We have all heard of CSS and the wonderful stuff that it can do. We also know what CSS stands for – Cascading Style Sheets. Much of the magic of the inter-web is wet with the stuff. A look back over the years reveals that the flow of CSS has gone from a trickle to a torrent. Once simple 10Kb CSS files used to line the Internet. Now the liquid truly gushes from fibre networks like there’s no tomorrow.

OK, enough of the water references. But really, part of the magic of Cascading Style Sheets is in it’s ability to cascade. The rules and culverts run, starting from high up, right down to the last period in the every website’s terms and conditions. Lucida Grande can be safely set upon the mountain top, to begin the cascade, and further down the slope, Courier can overrule, when it’s given permission to do so (go on – be brave!). It’s a bit like setting up a complex and hidden watering system that feeds the plants, flowers and pages that we all see. And enjoy.

The other part of it’s magic is in it’s simplicty – that you can describe, or transcribe, a beautiful design using just numbers and words into something that has a life of it’s own. And something that you can play with.

It’s been no surprise to see the widespread adoption of ipads and iphones (and androids) partly, no less, from good design that was informed by what CSS could do. But the key point is that people are playing directly with CSS as they use these devices. They are swiping, tapping and pinching something tangible – it’s the hand connecting directly with the aqueous nature of CSS. There’s no pools of stagnation on these devices like Microsoft’s recent implementation of HTML in email (they use Word as their CSS rendering engine). Partly this is due to the fantastic rise to fame of CSS browser rendering engines like Webkit and co. – long since battle hardened from the browser wars.

It’s an exciting time to be working with CSS. Especially with all the moveable magic of CSS3 transitions. May I long get my feet wet.

You know when you have a piece of information that you just sort of think that everyone else knows too. Well today I started talking about custom domain suffixes and everyone in the office was like WHAAAT?? So much so in fact that I had to go and check my facts.

But, it really is true. The ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) announced (in June ’11) that they will be taking applications up until mid April this year for companies and well-heeled individuals to purchase their own .whateveryouwant domain suffixes. So you might be heading to www.salted.herring in the not too distant future.

That is if it wasn’t $185,000 to register one of these bad boys, with an extra $25,000 p/a upkeep fee!

It will be interesting to see what happens over the next few months as this rolls out, I’m guessing that ICANN is taking a bit of a punt here (ie that Apple & Google are going to have an arms race over .smartphone or Coke will bother to buy .cola) but if these suffixes do become popular it might be something to keep note of.

watchthis.space

In this day and age, everybody wants a hero. My hero is of course CSS. And what is a hero without a villain? Browser bugs, of course.

It’s evil stuff! It has a half life of at least 5 to 10 years. To the CSS box model in shining armour, browser bugs are debilitating, especially when the likes of Internet Explorer have to render our hero. Over at Planet Microsoft, there’s lots of evil scheming afoot and browser bugs scuttling around on factory floors.

But, as we all know, villains come in different tights. Mobile Webkit flavours. Even standard bearers Opera and Firefox have their own dark days. And even Chromium isn’t always impervious to Kryptonite.

CSS can’t fight these guys on it’s own. It needs help. And that help comes from [...trumpet blasts...] a veritable army of eager web developers who stay up all night doing the undoable, fixing the unfixable, sharing their magic recipies and generally being incredible. Where would we be without CSS PIE? KAPOW! Would our web citizens be safe without the seminal work of Big John from www.positioniseverything.net? BLAMMO! And let’s hear it for the forum masters, making all those voices heard and, God bless, searchable! BOOM!

We all want to tread the hero’s path, towards a CSS that contains ne’er a hack in it’s hallowed rules. But can we do that? No, we can’t. In comes Firebug to help us in our daily debugging ritual. In comes handy tools like Virtual Box and multi IE’s to sandbag the flood. In comes IE’s famous ‘Conditional comments’ from a somewhat reformed Planet Microsoft (can we ever trust them?) to sanctify the cursed.

CSS has long fascinated designers, with web gurus, commentators and critics alike exploring the virtues of a simple syntax to describe the presentation semantics of a webpage. Jeffrey Zeldman discussed the mystic qualities of CSS in the early 90s, and famed Jeremy Keith has shown us how we can use JavaScript to interact with CSS. CSS development has often been the subject of dispute, with members of the CSS Working Group over at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) falling out. CSS masters, like Tantek Çelik, manage to keep the mere mortals in line, but disagreement amongst the CSS and browser development community seems to be part of the journey. Firefox and Opera’s scheming to adopt -webkit vendor prefixes is a good example: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/the-vendor-prefix-predicament-alas-eric-meyer-interviews-tantek-celik

Between these people (W3C), browser makers, and our army of CSS developers, progress is being made. This is not the thirty year war that ravaged Europe in the 17th Century. I mean, just check this out http://lab.simurai.com/tilt-shift/ (sorry Google Chrome, or Safari only). I can’t think of a better demonstration of what our hero is truly capable of (in a capable browser, of course).