Two Negatives Blog

DRY, eCSStender, and CSS3

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 10:48:00 -0400

I think @border-radius was the proverbial “candy” that the forks used to lead us back into their clutches. We all wanted them; hell, we’d come up with myriad ways to fake rounded corners to realize our design dreams. So when Firefox and Safari dangled them in front of our drooling faces, asking only that we add two small forks to our code for the privilege, we jumped at the opportunity.
.this-is-awesome {
  border-radius: 5px;
  -moz-border-radius: 5px;
  -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
}
They were only two small forks, after all, how bad could they be?

Aaron Gustafson

Yes! That’s it. I wouldn’t have been able to put my finger on but something subtle has been bothering me about all the CSS3 hubbub of late and Aaron has surfaced it nicely for me in his latest ALA article, Stop Forking With CSS3. It was all those browser specific styles! DRY is a principle that extends into every discipline and technology in all areas of software at all times. Why on earth would we happily (I say happily because we often have to voluntarily accept less than ideal solutions in order to get a desired result, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it!) accept a world in which we have to say

.this-is-awesome {
  border-radius: 5px;
  -moz-border-radius: 5px;
  -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
}

to get a rounded corners. That’s the opposite of what Standards are supposed to offer us. I know they’ve never fully delivered, but that doesn’t mean we should stop pushing for it.

Aaron (of WaSP, ALA, Easy! Designs, etc.) has put together what looks to be an excellent tool to combat this awful hackery.

Boiled down to its essence, eCSStender (pronounced “extender”) is a JavaScript library (akin to jQuery or Prototype) specifically built for working with CSS. On its own, eCSStender doesn’t do anything but analyze your stylesheets. When powering “extensions,” however, eCSStender allows you to use properties such as @border-radius and selectors like @.seven:nth-child(even) without having to resort to forks or hacks.

What this allows us to do is to write this * { border-radius: 5px } and have it just work in all browsers (or gracefully degrade in browsers that simply don’t support border radius).

Interestingly, the library was not originally intended to be used to enable simple CSS3 authoring. It was actually intended to make it simple to extend CSS with your own custom styles and effects. The physics demo that Aaron but together is quite impressive. I honestly don’t know exactly what I would use it for, but it seems a little like LISP in that perhaps it would allow you to extend CSS in a domain specific way that would allow for extremely concise expressions of style. That being said, it’s not the point. Aaron wanted to make it possible for all of us to participate in the future of CSS by not only telling the W3C what we wanted, but actually showing them. That alone, is really cool.

If you’re interested I’d definitely recommend reading the article. And in all honesty, all of Aaron’s stuff is really good. I especially liked his progressive enhancement articles, even though responsive web design is all the rage with the kids these days.

DRY.

The Limits of Human Cognition

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 11:24:00 -0400

First, watch this:

Seriously, watch it.

I’ll wait…

Stop Scanning and Watch the Video!!

OK, so did you notice it? I always come to these things to late and don’t get to find out if I really would have noticed it or not. That being said, it amazes me that about 50% of people who didn’t know what the video was about miss the gorilla until they’re told to look at it!

This video proves it again!

Amazing!

If you’re interested in further exploration of this topic, I’d highly recommend listening to Dr. Moira Gunn interviewing Dan Simons over at IT Conversations. Really an incredible episode discussing the limits of human cognition.

Also, I just love anything that bashes so called human potential. ^_^

thebigcaption: Please, Do Not Blow the...

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 18:07:26 -0400

thebigcaption:

Please, Do Not Blow the Vuvuzelas

original

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ…

Cooking, The Leidenfrost Effect, and Molten Lead

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 09:33:00 -0400

Un_freaking_believable!

So Kottke just pointed over to this article about using the Leidenfrost Effect to objectively show when your stainless steel cookwark is hot enough to prevent sticking and why it needs to be that hot in the first place. I tried it out last night and not only is one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen when the water instantly balls up and starts flying around the pan like crazy, but it actually worked (cooked up some peppers and onions for burritos… so good).

Then, he follows it up with a link to this video of the guys at Myth Busters sticking their hands into molten lead using the same Leidenfrost Effect to ensure that they don’t burn their hands off.

See it for yourself. The video automatically jumps to the right time.

/me shakes head in amazement.

A Brief and Detailed Documentary of The Semantic Web (Web 3.0)

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 09:13:01 -0400

While I’m with everyone else when I say that the idea of versioning the web is pretty ridiculous, I’m also a huge fan of the utopia that the Semantic Web promises. I think that giving all of the data on the Web semantic linkages would so change the way we relate to the glut of data that we have on our hands as to truly change the world.

Inigo, I hope we win…

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

We could only hope to be this excited while we’re giving...

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 08:58:50 -0400

We could only hope to be this excited while we’re giving thanks.

Crazy Oktoberfest Drummer (via 22 Words)

The Big Caption

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 08:53:36 -0400

The Big Caption:

New from the same kids who put together The Big Picture. They’re sometimes tasteless but for the most part they’re just hilarious if not biting.

“Two of mankind’s great inventions” is truly...

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 08:49:41 -0400

“Two of mankind’s great inventions” is truly the way to describe velcro and the iPad.

via Swiss Miss

I thought this was such an inventive rethinking of the concept...

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 08:46:33 -0400

I thought this was such an inventive rethinking of the concept of the stop sign and, really, reflects the way stop signs are used any way. I like the way it tries to call to the better part of all of us and encourage us to just be civil about it. So many transportation problems (and problems in general) could be solved if everyone just stopped being evil.

Unfortunately, the chances of that happening are fully nil.

Toddler Mode for iPad via Adaptive Path

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 07:38:59 -0400

This post is a little silly, but for me, it highlights something important about iPad that it seems Apple doesn’t really get. iPad, at least this first version, is built on the model of iPhone. And iPhones are personal devices — it’s reasonable to expect only one person uses an iPhone, and that the design should optimize for that. iPads, at least in my household, and those of folks I talk to, are family devices. They go from person to person in a house. This isn’t typical for most computing devices (except new-fangled set-top boxes for your TV). iPad’s form factor drastically changes the sociality of the device, and I suspect this will prove a rich avenue of exploration.

Toddler Mode for iPad via Adaptive Path

This is so brilliant. Having watched my daughter play with an iPad for awhile, the most obvious pain point is the fact that toddlers, every once in awhile, just freak out and touch everything they can. Which for certain devices, like the floor, for instance, is perfectly ok, but for an extremely sensitive touch device like the iPad basically makes the iPad do things that the toddler never wanted to do in the first place. Being able to control the interactivity of the device, from how to get to the home page to how to access all of the content, would be a huge win for most parents and make what already captivates children as young as 20 months into something that could productively occupy them for hours.

As a side note, I do love it whenever apple misses something design wise. It’s some sort of morbid joy that I take in watching someone who does something so well miss it for once. I think Peter nailed it when he said that Apple has thus far overlooked the fact that iPads are probably, at this point, one or two devices per household, max, and maybe only ever reach that level of saturation. These are highly shared devices. Being able to have even something akin to user accounts that allow you to customize app organization, wallpaper, keyboard layout (when is this going to happen, Apple?), would be awesome for anyone who uses this device with other people.