Category: Books

I am hard at work trying to finish the last of my due and overdue projects. I attend the first of my Red Cross disaster training sessions next Wednesday and will most likely be deployed south as soon as I’m finished–where is anyone’s idea, but it could be Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, or Texas. If you need anything from me before hand, now is the time to holler.

This is a short post. It was a much, much longer one earlier. I had said a great deal in this post that I ended up pulling. It was filled with frustration, anger, and a lot of “I told you so’s”, directed at politicians, some religious groups, and several prominant political webloggers.

I wrote into this post, as if it were a sponge for all my dark thoughts. I wrote them down, one by one, and then deleted them in one single swoop and click of the mouse. This is my last post written out of frustrated anger–doing so is the typographical equivalent of kicking a flat tire: it does no good, and it really doesn’t make you feel better.

In the meantime, I have two exceptionally good books that I strongly recommend you read, especially now. The first is John Barry’s Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America; and Ted Steinberg’s Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America. I’ll have more to say on both of them, and then some, in the future.

I received a copy of The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web from the authors, Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag, and have been getting an intimate peek into the world of web page design the last few weeks.

This is a beautiful book, with an elegant and clever layout, and featuring many examples of the famous CSS Zen Garden. With each design, Dave and Molly have focused on one specific element and used this as a basis for whatever is the topic of that chapter: Imagery, Layout, Typography, and so on.

“Zen of CSS Design” isn’t a book for beginners, as it doesn’t cover the basics of CSS or HTML. It’s a book for someone who has worked with both and wants to take their web design beyond the basics–to explore, but to do so in a way that is cross-browser compatible, accessible, and that validates.

For instance, chapter 4 provides techniques to replace the text of a header element with a graphic, but still have the text accessible to screen readers, and search engines–something that was new to me. In fact, I thought I knew CSS quite well, but I found out there’s a whole new level of tweaking I wasn’t aware of, primarily because I don’t keep up with the many design and CSS mailing lists. Luckily Dave and Molly do, and have gleaned the best of it in the pages.

As for my design, I’ve finally been inspired to clean up my stylesheet and use the ID and CLASS selectors correctly. I’ve also been fairly weak with fonts, falling back on Verdana or Arial most times. In the book there’s a whole chapter on typography, and I have now discovered georgia, which will be appearing in my pages in the days to come. This will make Joe Clark happy.

An interesting coincidence: this week Dave wrote a post about accessibility and the “aaa” Bobby rating that’s shown in the CSS Zen Garden HTML template. A group of Italian designers had challenged this rating because some of the designs do fail with accessibility, primarily through the use of color. However, as he pointed out, in the post, this is addressed in the book, which includes a decent discussion on all the nuances that can make a page less than accessible. There’s more to accessibility than labeling your images and using headers correctly; for instance, one suggestion is that text in hypertext links should be able to stand alone without the context of the surrounding text. Something that doesn’t work very well within a weblog.

After my first glance through of the book, I was inspired to try my hand with the CSS Zen Garden template, using my own Floating Clouds as model for the design. You can see the result in this page*.

As you’ll see, I’m using Georgia, and it is a pretty font. I’m also using the Floating Clouds open page body blocks and have left the sidebar items unconstrained. Rather than force all of the items into a tight, squishy box, the proximity of the elements serves as grouping — providing a balance while still allowing an openness in the design. Well, at least that’s my philosophy.

I’ve also managed to incorporate my background switching code, and do it while not touching Dave’s HTML — a requirement for CSS Zen Garden. I did this by using an import on the PHP file as the first line in the CSS file:

import “photographs.php”

The header file returned by the PHP program sets the result to CSS:

<?php
// declare the output of the file as CSS
header(’Content-type: text/css’);
?>

In addition, I also use the CSS3 “opacity” attribute for the quick summary element. This is supported in Safari and Firefox, and for those browsers where it’s not supported, the element is a solid white. Since the text is just as readable with both, and the solid white doesn’t disrupt the design, it seemed a good use of ‘edgy’ CSS. It also validates.

It’s a rather quiet design, but very readable–and at least it doesn’t hurt when you look at it, as can happen in this rather humorous look at the good old days of web design (note, lots of animated gifs in the page that opens from this link).

“The Zen of CSS Design” has been an eye opener for me and I’ll never approach web page design in the same way, again. I can strongly recommend this book — it’s definitely worth breaking into the piggy bank to buy.

*Note: I am not a designer**

**Further note: whole-hearted agreement with this statement will result in my hunting down and hacking your site. Consider the CSS Zen Garden entry I linked to. Now, think how your site would look with blooming peonies in the background.

There is one story for Kitchen I’m working on called “When Beauty becomes the Beast”. It’s about the CBS Documents and their impact on weblogging (not to mention weblogging’s impact on the CBS investigations). For some reason this subject saddens me a bit–as if we’re seeing the end of something that once was and we won’t have again. Yet webloggers point to this event with pride; a shining moment of triumph, and vindication, for weblogging.

Oddly enough, I got the title for the story because the incident reminds me of an extremely well written article by Terri Windling about the tale of Beauty and the Beast. In the article, Ms. Windling traces the history of the story and its various incarnations, as well as the influences of society on the story over time–in writing that’s lucid and entertaining.

One phenomena of the story she notes is how sympathetic the Beast was made; to the point that readers experience disappointment when the Beast turns into the Prince at the end of the story. Windling wrote about a play that actually focused on this disappointment:

In the 20th century the story was subtly altered again. In 1909, French playright Fernand Nozier wrote and produced an adult version of Beauty and the Beast with a fashionable Oriental flavor. Nozier’s rendition is humorous, yet beneath its light surface the play explores a distinctly sexual subtext, and the duality of body and spirit. In this version, all three sisters find themselves powerfully attracted to the Beast. When Beauty’s kiss turns him into a man, she complains: “You should have warned me! Here I was smitten by an exceptional being, and all of a sudden my fiancé becomes an ordinary, distinguished young man!”

This play was created in 1909 but, oh, I would wish that this version be staged today. I would pay money–real money– to see it, just to hear that last line said within the ambiance mentioned in the writing.

Windling discusses the Disney version of the film, which she liked and had many favorable things to say on it; but she also thought that much of the strength of the original tale was lost in Disney’s effort to make the tale safe. At the end of her article she asked, whether it mattered:

In Disney’s beautiful animated version of Beauty and the Beast, we take one step forward with the creation of a literate and courageous heroine, and two steps backwards as the heart of the tale is lost in the musical razzle-dazzle. But hey, the film is entertaining and fun. Young Lillian and I enjoyed it thoroughly. So should we care about what’s been lost in the process?

In my opinion, you bet we should. It does no service to lie to children, to present the world as simpler than it is. Villains rarely appear with convenient black hats, good people are rarely perfect. Beauty has gone to Hollywood now. Poor Beauty. Poor Beast. Poor us.

Something to remember, as I write my post on webloggers and the CBS Documents, and how beauty can turn beastly: good people are rarely perfect, and good intentions less so.

Windling also pointed to a poem about Beauty and the Beast by Jane Yolen, called “Beauty and the Beast: An Anniversary” that I rather liked. It made me think of growing old with someone, and how nice it sounded:

It is winter now, and the roses are blooming again, their petals bright against the snow. My father died last April; my sisters no longer write, except at the turning of the year, content with their fine houses and their grandchildren. Beast and I putter in the gardens and walk slowly on the forest paths. He is graying around the muzzle and I have silver combs to match my hair. I have no regrets. None. Though sometimes I do wonder what sounds children might have made running across the marble halls, swinging from the birches over the roses in the snow.