Let’s face it, cus­tomers can be finicky. Let me first explain that I’m work­ing on a project that was ini­tially built with Front­page and there­fore con­tains mal­formed code and other abtroc­i­ties I’d rather not dicuss.

The project was handed off to me like an Olympic torch. The client basi­cally instructed me to cre­ate a new sec­tion of the site, and to make sure it looked con­sis­tent with the rest of the site. Work­ing with the code I can tell you that I’d rather just redesign the entire site, but sadly this isn’t in the bud­get. Rather, the cus­tomer whose lead designer left the project, wants to keep the core design intact; noth­ing changed except for a few tex­tual updates and sec­tion additions.

Work­ing through the code and attempt­ing to deci­pher it, I can’t help but visu­al­ize myself some­where in the back­woods of Lou­siana, knee-deep in a murky swamp. As I slosh my way through the weeds and over­grown plant-life, I finally build a small shack on unsta­ble ground so to speak.

If the site was build with stan­dards and seman­tics in mind, it would have taken half the time to con­struct the new sec­tion. How­ever, because Front­page cre­ated the code it took me dou­ble the time and effort to make it work. Wad­ing through UPPERCASE tags, sloppy code and sytax just isn’t my idea of effi­ciency. Rather, at least to me, it’s HTML-Hell.

I can’t wait for the green­light to re-build their site with XHTML, CSS and web stan­dards. Until that point, how­ever, I’ll have to live with try­ing to work my way through uneven ground, and put up with finicky cus­tomers who demand any out­side links be removed. 

Three or four years ago I set up an account with Blog­ger. Ini­tially it was used to main­tain news updates at a younger ver­sion of kartooner.com. When­ever I’d find a tid­bit from the vast archive of the web I’d write about it with Blogger.

At the time I used an ‘iframe’ to incor­po­rate Blogger’s blog*spot into my site. This was before Pyra Labs used ban­ner ads and it didn’t look as obstru­sive as it does today. Even­tu­ally I out­grew Blog­ger so to speak and con­tacted Six Apart to install Mov­able­type. Prior to this I had heard good things about Mov­able­type and it was either MT or Grey­mat­ter, which had fallen by the way­side due to lack of features.

I paid Ben Trott (sec­ond half of the Trott over­lords) 20 bucks and he installed it in about 24 hours time. I remem­ber feel­ing a sense of accom­plish­ment that I was now using a CMS, flaunt­ing it to my wife, who, under­stand­ably could care less. She was just happy I had some­thing to write my thoughts with, so to speak and all was well.

When I switched hosts I remem­ber the feel­ing of dread, think­ing; “Oh no, I can’t shell out another 20 bucks for MT. What to do?” and so after a few Google searches I learned how to CHMOD (or change mode prop­er­ties) on files via either FTP or a Linux/Telnet client. With my new­found power of CHMOD I stud­ied the Mov­able Type instal­la­tion doc­u­men­ta­tion and taught myself how to get it to work.

Since that point I’ve had great suc­cess work­ing with Perl, PHP, Javascript and a slew of other web scripts. It was only a mat­ter of invest­ing the time to learn how it worked and apply­ing this knowl­edge accordingly.

Flash for­ward to May of 2004 when Dou­glas “Wired” Bow­man and Adap­tive Path announce the unveil­ing of the redesigned Blog­ger (I almost spelled blooger). To put it lightly and quite hon­estly I am floored by the re-coding and design tweak­age that Bow­man and team have accomplished.

In fact I dusted off my Blog­ger accounts and I’m happy to report that it’s fun again to work with Blog­ger, much as it was years ago.

The fresh and invit­ing design makes me want to explore it fur­ther despite its lim­i­ta­tions. Unlike MT it doesn’t sup­port plug-ins but uti­liz­ing Blog­ger code you can just as eas­ily change the tem­plates to your lik­ing or use the 25+ new tem­plates cre­ated by none other than Dave Shea, Jef­frey Zeld­man, Dan Ceder­holm and others.

