Posts tagged `css`

Do they give merit badges for prostituting yourself to a media conglomerate?

Boy Scouts in the Los Angeles area will now be able to earn a merit patch for learning about the evils of downloading pirated movies and music. [...]

The movie industry has developed the curriculum.

“Working with the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles, we have a real opportunity to educate a new generation about how movies are made, why they are valuable, and hopefully change attitudes about intellectual property theft,” Dan Glickman, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, said Friday.

…. Does this seem just a bit creepy to anyone else, or am I on my own here?

A few problems:

Allowing an industry to develop a curriculum is a recipe for disaster (or should I say “flop”?). I would no more allow the MPAA or RIAA to tell me about copyright than I would allow Exxon to tell me about alternative energy or Microsoft to tell me about “embrace and extend.” Remember, the MPAA’s the same organization that said you aren’t allowed to make backups of the DVDs you buy—if it gets damaged, you simply have to go out and buy another copy. Apparently, this sort of stricture is perfectly OK, but it strikes me as odd, given the Boy Scouts’ fear of homosexuals: apparently, getting fucked in the ass is only all right if it’s a litigious media conglomerate doing the mounting.

Glickman, ever stubbornly flogging the same dead horse, is right when he concludes that the attitude toward intellectual property theft needs to be changed—yes, by consumers, but just as much by the studios and the soulless abysses which represent them. I think people know the value of movies, and that is precisely the problem: certainly, they don’t seem to be worth buying anymore. At least, not when they suck, hard, and are available on digital media that was designed to give consumers the shaft.

The article goes on to that say that prospective badge-earners must also choose from a list of activities which include visiting a movie studio “to see how many people can be harmed by film piracy.” I love this, because I’m quite certain these children will be told that for every movie they download, some humble janitor or assistant to the assistant director will lose their job and return home, Bob Cratchit-like, to tell his starving family that there’ll be no Christmas presents this year—piracy has ruined the movie industry and it tireless, selfless constituents. No one will tell the Boy Scouts, of course, that the people who really care about piracy are executives whose salaries won’t be affected. The truth is that this tack by conglomerates to stem piracy with appeals to pathos is little more than people like Dan Glickman holding a pistol to some lowly worker’s temple and screaming that Dammit, if the piracy doesn’t stop, then Mr. Cratchit here gets it!

Dan Glickman is an asshole. And his merit badge isn’t worthy to wipe my ass with. Fín.

§1473 · October 23, 2006 · 2 comments · Tags: , , , ,

The Conference: Day III

A Retrospective on Cleveland qua æsthetic

Cleveland is a funny place. Like Wisconsin, it’s significantly greener than Illinois, and I find myself surprisingly aflush at the sight of all the verdure, but Cleveland is like a rusted, hulking monolith overgrown by jungle. The juxtaposition is frightening: while lost, we drove along so many leafy parkways lined with large embellished houses, but our destination was inevitably in the sprawl of the city itself, hemmed together with slummy, apartmented streets and the blackened faux-marble of the botanical gardens, the public library, and the enormous Presbyterian church on Euclid Ave. One building along a main drag called Chester St. appeared to have two dark bronze statues of skeleton warriors, as though someone had stitched together twisted detritus from a plane wreck to make this thanatotic duo, their sharp ribs prominent, their wielded swords even moreso.

It rained all three days we were there, in random spurts of thunderstorms. Cleveland’s drainage—at least downtown—isn’t the best, as even a relatively gentle storm left standing pools of water on the roadsides and muddy ponds in the grassy medians as late as the next morning. I’ve already said that Cleveland is organic, but add near-constant construction and rain to the list, and the city itself is a violent storm of confusion, parkways ceding to slums, trees to effaced apartment complexes, prestigious university to vacant, overgrown gas stations.

I realize that I saw but a fraction of the city, but I would expect that the university-dominated section would be a thriving little community of its own. Perhaps things are different during the school year: I saw few college students at all; only middle-aged conference attendees and the occasional gaggle of misguided tourists—why Cleveland?—gaping at the squalor.

