Monthly Archives: January 2009

CSS Tables – The Limitations

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Oh, CSS, you’ll never give up do you. So, think again, float is not dead. How’s that? First off, take a CSS table for layout. Secondly, realize that, in a table, there is no way to seperate table blocks, except if you put something in-between.

What used to be this with floats:

<div class="table_table">
<div class="table_row">
<div class="table_cell"></div>
<div class="table_cell"></div>
<div class="table_cell"></div>
</div>
</div>

Is now this ugly thing with CSS tables:

<div class="table_table">
<div class="table_row">
<div class="table_cell"></div>
<div class="table_cell_spacer"></div>
<div class="table_cell"></div>
<div class="table_cell_spacer"></div>
<div class="table_cell"></div>
</div>
</div>

(Sorry for the lack of code indentation, WordPress is acting stupid)

Anyways… spacers! Oh god, no. Luckily, borders can aproximate spacing and most image-based design cuts won’t need those margins in-between blocks. Actually, the fortunate news is that about 90% of the time, the spaces between blocks is what you don’t want.

I don’t think CSS tables are going to make CSS logic that much easier. If you were using floats in a good way, chances are you won’t have to change much in your HTML structure. I didn’t say you won’t have to change anything! Yes, CSS tables eliminate the need for container blocks or float clears everywhere and yes, CSS tables will fix a lot of bugs and make possible a lot of cool things; like menues that expand with content and 100% height properties that base themselves on the browser window, not parent CSS block, oh god yes.

CSS Tables – The Next Best Thing Since Ice-Cream

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If your a new web developer, you’ll be amazed at how logical today’s world of the web can be. Learning CSS tables firsthand in CSS would be dream-like; I envy future students.

But for modern web developers, for the few who truly master the trickery art of CSS design, CSS table is nothing short of amazing. While reading Everything You Know About CSS is Wrong from Sitepoint, you seriously have to buy this book, my jaw dropped. I couldn’t stop reading the basics of CSS tables with a constantly growing excitement to re-code all of my sites in CSS tables.

Really, the next best thing since the invention of ice-cream, or chocolate, or whatever godly desert basis you can think of, tasting CSS tables after having been proclamed CSS guru by your friends is heavenly. I know a lot in CSS. In my short life-span of web developement carreer, nothing has ever been so cool to learn.

To give you a good idea of my history, when I entered college (we call it Cégep here in the province of Québec in Canada, and it’s before University), I knew nothing about HTML and CSS and was learning to do everything via Dreamweaver’s WYSIWYG interface. Well, so long for those wasted hours, at least I know Dreamweaver’s interface by heart. I quickly realized how coding directly was superior. By the half of my first college year, I was coding without a WYSIWYG in all of CSS’s complex floating glory, learning mind-bending tricks I have yet to see in use by anyone else than some elites on other parts of the planet. So no, I haven’t met anyone better than me in CSS in person, yet. I am now in my third year of college.

Keep in mind though that layout is just half of CSS, the other accessibility part being largely ignored and unexciting, it’s always been something I could count on when it comes to showing off CSS skills. You don’t necessarily know what’s the difference between an <i> tag and an <em> tag if you know how to use float CSS.

But enough talk. Download the free chapters of Sitepoint’s book and learn ahead. (I thought about puting the information here directly, but Sitepoint deserves too much credit for publishing that book).

Anime: Changing Artist Halfway

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I was listening to The Third and uppon listening to 13, it seemed to me the drawings were awkward, making the characters look fat. So, I did a comparison with past and future episodes, and to my delight, it’s the only episode that’s this way.

The change is stunning. It really is another artist.
Let’s take a look.


The second image is the original of course; I’ll keep it this way from now on. But, hey, if that isn’t obvious. Just look at the nose!

–


Although closer to the original, it’s far from it. The nose, the face’s roundness, the hair detail. Everything!

–


Honoka and Millie. This one’s most notable aspect is probably the lack of hair detail on Millie.

–


And for the final, fat face!

Really, I hope the artist of the filler never makes Anime or Manga. May you stay as a good in-between-animation frame artist.

Audible – Not DRM-Free but Excellent Customer Support

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The other day I came about to a small surprise. I format computers a lot so a lot of my licenses have to be re-activated with a new OS counted as a new computer.

Unfortunatly, Audible only allows a maximum of three computers to be activated at the same time. If you don’t purposely disactivate your account, it’ll stay activated and when you have it on three systems, whether you can activate them or not, you’re done for it.

