I still want to follow up on line-height: normal and also on a closely related topic that emerged in the comments. And I ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/05/20/tour-de-frantic/ When I first wrote Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, the part that caused me the most difficulty and headaches was the line layout material. Several times I was sure I had it all figured out and accurately described, only to find out I was wrong. For two ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/05/06/line-height-abnormal/ When I saw a couple of people link to "the perfect iPhone ringtone" last week, I had that sinking feeling that comes from being beaten to the punch. I knew I should have stayed up an extra hour that one night and just gotten it done! But wait, hold it, ... http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/05/05/the-really-perfect-ringtone/