A Retrospective on Ben qua Conference Attendee, as Well as a Discussion of Code

But enough sentiment. My own journey to get here, in a plain grey van, speeding down I-480, was just as mixed. I woke at 7:09 this morning and —my understanding being that only my boss and his boss were going to the presentation at 10:30—went back to bed, to be awoken exactly four hours later at 11:09 by the sound of little kids (?) playing soccer on the athletic field next door. I was alone—all four of my companions had gone to the presentation, had even called for me through the door of my sleeping area, but to no apparent avail. The neck-ache I awoke with had nothing on the painful feeling of being such a schlub.

I mentioned last night that the recurring theme of the conference was that Oracle’s portal is utter shit. To that end, I find myself excited not by the opportunity to work with it, my loving ministrations being severely limited by its obstinate nature, but the opportunity to work with Tim, our DBA and resident Java guru, on his separate-but-not webpiece that will tie into the portal. Having seen yesterday’s presentation on Web 2.0 and AJAX, he and I decided that it would be a good idea to integrate it into his webpiece. Since the logic that drives the overhead menu requires database calls, we thought that using AJAX to load content into the specified area would reduce overhead and feel more responsive to the user, broken back-button or no. So, during the afternoon session on Thursday, I found a little AJAX script and made a working prototype with static HTML. Tim came back from his afternoon session with news of OS3Grid, a Javascript-based table system that allows for dynamic reordering, editing, and effects that wouldn’t be possible in IE with pure CSS. The only problem is that they don’t want to work together: the function to render the grid is run on page load, which doesn’t work if you are loading the grid’s host page with AJAX. I hacked up a fix by adding a new line to the AJAX script’s pageload function that reevaluates OS3Grid’s table-rendering function, forcing the grid to be rendered when the page was loaded with AJAX. The only problem is that each grid has a specific line that has to include the name of the parent div that hosts the rendered table, and since we’re guaranteed to have pages with multiple tables, we can’t simple hard code a standard id into the function and let it go. I will need to research other methods of forcing the script to run.

These are both neat Javascript tricks, but the real question is how well we can get them to work with the database. The AJAX function for navigation is entirely client-side: there’s not yet AJAX to submit any forms or grab any data from the database—it merely calls a JSP, which in turns talks to the database. One of the interesting features of OS3Grid, however, is the ability to edit table contents, and I’d like to make it so that an edited table cell submits—via AJAX, of course—back to the the database the changed contents. For that, I’ll need Tim’s help in using AJAX to talk to Java to talk to the database. It’s possible, of course, but my experience with Java is so limited that the slightest problem will sending me running to Google. Still, I think that this has the potential to be a really great interface, and I really like working with Tim because he’s truly excited about what he’s doing, and he asks things of me that push my limits and force me to improve my knowledge set.

§1236 · June 30, 2006 · 1 comment · Tags: , ,

The Conference: Day I, Pt. I

I write today from the Dively Center of Case Western.

I woke up at 5:45am this morning to the screech of my alarm clock, which somehow seemed even more grating than usual, having been one of the few amenities supplied by the otherwise—ahem—austere housing department here (for which see my previous post). Last night, after I’d finished blogging, I realized with some degree of dread that I’d forgotten my toothbrush, having brought indeed everything else required for the care of my teeth except the most basic implement. At midnight in a strange city, I had no recourse but to go to bed feeling somehow fundamentally dirty, and waking up with my teeth feeling mossy. Today, I am told, we will having a shopping spree at Walgreens or Walmart or whatever store we can find to stock up on the essentials that we weren’t provided. Were we in a hotel, there would at least be a vending machine with toothbrushes, but sadly the dorm we are staying at appeared entirely vacant last night except for two malcontents watching the BET Awards in the common room at a volume loud enough to pulverize concrete.

