"I think we could be in the rather frustrating position of having indirect evidence of life... but not being absolutely certain and not having any prospect of becoming absolutely certain in the foreseeable future." - Barrie Jones
My sister's eldest child was about four, I think. I was babysitting for the evening, and had already tucked his little brother in bed for the night. Curled up on the sofa with the four-year-old, I slowly turned the pages of a children's book about the universe, as he studied the pictures intently. He wanted to know all about the planets. Why were some bigger than others? Why were they different colors? Why didn't they have air we could breathe? But it was when I told him that those bright stars in our sky were really other suns, very, very far away, and that some of them had planets of their own, that the discussion got tough.
"Could we walk to that star?" he asked, pointing at a corner of the illustration.
"No, it's too far away."
"Could we see all those other planets?"
"No, there are too many. It would take a HUGE amount of time." ("Huge" was his favorite word then. Anything too large to describe or fully comprehend was considered huge.)
"Even in my whole life?"
"Even in your whole life."
He didn't like that answer, and his little face darkened. It wasn't fair. He wanted to see all those places, learn about them. (Of course, so did I.) I tried mollifying him by invoking his parents' strong religious doctrines.
"Isn't it wonderful, that God is so great, he can create a universe big enough that we could never explore it all?"
He didn't buy it. I couldn't blame him: neither did I.
I've made it halfway through Zeldman's book, and I'm liking what I'm reading. But, naturally, there's a very non-silver lining.
The cloud hovering overhead is the whole issue of transitional coding. I buy into the concept, but in practice I'm less sanguine: there are not-infrequent occasions when sites using CSS completely munge on me.
In some instances this may be due to outdated browsers, since I'm surfing on multiple platforms, with multiple brand browsers, in multiple versions. There's really nothing I can do on this aspect - I'm always going to have users on older equipment and software, and it's been a hallmark of Snurcher's from the beginning that that's okay. Users should be able to get in, get want they want, and get out, with only the smallest modicum of fuss necessary.
In some instances, perhaps even the same ones as above, it may be due to poor CSS coding. In theory, this is completely avoidable on a well-designed and implemented site. But this is also my first time out of the gate, CSS-wise, and managing a site the size of Snurcher's perfectly would be a tough first assignment.
And yet, now that I look back on this Winter's redesign, all I can say is, "Ick! Look at all those FONT tags! All those ALIGN and BGCOLOR tags! All those nested TABLE structures!"
Sigh. A little knowledge is *such* a dangerous thing...
Okay, so it's been just over a week since I installed the blogging software. I've got several blogs established, I've got folks actually participating in communal discussions, and it's been fun playing with a new toy. The problem? Well, once you learn one new thing, you realize that there's this other, related thing, that you really ought to know more about, and that leads you to an interesting tangent, which cross-connects to this other technology, which leads to discovering something totally unrelated but really cool, and suddenly you're in the middle of this run-on sentence because there's so doggone much fun stuff to figure out and it's an endless quest. And it's all the fault of those crazy standards people...
I mean that in jest, of course. Although I've been uber lax about implementing them, I do (philosophically, at least) support the concept of web design standards. The stumbling block for me has always been time - I've had too much raw content to process, to be able to come up for air and get a better perspective on how that content should be managed. (Ironic, as a better management system would make processing the raw content much quicker and easier. It's a circular situation. I really hate those.) There is structure, of course, to the websites I've built, and I'd like to think the structure is both logical and intuitive. It's the GUI that's the sticky wicket.
When I first installed MovableType (the software used to run the blogs on this domain), I immediately hated the default layout for the main page. Ick. Tres ick, in fact. No offense to the software-maker's efforts, mind you - since the layouts are completely customizable, it makes perfect sense that they'd start with a very plain vanilla template, knowing that users could then apply whatever design changes their hearts desired. Sure enough, right away I went looking for alternate layout designs.
As usual, I wanted to run before I'd learned to crawl; it's a character flaw that annoys me no end, but there you are, it's how I'm wired, and on the upside, I do seem to learn best by doing. The few sites I found which provided alternate blog layout styles for download, were very light on the "how to" department, apparently figuring that if you knew enough to want to download a skin, you'd know how to split out the template from the stylesheet and load them appropriately on your own site. Via my usual trial by fire approach, I figured it out with only a modicum of frustration. Problem was, none of the styles I found really "clicked" for me, aesthetically.
And that's when I discovered that I was gonna have to bite the bullet and learn CSS. (Okay, Pye, you can say "I told you so!" now!)
A few days later and some dollars poorer, yesterday Amazon delivered its latest contributions to my coding shelf. Most of the books are reference manuals, because I love coding dictionaries (that's coding as an adjective, not a verb), but I did order a couple volumes on concept and approach. First up on the reading list? Jeffrey Zeldman's "Designing With Web Standards". Amusing guy, Jeff - I like his writing style, which means I'll probably actually read this book straight through instead of piecemeal. And we'll see where the road leads from there...