The Juice Journal

Dear Skype,

I do love you. I really do. But I’ll be honest: we’re on rocky grounds right now.

When I broke up with Gizmo, you seemed like a big step up, Skype. You had better software, a sweet wifi phone, better voicemail management, and you actually worked most of the time. I quickly realized you didn’t properly send a caller ID, so people had no idea who was calling them (it’s typically either +000000 or +0123456 or something). Also no receiving text messages, and no text messages or chat at all on my Netgear handset. But those were the days of optimism and hope, and simple joy over a $6/month phone bill, so everything was excused with the assumption that you were working on these issues.

It turns out I misunderstood your priorities. You weren’t working on caller ID for US callers; you weren’t working on simplifying your bloody confusing array of payment and subscription options; you weren’t working on breaking the stranglehold of oppressive, expensive, technologically-backward telcos; no, you were working on shitty cell phone compromise add-ons that just admit people should carry expensive, crappy mobile phones and use you as a third-party. You may not want to admit it, Skype, but you’re becoming the telcos’ bitch.

What happened to the revolutionary Skype? Skype the game-changer? Skype, the little Estonian P2P communication company that made calling free and set the telcos’ knees trembling? Do you still care about shaking things up?

I still care.

You’ve changed my unlimited calling plan again. I bought “Skype Unlimited” a year-and-a-half ago or so. Then that got cancelled, and replaced with Skype Pro (never mind that, if I recall, the name “Skype Pro” used to refer to something totally different, and at the very least it’s somewhat confusingly-similar to “Skype for Business” and various other boring names). Now it’s just Skype Subscriptions. All of these have been almost identical, but with minor little differences that left me wondering if I was still going to be able to do what I had been doing. Also, each change has required me to cancel my then-current plan and sign-up for the new one. A time-wasting hassle, with literally no gain, other than the fact that this unlimited calling thing should probably have been called a subscription from the beginning.

I say all this because really, I do love you, Skype. You’re cheap, you’re easy to use, and you’re a hell of a lot better than those cell phone companies. And you have potential, lots of potential. When popular mindset comes around and embraces the internet as the single necessary network of communication, with all its advantages of price and innovation, you’ll be in the best place to take advantage of it.

I just hope for both our sakes’, Skype, that you don’t muck this up. I want us to have a long and happy future filled with many happy hours of free calling.

And give me freaking caller ID, dammit!

{love},
{ryan}

I attended my first BarCamp this past weekend, and I have to say I had a blast. Being around so many intelligent, erudite, open-minded people is always a high.

For those not in the know, BarCamp is an “unconference”, an open gathering of people who themselves decide the topics of panels and discussions. The attendees are largely from the various nerd communities, but the format is very open and appropriate for anyone with ideas. I think that’s most people.

I think my favorite discussion was an open-ended gathering with the topic “The Social Sciences of Technology”. We discussed differences and similarities between online interactions and “analog” interactions; wiki ideas applied to government, decision-making, and societal structuring (with enthusiastic and enlightening thoughts from Mark Dilley); the troubles with binary mindsets; and hope for community self-determination through intelligent use of technology and self-activism. And much much more!

I also loved meeting and chatting with other clever minds and fun folks, some sharing my field of web work. George Huff and Todd Quackenbush of We the Media were great to talk with after a delightfully confusingingly-named session on design and nerdery. I look forward to bumping into these two again. Bram Pitoyo and I enjoyed an intense conversation about design, freelancing, web browsers & word processors, and all manner of fun typophile crap. I also just noticed somewhere on his website that he is a “elevator music enthusiast”, a topic we did not discuss but I’d love to bring up with him sometime. Finally, I met someone I consider a big shot, Rael Dornfest, former CTO of O’Reilly Media and current wizard at Values of n (which I asininely called “Powers of n” when I first approached him).

I could talk about the ideas and the people I experienced at BarCamp for a bit longer, but I’m tired and blog entries are supposed to be short and sexy I’m told, so I’ll just let the rest be.

Join the community: go to a BarCamp near you!

{love},
{ryan}

Now you see my site’s underpants… no, you now see it totally naked. What do I mean?

Today is CSS Naked Day

Today, standards-based sites around the world have voluntarily stripped their pages of the CSS that makes them pretty.

The funny thing, and the point of the whole exercise, is to see that what’s left, the content, is still pretty because it’s semantic. The headers show up as headers, lists have bullet points, emphatic text shows up emphatically! Everything is still totally usable, on any device that browses the web.

