Summary of eHow articles for May

The articles I published on eHow in May are listed.

Deb's Deli

Jemez Springs is about 45 minutes from Albuquerque in the Jemez Mountains. I went to a Tai Chi Retreat there and took a bunch of photos. There are about 4 places to eat in this tiny town, all serve very good food. Deb’s Deli serves real homemade pie, ice cream, and you can get a hair cut in the shop in the hall. I ate a lot more than I soaked in the hot springs, and I did Tai Chi a lot more than either of those things.

For eHow in May, I opened a new Twitter account for @Veesites. Veesites  is my eHow username, and this Twitter account will contain only tweets about eHow content. The new account will give me an RSS feed from Twitter for my eHow content, since eHow doesn’t provide for a way for individual users to get a clean RSS feed for articles.

Useful Links: Passwords, YUI, mobile web class

Useful links include an article about password security, a new YUI release link, a class in mobile web best practices.

The Usability of Passwords looks at ways to make passwords more secure. Worth reading.

YUI 3.x Preview Release 2. If you find the Yahoo! User Interface helpful, the new release includes Widget and Plugin infrastructures.

A W3C course in Mobile Web Best Practices is available. It takes about 2 hours a week through June and July, costs 99euros. Here’s the full course description. IMO, it would be wonderful if a large number of university instructors who are training future web professionals were able to take this course.

Review: HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions

by Web Teacher
get this book at Amazon

HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions: A Web Standardistas’ Approach (Amazon affiliate link)

★★★★ HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions: A Web Standardistas’ Approach by Christopher Murphy and Nicklas Persson is from Friends of ED (2009). The thing I like most about this book is also the thing I like least about it. That thing is the book’s organization. The first half of the book is devoted entirely to a complete intensive in semantic, standards-based HTML. Although some things are treated a little superficially (such as making tables accessible), for the most part a person could become very good at semantic HTML after going through this part of the book.

The second half of the book looks at CSS. Again, the book is really thorough about the basics and the use of best practices in writing and using CSS. However, it isn’t until Chapter 13 that the topic of using an exernal style sheet is introduced. There’s a chapter after that with references to good resources, but basically the book is over after Chapter 13.

I like that every part of HTML and CSS is covered from a web standards viewpoint. This book is really good for that. But it bothers me that it takes the book so long to put it all together so that the reader has a complete view of what the process is all about.

If I were teaching a semester class with this book, I would would work around the organization in all sorts of ways. (An individual reader, working through the book on her own, might find the approach excellent.) From a teaching viewpoint, it this would be a great book to have as a secondary resource. The chapter on Images, for example, could be assigned as required reading when you were ready to teach images. The information is thorough, the explanation of alt attributes is helpful: it’s a good chapter.

It’s a good book for working on your own. For classroom use, it’s a good secondary resource.

Summary: Thorough grounding in the basics.

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Does the Kindle Make Sense?

Since I don’t normally buy a lot of books, I never saw much personal reason to buy a Kindle.

That may change. More . . .

I read a lot, but I don’t buy a lot of books. I get books at the library. I buy magazines and newspapers, but only the occasional book. The other day I grabbed a book at the library called Grown Up Digital by Don Tapscott because of this sentence on the inside flap of the cover: “The bottom line is this: if you understand the Net Generation, you will understand the future.”

I haven’t read it yet, so I’m not ready to say I understand the future. As soon as I read it, I’ll be ready to give you any hints about the future that you might want. Right now, pre-reading, I’m thinking that the future involves e-book readers, the hottest of which is the Kindle.

Since I don’t normally buy a lot of books, I never saw much personal reason to buy a Kindle.

That may change.

For one thing, I own an iPhone, and read my first ebook using the Kindle iPhone app recently. I found I loved reading that way. Denise does, too.

And then the Kindle 2 came out. This device is bigger in phyiscal size and is meant to handily display larger format information such as newspapers and textbooks. It will also publish blogs and download your magazine subscriptions instantly.

Yes, you can now publish your blog to the Kindle. You can even self-publish a book to the Kindle, like Burningbird.

