Tomorrow, I get on a plane to Web Design World Chicago. It looks like it's going to be a great conference. If you're in the area, come on over and join in the geek fun. Jeff Veen, Jared Spool, Dan Rubin, Joe Marini, Greg Rewis and more!

Then it's on to HOW Design in Boston followed by Multi-Mania in Brussels, Belgium, TODCon in Orlando and finally Web Down Under in Sydney. The organizers have worked hard, and done a great job on all these conferences so be sure to come to the one closest to you. You will not regret it. Promise! Grab me in the hall if you're there. I love to meet people. :)

<soapbox> 

Just a little update to Ray's article today. After receiving many negative comments on his blog, emails from CMX and a not-so-subtle email from me, my article has finally been removed from the offending blogger's site.

Thank you to the CMX subscribers - and partners - who helped in this matter by posting comments on the blogger's site. You guys are great!

In an email response from the blogger, he stated, "...i had already your name in the end of this article..."

Yet again, this individual completely missed the point. Attribution is  not a replacement for permission. Copying is not a form of flattery.

And hey, if you've ever seen my loud shirt collection, you'd know I wasn't that much into flattery, anyway.

Why the score of 2 - 0, you ask? Well, at the same time I found this blog site, I also discovered a commercial software site which had not only republished another of my articles, but had edited the article in such a way that it seemed I was endorsing the product. One email to them and the article came down. Ironically, at THAT point they asked how much it would cost to reproduce the article.

Fat chance.

</soapbox>
 

Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3, the book I co-wrote with Greg Rewis, is finally out. Yes, I know, it was long overdue. I took a picture of it when I finally got to see it at Greg's house (no, my copies haven't arrived yet), so if you'll excuse the exhausted, traipsing around Phoenix all day look on my face, you can see me with the book on Flickr.

Greg and I didn't want to create the same CSS or Dreamweaver book that others have written. Those books are published, are very useful, and if that's what you need buy the appropriate book. Our goal instead was to show how to create standards-based, accessible web layouts using Dreamweaver. It's a myth that you have to hand code to be a real web developer. Is it best to know how to semantically mark up your page? Yes, absolutely. This is a craft and you should know as much as you can about it. Can you hand code within the Dreamweaver environment? Of course you can -- I do it all the time. Do you have to? Absolutely not. There are tools within Dreamweaver that make your work faster, and more effective whether you're working in code or design view. If you haven't looked at Dreamweaver since about MX or so, it's come a long way baby!

Chapter 1 is an overall review of important CSS principles that you must understand to create sturdy CSS-based layouts. The project in chapter 3 takes a lovely, nested table-based layout and transforms it to a CSS layout. Each of the remaining four chapters are a full project based on the CSS layouts I wrote for Dreamweaver CS3 - Fixed, Liquid, Elastic and Hybrid. Chapter 6 also uses Spry 1.6 (an upgrade from Adobe Labs for the Spry 1.4 version that ships with Dreamweaver CS3) and takes you through the process of using HTML data sets to create an accessible Ajax gallery -- unobtrusive javascript and all. We hope the projects will feel like we're working with you as your personal trainer.

The book is full of CSS tips and techniques. It also teaches a variety of ways to use Dreamweaver CS3. Both Fireworks and Photoshop comps are used and the integration of those programs with Dreamweaver is illustrated.

Our hope is that the techniques taught in the book will make your beautiful designs more solid as well as making you more comfortable with the program used by so many web departments. I use Dreamweaver every day and even I learned some new Dreamweaver tips from Greg! Here's what one reader had to say:

"The first chapter alone was worth it to me. I have a lot of CSS books, tutorial sites, etc. Maybe I'm more familiar after working with it for a while, but for me, this book is as clear as a bell, informative as a book ought to be, and motivational as a hand grenade... made me want to jump up and run like hell... to Dreamweaver to try stuff out."