The “free swag” situation improved somewhat when we arrived at the Dively Center: upon registering, one received a blue CampusEAI lanyard upon which was attached a name tag. Ostensibly, everyone is to wear it around his or her neck during the conference, but afterwards, of course, it can be used for pretty much anything. More importantly, our “free gift” was a Belkin 4-in-1 pen, a heavy metal affair with a bright bluish reading light, a laser pointer, a ballpoint pen, and a PDA stylus in one phallic cylinder. It requires four tiny batteries (included), but considering the number of times just today that I’ve accidentally flash the reading light or the laser, I have a sneaking suspicion that it will die within a month and I will have no desire to buy more batteries.

The lobby of the Dively Center was a real sight: wall-to-wall geeks, some of them long-haired misanthropes that look like they spend most of their time in the dark using vi, some of them crisp-collared management types, always greying just slightly at the temple and generally looking affable, and even some women, which is a rarity at technical conferences. I seem, as I suspected, to be the youngest person here. No matter: the first meeting put me in my element.

From 9am to 11:30am, I and a laptop:human ratio >1 were regaled with advice on how to attack the Oracle portal’s styling, either using the built-in style generator (which is, if you have a speck of intelligence, obviously crap), adding extra CSS (which we already do), or use a custom renderer. You see, Oracle’s portal allows one to customize where the content area goes, which means that I can place the portal contents within a standards-compliant template. The bad news is that the output created by the built-in code escape #content# is tables nested inside of tables, nested inside of tables. It’s enough to make you sick, and the end-user really has no control over what is outputted. The instructor assured us that later in the afternoon, he would go over customizing the renderer that outputted said tables.

Another attendee, who happened to be from a British university, and thus immeasurably fun to hear speak, complained about Oracle Portal’s total lack of compatibility with anything resembling a standard. “Good,” I thought. “Maybe I’ll get some answers. And maybe this guy will show up again and I’ll get to hear his accent more.”

Lunch was buffet-style, and was actually quite good. The chef—a trim black man with a rakishly-askew hat—announced the courses and the soups of the day, and I got lasagna and a turkey sandwich and pasta salad and cream of chicken soup and was quite stuffed. I only had to stop eating once, when trouble back at the university forced me to whip out my laptop and troubleshoot.

The afternoon session was a short one, only lasting until 2pm, and was actually no help at all. The instructor described editing the various files used for rendering, but it occurred to me in medias res that what I want to change in the portal—that is, changing the tables-in-tables-in-tables structure into a much simpler one based on flexible divs, ideally AJAXified ones—isn’t really possibly without a lot of work, because Oracle’s interface for adding portlets to a user’s page involves essentially a table-splitting mechanism, and I gather from the code that trying to change the way it’s outputting might break that. At any rate, it’s something to look into.

So here I am, drinking tea and eating an apple, typing on my laptop and its persnickity wireless network card. I relish the thought of getting a toothbrush and possibly beer. I sort of relish the thought of sitting down and reading Rousseau’s The Social Contract. I don’t know how in the world we’re going to stretch that out for the rest of the day.

§1230 · June 28, 2006 · 4 comments · Tags: ,

Curly Quotes

I’ve always been one inclined to heavily stylize my blockquotes. Some people merely indent, some change the color. Me, I apply to blockquotes the same sort of design æsthetic that I would to dropquotes, which is to visually separate and emphasize. So, I have a pleasing bluish-violet background color to it, a distinct <cite></cite>.

The default blockquote style in K2 is a simple indent and a left-positioned PNG openquote. Not only is the quote graphic kind of ugly (a not-very-stylized grey), but it seems incomplete in that it’s only an openquote, and doesn’t include a closequote. Because it’s set as a background image, of course, we can’t have two (one for open, one for closed).

In my old theme, I solved this with a messy hack wherein I searched and replaced all blockquotes with a blockquote and a nested div. I set the blockquote to have the openquote in the top left and the div to display the closequote in the bottom right. Semantically bad, but it worked.