As I mentioned, I subscribe to newspapers and magazines. A steady flow of paper comes into the house, passes before my eyes, and exits via my recycling bin. Knowing that I could get all the same material without all the paper is important information based on my world view. Miraz at KnowIT said in Books of the future: chunky bits of digital linkbait?

A while back I published a post called I hate books, in which I wrote about how fed up I am with books being published on dead trees. My pal Maria wrote a rebuttal, I love books where she wrote about the appeal of words printed on paper.

What about those dead trees? What is the environmental impact of e-readers?

An extensive analysis of this issue at Fat Knowlege called E-Books Vs. Newspapers looks at every aspect of this question—from cutting trees, running printing presses, delivering paper reading material on the paper side of the equation to manufacturing and disposal of electronic readers and even the electricity consumed by the servers delivering material to devices on the e-book side of the equation. One of the conclusions was

Reading the physical version of the NY Times for a year uses 7,300 MJ of energy and emits 700 kg of co2. Reading it on a Kindle uses 100 MJ of energy and emits 10 kg of co2.

Newspapers desperately need to keep subscribers right now. The New York Times has released its own Reader application which is used on computers. Other newspapers have gone completly online, even without special reader apps. Funny Business asked, Can the Kindle DX Save Newspapers? At the Business Insider, we learn that Printing the NYT Costs Twice as Much as Sending Every Reader a Free Kindle.

We all seem to grasp the idea that traditional publishing on paper has reached a crisis point. What we resist is concluding that devices like the Kindle may the solution.

People are slow to change, and cite reasons like “loving the feel of a book” as a reason to resist e-book readers. Even people who make the switch, like One Plus Two in I love me some Kindle seem ambivalent about the change.

Then there are unresolved issues around DRM and Author rights vs. disability rights. See Publishers hit Kindle Text to Speech Kill Switch for an update on that the rights story.

BlogHer Contributing Editor Sassymonkey talked about DRM to me in an email.

I love the *idea* of the e-book readers so, so much but I hate DRM with a passion. When I buy an actual book I can move it around from a bookshelf to the car to whatever. I can even loan it to friends. So why the heck can’t I move an ebook from my Mac to my ebook reader to my iphone to our PC without doing something illegal and causing publisher/some author’s heads from exploding? I mean, I’ve paid for the book. Sigh.

Even as all these issues are debated, legislated, and pondered, the e-book market races ahead with gusto. Develop the technology, sell the devices, and resolve the details later. That’s the current system. World Public Library has over half a million e-books listed. When Jeff Bezos introduced the Kindle 2, he said,

Today there are 275,000 books available for the device. On Amazon.com, 35 percent of sales of books that have a Kindle edition are sold in that format.

That’s huge: 35%. As more people get Kindle devices, I think that percentage will rise. The plus factors are compelling. It’s better for the environment and it’s cheaper. Most books are only $9.99, there’s no shipping cost, and you have the book or newspaper in your hand seconds after you buy it. That seems like a “duh” factor to me. What person who owned a Kindle wouldn’t opt for e-book over print?

Does that mean e-book readers are the solution for publishing, or are they just one aspect of this transition in media that we are embroiled in right now? I wish I had the answer. I can tell you this: the next time I buy a book, if I can get it on the Kindle app on my iPhone, I will. Absolutely.

Cross-posted at BlogHer.

The Cascade and ordering external stylesheet links

The Cascade in Cascading Style Sheets can determine how a web page displays. The purpose of the Cascade is to resolve conflicts when more than one rule applies to an element on an HTML page. Factors such as specificity, inheritance, and the order of the rules within a style sheet can all affect the way rules Cascade.

Most web sites use external stylesheets exclusively. There may be more than one external stylesheet attached. Some of the external stylesheets may address specific aspects of the site’s design. For example, there may be stylesheets containing only workarounds for Internet Explorer, or stylesheets that only serve to reset the browser default styles.

Another common reason for multiple linked external stylesheets is the number of possible media types that can be applied to styles. The possible media styles are:

  • all
  • aural
  • braille
  • embossed
  • handheld
  • print
  • projection
  • screen
  • tty
  • tv

Links to external stylesheets  are listed in the document <head>. The order in which these external stylesheets are listed affects the Cascade. In The Cascade by Example, I mentioned that “the closest style rules.”