C. Lindauer

Some of you may have also heard a rumor about the other partnership that came out of writing this book. And to that I say, yes, it's true. Greg and I were engaged (via Twitter) in early March. You can think of the book as our baby. ;)

As the title indicates, my Fireworks article is now live on Adobe Edge. Feel free to check it out. I'm quite happy with the end result and I hope you gain some insights on the Fireworks work flow as well.

I have covered this topic in both written and video form here on CMX, but in this article, I atcually take someone else's single page design and build it out into a series of interconnected pages.

Enjoy! 

John Nack has a lengthy post about why you won't see 64-bit Photoshop goodness on Mac for CS4.

There is a lot of good information there about what 64-bit does and doesn't mean, both in general and for running Photoshop. In the end, it's about market, and Apple has decided to leave Carbon-64 in the trash heap. So, Adobe will be focusing on moving to the Cocoa way of doing things.

John brings up some good information for Mac folks, and also tries to head off any media-baited flame wars. However, I am willing to bet this will just spark a frenzy of armchair developers wagging fingers and charry-picking lame arguments. It's business, folks... take an objective step back and see what makes sense to all parties involved. Pay special attention to the 3 points made near the end of his blog entry.

Happy Anniversary to CMX and my fellow CMX'ers!!

Thanks to everyone who has worked so hard to make this site the success it is. And of course a huge thank you to all of our loyal subscribers, we wouldn't be here without you. :-)

Wow...hard to believe it's been 5 years! I have to say it's been a hell of a ride, and one I've thouroughly enjoyed and been proud to be a part of.

Some months ago, I wrote about my interest in a new audio book category, the podcast novel. These novels are similar to those movie serials of old (Flash Gordon, Lone Ranger), radio serials of not so old (The Shadow, Green Hornet) and TV mini-series of today. Their popularity has grown and many of the authors have earned a certain amount of fame (if not fortune) by writing and narrating their own books in serial form.

Some of these podcast novel authors are now going from cyberspace to the printed page! Yep, they're signing book deals for the novels they used to narrate for free. I think this is pretty cool.

Scott Sigler's sci-fi (and ultra violent) podcast novels can be subscribed to for free on iTunes, but he now has a book deal for the print release of his novel, Infected, coming out in April.

Seth Harwood's film noire private detective podcast novel, Jack Wakes Up is also now in print.

J.C. Hutchins, author of the Seventh Son Trilogy will see the first of the trilogy, Descent, hit the printed page this summer.

What I love about all this is how things got started; online, free, serialized but complete, versions of the books. These authors, and others, I am sure (I'm a sci-fi geek so my interest only extends so far, I admit), gained a following, a fan-base online and their hard work has paid off. It's a geat example of how new media is affecting the way things are done.

Chekc out iTunes or Podiobooks.com for a long list of podcast novels in a variety of genre's. Give yourself a break from the same old, same old on your iPod.

Personally, I'm hoping to dump a bunch of these onto Tom Green's iPod before our camping trip this August, and delete his Abba collection in the process . . .

Ok, I'm in Kansas and I thought we're pretty good with online business tech stuff - I have to file, monthly, on my income, etc. I can do this online which is quick, convenient and saved me a stamp and a check (EFT payment). Now, I'm no fan of taxes, but it is the law and not paying is more painful than paying, so I've been faithful to make the payments every month before the due date (errr.... on the due date) and get the yearly required paperwork in too. Each transaction has a confirmation ID and each monthly form is stored, electronically, on their site. I can see that I've paid for the entire 2007 year, have everything filed, etc...

However, today I get a call from the Kansas Department of Revenue - I wasn't there, so I call back when I get in. It is a long distance call and they are only open from 9am to 5pm. I have voip service, so I dial away. I'm put on hold. (insert elevator music here with brief interruptions telling me how important my call is to them...)

Mike answers the phone, I chat a little letting him know why I'm calling, give the case number and wait. He asks some questions to make sure I'm the right guy (you know, that hard to get information, like the address of my business...) - after he's certain I'm not some stranger calling to make good on a government debt for someone else, we proceed to figure out why they called....

