tjameswhite.com

At work on Friday I gave a presentation to a few people on the power and benefits of using Cascading Style Sheets. It went really well. There were a couple of guys from our product development team and they were very impressed by what I can do.

It looks like I may be asked (I’ll see that I am) to have a similar chat with a couple of managers. If all goes well, I’m going to try to create a little niche for myself here - our products could certainly use my help.

For those gamers out there, you are aware of “leveling up” a character — that moment when the suddenly gain enough experience to be at the next higher level of development. Always seemed like a rather silly and sudden mechanic to me.

But, the thing is, it actually seems to reflect life. Or at least my t’ai chi. I go about practicing t’ai chi and after a while I begin to get frustrated. I won’t seem to be showing any improvement, in fact I often feel quite the opposite.

Then in one instant, I will leap ahead and feel that I have actually reached a new level of the craft. My form feels and looks better. My push hands is better. I seem to actually level up like some silly role playing character. I have gotten this feeling about once per year and I’m not alone. Some of my classmates have expressed the same feeling — lack of progress, then one big jump ahead.

So, I reckon I’m about 4th level now…. (I guess that’d be a 4th level monk.)

Oh, I just realized that I have been practicing the sword form for just over a year now. Wow, that went by fast. One year and I still haven’t learned the entire routine. Believe it or not, that makes me happy. I am in no hurry.

I’m referring to grackles and sparrows of course.

A couple of years ago, we put up a thistle feeder to attract finches. We were partly successful in that a couple of House Finches came by, as well as a couple of American Goldfinches. The Goldfinches didn’t stick around much and the feeder has mostly been occupied by the various species of sparrow.

Over the weekend we picked up a second feeder — this one for the classic “generic bird seed mix.” I filled it with a pound or so of seed and within minutes the feeder was covered by sparrows, finches (both House and Goldfinch) and the Common Grackles. Mourning Doves were also in attendance playing their usual ground cleaning role.

Now the idea was for this feeder to attract the Cardinals and Blue Jays that are in the neighborhood. The Jay did, in fact, make a brief appearance, but the sparrows, finches and grackles mobbed the feeder.

Within a few short hours it was empty.

To give you an idea of how voracious these birds were, during the Really Big Storm that blew through in the evening, I looked out back and a couple of sparrows and crackles were still on the feeder. This wasn’t just a rain shower, we are talking driving rain, flooding yard, 40 mph winds, thunder, lightening and the tornado siren.

And still they ate seed.

Sarah and I have decided that we will only fill the feeder twice per week, max. These birds are going break the bank otherwise.

Addendum: I originally identified the male and female House Finch. I now believe that the what I thought was the female may have actually been a Pine Siskin.

Lach and James had some good comments regarding my classing of <em> post from the other day. Lach pointed out

As for <em class=”strong”&gt, that’s a bad use of a class there. That’s implying presentation in your class. Let’s say at some point in the future, you change your site design, and your strongly emphasized elements need changing. In your stylistics you’d then have the weird situation of setting em.bold to have a normal font-weight.

James helped clarify this for me with his simple “basing class and id on structure, not style.”

I think I still have a valid idea, I just presented it sloppily — I used class="strong" and class="italic" for convenience. What I should have written was something along the lines of class="e1" and class="e2". This would eliminate the odd confusion that Lach pointed out, and sort of covers James point. These classes simply point out that there are two different types of emphasis.

But I’m not really convinced by my own argument. That still seems to be using a class for style, it’s just hidden behind some semi-meaningless syntax.

So, let’s look at the elements again — <em> and <strong>. They both are used to add some sort of emphasis to text. Style them how you will, browsers will by default typically style them with italics and bold respectively.

But again, the elements do the same thing: add emphasis. So, what if there was simply an <emphasis> element that had different allowable states? Something like:

• <emphasis type="important"> = this is important
• <emphasis type="strong"> = speak loudly now
• <emphasis type="lang"> = je ne sais pas

where type=”…” could be treated like a pseudo element. The corresponding style sheet would then define the types:
emphasis:lang {font-style: italic;}

Perhaps foreign language don’t belong as a type. Perhaps book titles do. Perhaps there should be some defined allowable list of types. Or not. I’ll leave those picky details for another time (and more qualified people). The heart of the matter is, do we need two elements that provide emphasis or is there a better way?

In the meantime, I will go about using <em> and <strong> for italic and bold, and I will deal with book titles, foreign language, etc. as best I can when I come across them.

So I’m slowly being addicted to a new browser:

I’ve been using Mozilla for quite a while now and really love it. But I decided to give Firefox (Moz’s cousin) a try a month or so ago and it is slowly becoming my default here at work. The main thing it has going for it is speed. I find Mozilla/Firefox/Netscape X.x to all load pages faster than Internet Explorer X.x, but Mozilla (and Netscape) tend to take quiet a long time to load the actual application. Not so Firefox. It has proven to be a small and snappy little browser with (mostly) the same functionality I love in Mozilla.

If you haven’t tried one of these, you owe it to yourself. Just use the tab feature for a day and you will never go back.