A lengthy rant about how XUL Templates are a Waste of Time (via marc). I found the same things the last time I looked at it: it’s no better far worse than XHTML/CSS + PHP|Perl|Ruby.

I like to spend my winter holiday thinking about the year, and what I didn’t do enough of. Next year, I hope to:

1. Write more. Not just web fluff and links (which is fun), but more real fiction and non-fiction. I love to write, but life and complexity just keep on getting in the way.
2. Do more creative stuff. I have an artistic side, but the geek in me naturally suppresses it. I need to learn better balance.
3. Learn more healthy habits. I love good food, I grok nutrition, and I enjoy exercise. I need a bit more of each (and less of the crap).
4. Learn Ruby/Rails well. Last year I polished my C#, Javascript, and Php skills (as well as time spent with SQL, CSS/XHTML, etc.). This year I need to at least know why Rails isn’t for me. So far I’ve only spent a dozen hours with it, which isn’t nearly enough.
5. Focus. Life is noisy. Work is noisy. Learn to deal with both: I will overcome the chaos.

One thing I like to keep in mind with resolutions is that sometimes a year isn’t enough. Life is a garden, and sometimes crops fail. The key is to keep doing healthy things, and remember that growth takes time, practice, and effort.

Today I was thinking about how to write a web app that draws comic bubbles. There are many parts and solutions to the problem. It’s one of those things that gets complex quickly, unless you’re willing to remove some of the harder features.

I need to spend some time thinking about compromise, as a perfect solution is unlikely given the tools available for web applications.

Some of the problems:

• Embedding special fonts
• Resizing irregular bubbles
• Adding/positioning bubble parts
• Positioning fonts based on irregular edges
• Clipping bubbles to strip edges
• How/where to render (client or server, svg, js, raster, etc.)

I can see a few different approaches. Each solves a few of the hard problems, and each has its own rough spots.

One approach would be to perform the rendering on the server side. Something like Inkscape could be pared down to run as a web service. Comics would be stored in SVG, but rendered to GIF/PNG to embed in the web pages. Comic authors would edit their strips using rich Javascript approximations (edit boxes over the rendered form), and readers would see the already-rendered strips. This allows for high quality rendering, for authors who wanted to go to press with their strips.

Another approach would live within the limitations of xhtml/css/javascript. Fonts would be limited, and all rendering would be done client-side. Features could be added to this as browsers matured, but would depend heavily on browser vendors and compatibility. This approach would initially limit things like clipping, available fonts, etc., but would likely be easier to build.

There are dozens of other approaches too. Flash or the canvas widget could be used, or something written in Java. Luckily I don’t have time to start today, so I’ll have to let my subconscious gnaw on it for a while.

The new amateurs, a post that talks about professional web developers who refuse to learn new techniques like CSS and standard XHTML. A balanced approach, an open mind, and the understanding that there’s always more to learn is what makes a professional useful.

How to style a restaurant menu with CSS, a basic HOWTO that covers floating DIVs and other useful, real-life XHTML bits.

Today I gave up on web standards. Again.

I’m in the middle of re-tooling the weblog, one of those bi-annual habits that plagues me. This particular round was spurred by an interesting find, a fairly sensible (and seemingly liberated) php/mysql-based weblogging tool. I figured would make a good replacement for my currently functional, but somewhat tedious, publishing system.

I decided to make another honest attempt to find XHTML/CSS Zen. I’ve been previously frustrated by inconsistent browser support for DIV positioning, which appears simple on the surface (but ends up a time-sink for getting layouts to mesh). Since then, I’ve read several articles outlining the ‘right’ hacks for getting DIVs and CSS to render sensibly across all browsers (cough IE), and thought that this time would be easier.

Getting the site layouts to work in Mozilla and Konqueror-based browsers was easy: both are capable, compliant browsers. CSS and XHTML are a bit limiting (compared to postscript or latex), but I can live with that. It’s Internet Explorer that causes all of the problems.

Even after applying the many well-known CSS hacks, I was still suffering rendering problems. Then I realized: this is a simple problem, why am I wasting my time trying to get a two-column layout to display properly? Layout is a trivial problem, and I’ve spent hours trying to approximate a simple format in a handful of browsers. What a waste of energy.

The standards are broken. IE is broken. Trying to make the standards work by hacking and slashing the markup is broken. Trying to make /my/ site standards compliant is broken. The whole approach stinks.

All I want is a simple way to layout text. I’m not a moron, I’ve used dozens of markup systems for more than 15 years. HTML 1.0 worked, even though it was a bit limiting. XHTML works, as long as you avoid the zealotry. It just doesn’t make sense to hack around a bogus rendering model, and shitty support for an end result that can be achieved through simpler means. Why are we wasting our time with standards-purity?

The whole approach lacks of elegance and balance. It’s broken. It’s a time-sink. And, it takes away from the time we spend thinking and writing about things.