"Sir, we don't have your filing for all of last quarter no the payment for the last quarter either"

I'm a little shocked, I know I paid, I saw the money leave my account, all he can tell me is I need to get the right paper work in. They do have my yearly, which has the exact details for my monthly, but we won't go there - having the government actually make the connection between the yearly and monthly reports is asking too much. I mutter something and then get off the phone. By this time, I've loaded up the Kansas on-line payment system and just got to the section about my payments. I call back.

May answers the phone. I give her the details like I did Mike. As we progress, I tell her I've got the electronic confirmation numbers for the payments. I give those to her. She says she sees them, but she can't open them (huh?) and tells me I'm late and fees are assessed , which I suspected, and that, if those were the reports, I'd need to call someone else to get it figured out. Oddly enough, they know I did make a payment and they know that the payment made matches the figure they said I didn't pay in December. Again, this is a leap they cannot grasp. I'm given another long distance number to call.

Kevin answers the phone. I tell him the issue and he's able to figure out that, yes, I did make the payments and yes, the confirmation numbers are for the transactions I said they were for and, yes I filed on time. However, he can't do anything about it. The money was credited to the first quarter 2008, mind you, we're not allowed to file for the first quarter until it is over which is in two weeks. I need to call someone else and, yes, it is a long distance number again. I need to call accounting and tell them that Kevin in the electronics division said it was OK and verified the payments (and since there is only one Kevin, I think they may check on that). See, someone in accounting mis-keyed the information in to the wrong area. Several thoughts went through my mind, but the ones I can print involve:

• Why am I fixing this problem? I did what I was supposed to do.
• Why can't the revenue department open the confirmed electronic transactions?
• Why can't Kevin call accounting himself and fix the issue?
• Why can't Kevin just fix it himself?
• Why couldn't May or Mike have called Kevin and then accounting to fix the issue?
• Why couldn't May or Mike have fixed this themselves?
• By the time this is done, I'll have spent more time resolving their foul up than the entire bill is worth
• When I screw up, as they thought and billed me for, I'm charged, who pays me for their screw ups?

In any case, I had to leave for an appointment before I could call accounting, something I'm "looking forward to" the same was you look forward to a root canal. Luckily, they will find in my favor and reverse the charges and all, but, man what a waste of time...

Keep your eyes peeled for the April issue of Adobe Edge because yours truly is making a guest appearance.

Here at CMX as well as in my teaching, I've been focusing recently on using Fireworks to create click-through prototypes, and establishing best practices for one's FW workflow. With the evolution of Fireworks, it's much easier to create these interactive mock ups quickly, allowing more immediate client feedback/approval of a site's design and flow. The beauty of this process is many changes are made early in the design stage, rather than during the coding process.

As designs get more complex, it becomes even more important to set up some best practices for workflow. This helps in case you have to revisit the design weeks or months down the road. It is also very helpful if you have to pass on the design to someone else.

My article on Adobe Edge will focus on the creation of a click-through mock up from a finalized multi-page Fireworks PNG file.

If you've not heard of Adobe Edge before, here's the low-down:

Adobe Edge is a free electronic newsletter that comes out every couple months. It features content for web designers and developers, covering stuff going on at Adobe and the web in general. While the focus is about Adobe and what it's doing to make web-life easier, the magazine also covers things happening outside "the mothership."

For example,  February 2008's issues has this list of contents:

• Adobe Media Player: Understanding the structure of the RSS feed
• BlazeDS and what it means for the developer community
• The edge of Flash
• Comparing Adobe Flex and Ajax development models
• Project profile: Virtual life on the International Space Station
• Quick tips for integrating Adobe Creative Suite 3 products
• Open source at Adobe

You can either check out the Edge every couple months, or subscribe to it online. I hope you get a chance to read the article and find it useful.