Here’s an example:

<link href="CSS/2col.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all">
<link href="CSS/mobile.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld">
<link href="CSS/print.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print">

Three sets of style rules. The first one listed has the media type “all.” That style sheet will apply to all media types. The second one listed uses the media type “handheld.” The third uses the media type “print.”

What does that mean in Cascade terms?

It means that for a user viewing a page in a handheld device that recognizes this media type (some handheld devices like iPhones are capable of rendering web pages using media types “all” or “screen”) will see the page displayed according to the rules in the handheld stylesheet. The Cascade is what makes it happen.

Here’s how it works. The handheld device may see the rules in the media type “all” stylesheet and attempt to apply them. If it sees the rules in the media type “handheld” stylesheet, these rules will take precedence over the rules in the “all” stylesheet. That’s because the “handheld” rules come after the “all” rules in the Cascade. Or to put it another way, the “handheld” rules are closer in Cascade terms than the “all” rules. And the closest rule wins.

The same principle applies to printers. A printer will format using rules from the “all” stylesheet, but any rules in the “print” stylesheet can overrule those in the “all” stylesheet in determining how the printer formats and displays the page.

Handheld devices vary so widely in capability that I don’t want to make generalizations about them. But it is safe to generalize about printers. Since the “print” rules come after the “all” rules in the Cascade, the “print” stylesheet only has to contain rules needed to override something in the “all” rules. For example, the “all” rule for color may be set to black. If you want the printer to print the text in black, there’s no need to add a new rule about color to the print stylesheet. However, if the “all” stylesheet uses percentages for font sizing, you might want to write some rules in the “print” styles that set the font sizing in points, which printers interpret more accurately. The rules using points will be the ones applied by the printer, because of the Cascade.

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The Cascade by Example

The Cascade in Cascading Style Sheets can determine how a web page displays. The purpose of the Cascade is to resolve conflicts when more than one rule applies to an element on an HTML page. Factors such as specificity, inheritance, and the order of the rules within a style sheet can all affect the Cascade.

The most basic concept around the Cascade is the location of the style rule. Styles can be written in an external stylesheet, an internal stylesheet, or inline. In addition, each browser has built in default styles for HTML elements that determine formatting and appearance.

The general rule is “the closest style rules.” Rules cascade from browser defaults, external rules, internal rules, to inline rules. Each step down the cascade from browser defaults to inline rules brings the rule nearer and nearer to the HTML element it targets.

Some illustrations

Here’s a paragraph with no styles attached. It displays according to the browser’s default styles.

a paragraph with browser default rules

Adding an external style sheet serves to illustrate the next step in the Cascade. I’ll add this rule to an external, linked stylesheet:

p {
font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
color: #00F;
}

Here’s the result. You can see that the rules for font-family and color in the external stylesheet take precedence over the browser default rules.

a paragraph styled by browser defaults plus external rules

The next step down through the Cascase into closer proximity to the affected HTML paragraph is to add an internal style rule to the document head.


p {
color: #93F;
}

This rule sets the paragraph to a purple color. Notice that the font-family set in the external style sheet is still Trebuchet, but the external rule regarding color has been overruled by the internal color rule.

a paragraph affected by both external and internal style rules

The next step down in the Cascade is one that is not normally taken. It needs illustration, even though it is not a best practice and its use is discouraged. That is the inline style, a style rule written as an attribute of a single HTML element.

Here’s what I added to the <p> tag in the HTML document.

<p style="color: #F00">

The result is yet another color change. The inline red color rule takes precedence over the internal rule and the external rule. The font-family rule set in the external stylesheet remains unaffected.

a paragraph with external, internal, and inline styles

These examples illustrate the principle of location of style rules in the Cascade. In practical terms, most web sites use only external stylesheets, and internal and inline styles don’t enter into the mix.

Additional Thoughts

I plan to add future posts explaining factors that can affect conflicts in the Cascade when the only styles are in one or more external stylesheets. As I mentioned earlier in this post, that can include concepts such as the specificity of selectors and the order of  the rules in the stylesheet. The order in which external stylesheets are linked to a page is also part of the Cascade.

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