For K2, though, I wanted less cruft, but I wanted to accomplish the same basic thing. Enter CSS and Design Meme’s Curly Quotes idea. It uses :before and :after pseudo-classes to add areas before and after the blockquote. Then it uses the content attribute to add in open-quote and close-quote. It’s an elegant solution, but it has two problems. One: it’s not cross-browser (IE doesn’t support pseudo-classes). Two: even among CSS-compliant browsers, the handling of the open-quote and close-quote varies. Obviously, I want the quotes to appear as “” and not "". However, only Firefox 1.5 did that: Opera 8.52, Safari 1.3, Firefox =< 1.0.7 and others all displayed ". Read more…

§1010 · March 3, 2006 · 8 comments · Tags: , ,

A long, angry entry about web design and my job

I love my job, because I get to play with web code all day, but more and more I’m learning the hard way about working in a bureaucracy; that is, the private institution sort of nonsense that plagues academia.

A few months ago, the web services department got a rather nasty e-mail from the VP. Actually, I shouldn’t say “nasty,” because it wasn’t overtly nasty, but rather insinuated some nasty things. Some awards group of some sort had made their 2005 list of the Top 10 Admissions sites of private colleges. Our local rival, Lewis University, was #4, I believe. The #1 spot went to Transylvania University. The unasked question from the e-mail? “Why isn’t St. Francis on this list?”

Well, that’s a good question, Mrs. VP. There are a number of reasons.

We’re living in 1998. I mentioned last year that I was working on a major rewrite of the site’s HTML template. We started rolling it out this week, but the problem is that we’re using a bunch of static HTML files and a set of Dreamweaver templates. Changing anything is a horrible ordeal. I’ve tried to make changes as easily as possible by handling most styles in a set of external CSS files, as well as having our persistent navigation menu be called from an external Javascript. But the St. Francis website is a collection of years of cruft. At the end of last year, I was still finding and deleting/updating pages in the 2002-2004 template. Now, as nice as I can make the template, I have little control—at least during the switchover—over the editable sections, which are a mess. A complete, utter fucking mess, with tables inside of tables inside of tables. We have years and years of stupid faculty and incompetent people putting everything inside of tables, just so that they can have several elements—which should be in list form—appearing side-by-side.

I don’t expect people to understand the difference between, for instance, <em> and <i>, but understanding that tables are only to be used for tabular data is not difficult. The problem is sheer laziness: tables are easy to put in, and they do what you want.

But therein lies the problem: a large number of our faculty edit their own pages. We give them access, a copy of Dreamweaver 4 (there’s another problem, right there), except when they edit pages with Word, the stupid pricks, and they’re supposed to do their own thing. This is good insofar as it relieves us of the tedium of text updates, but bad in that faculty and staff do some really dumbshit things, including tables, animated gifs or cartoonish icons, and of course everything is hardcoded with HTML declarations instead of with CSS.

So, Vice President, why is Lewis University on the Top Ten list and St. Francis isn’t? Because Lewis University outsources its website. The knuckle-draggers on campus don’t get to touch it: they only send updated information which their (expensive, I imagine) webmasters then put into the site, which is OK for a designer’s standpoint, but of course I’d like to see it coded better.

I have to work with incompetent people. The University employs a graphic artist who lives in another state. We send her an assignment, and we get good work a few days later. However, she works on a Mac, using Quark Express, and so no matter what she does, and no matter what we ask her, she sends us a PDF of the finished work. Rasterized, in other words. Even when outside consultants we hire ask her for metadata-enabled file types, or PNGs, or something that they can work with…. she sends them a PDF. Oftentimes, we use the PDF promotional flyer for the web, but we need to make a form out of it, or change the text, or—in the case of the Chicago Tribune, who we submit ads to—completely remake the poster by blanking out the text and typing it into a layered PSD (Photoshp) file.

She won’t send anything else but a PDF. We continue to pay her.