Coming up in the next couple months, I'll be at several conferences where I'd love to meet you! This week, Austin beckons! At South by Southwest Interactive, I'll be doing three panels. On Saturday, What Women Need to Succeed will explore women in technology--what it takes to make your mark and succeed in the tech world we love. Are women really different? On Sunday, I'll do a panel with Greg Rewis of Adobe on Responsible Web Design. And finally, on Monday afternoon, we'll discuss where WaSP has been and where it's going in Don't Break the Web.

On April 14th, I'll be presenting a three hour session at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) in Las Vegas, In-Depth: Using New Media with Adobe Dreamweaver.

On April 25th, In the great city of New Orleans (right before the first weekend of the Jazz Fest!), An Event Apart will take place. Jeffery Zeldman and Eric Meyer invite you to come join us. I'll be presenting Design Challenges, Standards Solutions. Practical, real-world solutions to common problems. If you mention my code -AEASULL- you'll get a $50 discount. Go for it, it will be a great conference! And plan to stay for JazzFest on the weekend.

On May 5-7, Web Design World Chicago will be in the Windy city. I'm presenting two CSS/Dreamweaver session there: CSS-Based Layouts with Dreamweaver CS3 and CSS Problem Solving with Dreamweaver CS3. You can receive $300 off the price by using the code - SPSUL - when you register!

May 18 & 19, I'll present two sessions at HOW Design Conference. A three hour session, Styling With CSS in DW CS3 will be on Sunday. And Common Mistakes Print Designers Make on the Web will be on Monday followed by a book signing. Yes, Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3 will be released -- finally -- on April 11th! w00t! (Be sure to sign up soon since the early bird discount only lasts till March 28th!)

In Orlando in June, TODCon returns, but we'll talk about that more soon. Come see me, introduce yourself, enjoy all the speakers at the above conferences. Meet you there!

So maybe you've never heard of twitter, or maybe it's old news but you thought it seemed silly. That's what happened to me at first as well. A friend told me to check it out (with no instructions), I took a look at the home page, wondered why I cared what all those people I didn't know were doing right now, and closed it. For those that haven't heard of it, twitter is a social networking tool that requires you to answer one simple question - "What are you doing?" - in 140 characters or less. And I agree, it does sound rather silly every time I try to explain it. However, I've found Twitter to be my favorite social tool. I've basically turned off IM (which can be an extreme time sink for me when friends need CSS help!), but I can still keep up with people I care about.

In light of the confusion of new people looking at the app, I thought I'd write a few tips I've found along the way that make it work for me.

A Quick Twitter Primer

1. Your initial job is to find people you want to follow. You follow them by viewing their profile page and clicking "Follow" under their main icon. These are your friends. (They're called "Following" in your Stats sidebar and their icon will now appear in your sidebar.) There are a variety of ways to do this. Most obviously, start with the people you know. Then, check their friends and see who you know, or know of. Don't worry about whether they know you, it doesn't matter. They may not follow you back for now. Just find interesting people you'd like to know about, know better, or simply eavesdrop on. Heh. Once you've pillaged and plundered your friend's lists, use the search feature for other people you know. If you're really outgoing, you can search for people in your geographical area and start getting to know people you can actually get to know in real life! Wow. This is where twitter can become a great local networking tool. You can even watch the main twitter page for random people you might want to follow. I don't personally find this to be very useful with all the various languages represented.
2. After adding some friends, you'll likely end up with a few that add you as well. Those people will actually "hear" what you tweet (a tweet is slang for your 140 character post--though you'll hear it called many different things). The tweets of the people you follow will be on your home page when you're logged in. Your tweets will be mixed in chronological order among them. If you're on someone else's profile page, you'll see everything they've written. If you'd like to see the interaction with their friends, click on their With Others tab.
3. The people that don't follow you will not see what you tweet. But there's a workaround if you'd really like to interact with them (that is, if they're paying attention). Using the @ symbol and their username (for me, that would start with @stefsull), your tweet to them will show up in their Replies tab. But though it once worked in a different way, currently, the @stefsull must be the first thing in your tweet. Putting it somewhere in the message will not make it show up in their Replies pane. I try to check my Replies pane at least once a day to see what I might have missed (since I don't sit and read twitter all day). Even if I don't know someone, intelligent or witty comments may cause me to add them. :)
4. Once you're set up in this way, just start twittering. Periodically through the day, leave a tweet. Doesn't matter if you only have a couple followers to start with--having a higher number of updates will likely get more people that find you in some way. And the numbers grow over time.
5. When you follow people and they follow you, you have the ability to send Direct Messages (DM). These are messages that no one else sees and can be set to be sent to your email.
6. Unless you set your tweets to private, anyone can read them, including googlebots which will kindly add you to the index. If you choose private tweeting, you will have to allow people to follow you. I don't do this, but I know some people, especially those who work at larger companies, enjoy that privacy.
7. Be sure to check out your settings. You can customize your profile page, add your icon, set privacy, add twitter to your mobile device or IM client, choose how you're notified of DMs, etc.
8. And if you're an organized person, you can click the little star icon at the end of any post and add it to your favorites. So if someone posts a URL you don't want to forget, or simply says something that makes you giggle uncontrollably, click the star so you can find it again.