Please read more about all this at the official CSS Naked Day website. No pretty styles there, either. Sorry.

UPDATE: CSS Naked Day is passed, and the styles are back! Yay!

{love},
{ryan}

Time was when a web designer needed to know all the hacks to get his or her sites to display properly in all the major browsers (all right, Internet Explorer is really the main problem). Then along came IE7, and our hacks stopped working (IE fixed some of the rendering and parsing bugs, but not all), leaving us desperate to find a new way to target the atrocities of Internet Explorer.

Amongst others, we lost the * html hack.

The * html hack (starting a CSS selector with * html) allowed us to target CSS just at IE. And although it’s no more, we, as designers for the web, still need a way around the crap of IE.

Along came conditional comments, which had technically been around for years but only now really seemed useful. With IE’s proprietary conditional comments, we could serve up separate stylesheets or even content just to specific versions of Internet Explorer.

There are several reasons conditional comments aren’t awesome. For one, we must put them directly in our HTML, rather than in our CSS. Two, at first glance it seems like we’d need to create many different CSS files, one for each version of IE we need to target. These two downsides are a nuisance and make IE hacks comment-served-styles perhaps even less maintainable than before.

Then Hiroki Chalfant came up with a clever solution that gave us the ability to target IE directly within our CSS. Basically, use a conditional comment to serve an enclosing <div> with an id of "IERoot" around everything inside the <body>. Only IE would see the <div>, so only IE would have that clever #IERoot. Therefore, instead of using * html whatever, we could now use #IERoot whatever in exactly the same way. Clever clever.

This solution still leaves us with the problem of not being able to address specific versions of Explorer, something I need while creating templates for dreamscape. I’ve taken the (logical) next step from Chalfant’s method, and created separate <div>s for IE5, IE6, and IE7. It looks like this:

<body>
<!-- provides IE-named containers to allow IE-specific CSS -->
<!--[if IE 5]>
	<div id="ie5">
<![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 6]>
	<div id="ie6">
<![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 7]>
	<div id="ie7">
<![endif]-->

And then obviously we need to put this in the footer to close the <div>:

<!--[if lt IE 8]>
	</div>
<![endif]-->
</body>

Now in my CSS I’m able to make a declaration like this one (a replacement of Tantek’s famous Box Model Hack):

#ie5 div {
	padding: 10px;
	width: 220px;
	}
#ie6 div, #ie7 div {
	padding: 10px;
	width: 200px;
	}

As you can see, we can use this technique to specifically target any version of IE for just about any CSS rendering bug.

Shortcomings

I would have liked to make the <div>s have an id of "ie" and a class with the version number. That way we could target all buggy versions of IE at once, or just a specific version. However, old versions of IE (surprise surprise) don’t support selectors with both a class and an id, so no dice. If you want to target more than one version of IE, you have to write comma-separated selectors, which can occasionally get a bit long if you’re addressing something buried deeply in your HTML that needs a great deal of specificity. Meh.

I’ll update this post with other shortcomings as I discover them. Please feel free to comment with any further ideas you may have, or questions or concerns.

Shameless Plug

If you’d like to try this IE-targeting thing, but don’t really want to muck about with your code, or perhaps your CMS doesn’t give you the flexibility to add this sort of thing, you can download the latest versions of dreamscape cms from the SVN at Google Code page. The default theme, "The Neue Standard", has this feature built in.

Thank you.

UPDATE: I feel totally silly for accidentally misnaming the * html hack the “Holly Hack”. Which it’s not. The * html hack is also called the Star HTML Hack or the Tan Hack. I’ve updated this post. Thanks, Wojtek.

UPDATE 2: At John Lascurettes’s suggestion, I shortened up the closing <div> by making it a single conditional comment. Thanks, John.

{love},
{ryan}

It’s about time I added a blog to my professional design site. It seems like everyone else has one, right? You practically expect one.

Who is this blog for? The content of this blog will be aimed at potential clients, colleagues, and students of design. Everyone interested in these areas will find something to learn.

What will I talk about here? I’ll cover many aspects of design, from CSS techniques to Photoshop tips to design theory. I’ll also discuss issues of social justice, socialism, being a conscientious entrepreneur, and just chatting about life.

Come along for the ride.

{love},
{ryan}