We have management who thinks that the website is something that should be a communal decision. Not a communal effort, mind you, which is of course necessary, but a communal decision. That is to say, we need to have a committee that decides on design elements and how things happen. Especially managers, because they always think they know what’s best for the website, even if their own experience is limited to making a personal page in Word. Competent managers hire competent people and leave them alone to do what they do best. Needless to say, that isn’t the case here. The VP, in her e-mail, said that USF’s not making it onto the Top Ten list was proof positive that the website needed to be more of a group effort. Does it surprise anyone that a VP would say that? No, what it proves it that

  1. Sites which are outsourced to professional firms are often entered into contests like that
  2. The web services department is underfunded and understaffed
  3. The university website is already too much of a group effort, thank you very much

I am the only person here who seems to know anything about web design. My department consists of only three people: myself, my boss, and another student worker. I talk about CSS, about semantic markup, and none of it has any effect. My boss sympathizes: I suspect that given his druthers, he’d let me do pretty much whatever I want with the site, but he’s the first one to get bitched at if anything is changed. Faculty yell about “academic freedom,” and of course everybody and their mother wants to say what goes on their little piece of the (templated) site, and it invariably includes something horrendously stupid or contrived.

The people at my University don’t view the web site as a serious internet presence: they view it as a curiosity and a toy. They think that their colleagues or prospective students will be impressed by the godawful tripe they hack up. They don’t understand, for instance, that most visitors to the site might not have the esoteric font they chose, or that six billion small graphics make people want to wretch. Here’s the thing about design: if you can’t say why you’re putting a certain element in a certain place, it’s probably bad design. “Just because” is not a design decision: it’s an amateur sending a dagger through the heart of Web-2.0-conscious designers everywhere.

We have a business unit that will design and host websites for local businesses. I’ve designed several of these. These sites are basically just subfolders in our normal site, and the domain name the local business may or may not use is mapped to the index of that subfolder, and nothing else. If you navigate within a hosted site, you will go from www.domain.com to www.stfrancis.edu/domain. I asked my boss why we couldn’t simply move these hosted sites up to the same directory that the root of our normal website sites on, make some additional entries in Apache’s config file, and go from. He says he was told by one of our network staff that this was impossible. Either we have some limitation that I’m unaware of, or our network staff can’t administrate for shit.

So, as a result, we have Dreamweaver “sites” overlapping, which can sometimes lead to problems.

In private moments, my boss talks about taking everybody’s write rights away, and only giving them out as necessary, to preserve the integrity of the website. It’s a good start, but the fact, is, people already have way too much power when it comes to their ability to manipulate webserver files.

This summer, the word is that we’ll be upgrading our network from Netware 5 to, I think, Novell’s Enterprise Linux, which means we might actually have a dedicated Linux box running Apache. If this is true, I’d like to start moving our current site over to a CMS, probably PHP-based since anything else would be beyond the pale for this place. Still, even using something like Joomla! or Drupal would be relatively easy, I think. Contributers would be given a very limited role, basically being able to contribute only text, perhaps some pictures. I’d brand the whole thing up, and that would be that. Now, as to whether that actually happens is another thing entirely.

You see, our current project is a portal. The CMS systems I just mentioned are basically portals, but we of course couldn’t use anything straightforward. No, we got some hefty grant and some third party whipped up an Oracle portal for us, written in crufty Java, and sitting on a (apparently poorly configured or underpowered) Linux box. Without even getting into its internals, it’s a UI nightmare, and that’s for the tech department: I can only imagine what the students are going to think when they learn how completely atrocious the porlet-adding process is, and how if you don’t like the personalized layout you’ve made, you basically have to delete everything and start from scratch.

I’ve no doubt that the final decision on the Oracle portal came from higher-ups, and not the people who have to implement or use the technology.

It’s sad, however, that my $7.95/month shared hosting account is faster than the one in our datacenter. I could shift the entire USF website to my own account, turn it into a CMS, and it’d probably be a hell of a lot better than what we’ve got now.

§985 · February 15, 2006 · 6 comments · Tags: , ,

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