Thank you Google for breath­ing new life into Blogger. 

I’ve noticed the Print Pre­view results in Fire­fox look sloppy com­pared to that of Inter­net Explorer’s print pre­view. Maybe it’s just me but Firefox’s pre­view trunacates text out­side the page bor­ders even if a print style sheet is setup to do just the oppo­site. IE on the other hand (with a print style sheet) dis­plays the text in the pre­view inside the mar­gin boundaries.

For test­ing pur­poses I’ve set up a print style sheet for the main index of kartooner.com (in other words, the front page of this web site and not the archives).

Try this exper­i­ment for me; if you are using Fire­fox go to File > Print Preview and screen cap­ture the results. If per chance you are using Inter­net Explorer please do the same.

Would you be so kind and send your screen capture(s) to erik(at)kartooner(dot)com.

I’ll be sure to dis­play the results and hope­fully I’m not just see­ing things.

I should men­tion that I’m cur­rently using Fire­fox 0.8 (nightly build) on Win­dows XP. Thanks goes to Adam Bramwell for send­ing me the first Fire­fox screenshot.

Like­wise, his results are the same on his nightly release for Win­dows XP. Any­one else get­ting these results? Appar­ently, Nico Kaiser has also received sim­i­lar results with Fire­fox on Debian and Chad Cooper on Win­dows XP. Is this a bug?

Fire­fox 0.8 / Lat­est Build — Print Pre­view screenshots

Inter­net Explorer 6 — Print Pre­view screenshots

When I fin­ished read­ing Jef­frey Zeld­mans’ Design­ing with Web Stan­dards the first time, I was puz­zled. It all made sense mind you, it’s just the core of its mes­sage didn’t sink in as I had orig­i­nally planned. Whether this was attrib­uted to late night read­ing, or my prover­bial inept­ness I’m not sure, my point is that typ­i­cally when some­thing doesn’t seep in the first time I’ll go for a sec­ond try.

I’m almost done with Design­ing with Web Stan­dards for the sec­ond time and every­thing has clicked together. Evi­dence of this is this per­sonal site which evolved from using Mov­able Types’ default tem­plates to slight tem­plate mod­i­fi­ca­tion and finally result­ing in what you see now, orig­i­nal lay­out and code.

I have to thank Zeld­man (and a list of oth­ers) for inspir­ing me to take this leap of faith if you may. Prior to using CSS and XHTML I was rely­ing on spaghetti code, sliced and diced image slash table hybrids and a bleak under­stand­ing of seman­tics. Proof of my sloppy code habits exist in EMWare Pro­duc­tions which was hosted on Geoc­i­ties (before Yahoo bought them out).

After build­ing this site, in Netscape no less, I listed it under the Soft­ware cat­e­gory on Yahoo, which resulted in sev­eral lucra­tive and poten­tial part­ner­ships with Japan­ese soft­ware com­pa­nies. Truth be told, I was only 18 at the time and wasn’t con­cerned with cor­po­rate part­ner­ships let alone try­ing to run a com­pany with mem­bers scat­tered around the world.

This was before the dot com boom and the revi­tal­iza­tion of web devel­op­ment which meant — dur­ing that point in time — I could get away with an unpro­fes­sional look­ing web site. Flash for­ward to Novem­ber of 2000 wherein my brother and I receive a cease and desist let­ter from emWare, a com­pany based in Utah. Despite the fact that EMWare Pro­duc­tions had been shelved for sev­eral (6 actu­ally) years now, we still get a chuckle from our adven­tures in soft­ware development.

Today I can­not stress enough the impor­tance of seman­tics and standards-based web devel­op­ment. As Zeld­man explains; grasp­ing these con­cepts and uti­liz­ing them accord­ingly will pave the way towards a leaner and cleaner world wide web. Sites like the CSS Vault, Zen Gar­den and count­less oth­ers are push­ing these ideals into the pub­lic fore­front with­out a dime attached.

As H.G. Wells once said;
> The future is now.