Fortunately this isn’t much of an issue as you can call Audible anytime and they will reset your activated devices. I called and I was immediatly serviced by someone who looked like this is something that happens a lot of time. But he still remained very pleasent and knew exactly what was my problem, I’m guessing this isn’t the first time it happens.

So even though Audible books are DRMed and you can’t play them on incompatible devices, Audible supports its fare amount of MP3 players and they have great support. iTunes and iPods are the best for Audilbe of course.

Thank you Audible!

DSD Applied to Video – Beyond the Pixel

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DSD is somewhat Ironic (What is DSD) because its process is quite literaly immitating the analog signal. But in audio, much to the contrary of video and imaging, this is the best thing to do.

In imaging however, the saying goes digital is better since it can describe every pixel in a lossless matter, which is good because this is how monitors work.

However, digital imaging is stuck to pixels. You can’t get more than what the pixel gives you with a pixel. With traditional films, you could rescan a film tape and get a greater amount of detail in it. A very direct impact of that is that traditional film cameras (the very expensive ones) are expected to be around 120 Mega Pixels, in theory, much higher than today’s best Digital SLRs.

While this theory is largely eliminated by the fact digital imaging never loses quality because you can’t degrade a bit of numeric information, it’s either a 1 or 0 and that’s where it ends, I came to the conclusion DSD could be applied to imaging, digitally, much the same way as it was for audio.

Think of it, the technology already exists. NTSC is transported over analog as a modulated signal on a 4.2 MHz bandwidth. Since this signal is essentially composed of waveforms, it could be digitally encoded in the same way as DSD: on a 1 bit high frequency stream using algorithms to describe its content. This could essentially describe visual content in a way that goes beyond pixels because it’s mathematically scalable functions stringed together.

But, this is a very “in the air” theory. Fixed images cannot be described on a lenght of time, so an image would have to be a peice of video. Editing such data digitally could prove immensily complex, the very reason why the best SACD discs are mastered from a PCM-based recording instead of a DSD stream. And as I am not scientific, there is probably a dozen of other holes in my theory, but hey, we can dream and you have to admit the idea is technically cool.

The confusing world of Newlines – Why your text file may have become a single line

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If you’re in the web business, you’re bound to have come across the phenomenon of opening your text file and have it appear completely on one line or in some kind of giberish.

While a lot of it can be attributed to localization and the use of incorrect encodings for languages, we’re gonna talk more specifically about Newlines here.

In simple terms, each system has its own way of encoding new lines in text files with special invisible characters. Windows uses a CR+LF, UNIX a LF and Mac a CR.

Now, Mac OS X is based on UNIX so the CR-only format doesn’t apply to newer Macs, only to pre-OS-X systems. Mac OS X uses a single LF for a new line.

So, if somebody gives you a text file made on a Linux machine or a Mac, chances are Notepad will open it on a single line. Some uploading systems automatically convert the file to that system’s format, and since your web server probably runs Linux, you’re bound to download back your file and open it in a single line.

A very good example is opening Engadget’s RSS XML file in Notepad. It’s pretty ugly. Now this doesn’t mean Engadget is working on UNIX-based boxes, rather, that XML file was probably automatically generated by somekind of PHP script running on none-other than a very common Linux server.

Open it in a proper text editor, say, Notepad++, and you’ll see all of its glory (and the confirmation it uses LF by checking some stuff in Notepad++).

The solution?
There is none.
Yeah… unfortunatly nobody thought of making that a standard yet so instead you’ll need to use a software that supports all the formats. Luckily, about every raw-text capable software on earth, even FrontPage and Wordpad, can recognize all formats, just, not Notepad. With a bit more badluck however, UNIX-based servers aren’t so polivalent as those big software suites and could possibly read your the extra CR in Windows encoded files as crap, resulting in mysterious application errors and what not.

The morale of this story is to choose your software.

  • Linux Server = LF capable editor (Notepad++, Dreamweaver)
  • Windows Server = Anything really, your server’s not going to panick if the code is on one line, except if it’s Ruby. Try to use Windows stuff in this case, any Microsoft software fits the bill, as well as Notepad++ and Dreamweaver.
  • General Public = Windows-compatible. The big majority of users are still on Windows, don’t go publishing raw-text files with UNIX newlines in them if you don’t wish for 95% of the planet to not be able to read your files. (remember .txt files open in Notepad by default, not Wordpad, so you don’t really have a choice but to accomodate for Notepad)