What's the Point Really?

Well, maybe there's not one for you. But for me, a person who works from a home office, travels all over the world meeting people, works remotely with a variety of people and companies, it's an amazing tool. I began by adding anyone I knew of in the industry. Many of them I'd never met and perhaps hadn't even conversed with by email. But reading my page periodically, I began to feel I knew something of these people. I learned who had wicked wit, who had spouses and kids, when they were sick, when they had great accomplishments, when something traumatic happened. Yes, you can argue I don't really know them. And you're right. We haven't sat over coffee and shared our deepest feelings. But I certainly know them more than I did, or could have. When I do get an opportunity to meet them later, at a conference, there isn't that uncomfortable feeling of meeting a person you've only heard of. For me, feeling like I know them allows me to be immediately comfortable, relax, discuss, hang out. For those I have met, I don't lose track. I can keep up with their life until I see them again in the future.

There are companies and organizations using twitter to send out news and notifications. You can even keep up with politics, weather, news feeds, etc. Twitter is a tool. Use it as you will. But for me, the part that matters is it keeps me nicely connected with the little people inside my computer--my virtual, and sometimes real, internet buds.

As I train all over the world, one of the issues I try to spend a good deal of time on is helping people to understand the malleable em unit. And how to utilize it for good and not evil. :)

Anyone who knows me knows my burden for accessibility and the em unit is one of the most accessible ways to design. In fact, Greg and I spend a chapter on it in our upcoming book, so I won't go into a lot of detail here. But today, I stumbled upon a really great font-size calculator created by James Whittaker. If you'd rather keep it handy on your desktop, he also created it as an Adobe AIR application.

In reading the comments of his blog post, I saw a couple people questioning the reasoning behind decreasing the default text size of a user at all. And I began to answer those questions with my own opinions. About three paragraphs into my reply, it occurred to me that I was monopolizing James' comments and it was best done as a blog post of my own (please read James' post for the full story).

For the quick back story - the default text size of modern browsers is 16px (that would equal 1em). It's quite common to choose a 12px font-size which is 75% of the default sizing (.75em), as the base font size for elements on your page. (I'm not going to address here whether that should be placed on the body, or on individual elements.) The people responding in the comments were questioning whether we should adjust the base font size (something I've heard for years) since we're taking away "the experience the user expected." My reasoning follows...

The Three Groups of Users

I likely don't have to remind you that back in the days of tag soup, 12px was a very common size to set type to on the web. In fact, even after many developers started controlling their typography with CSS, 12px was probably the most common size to set type to. So saying that people who leave their browser set to the default 16px size want that size is simply not true. They hardly know what it looks like since more often than not, it's overridden by other font sizing and styling anyway. And if they're like the average user, they don't have the inclination to change it either. They can see just fine, thank you. And they use most of their apps with the defaults they ship with (which explains why most of those same people use Internet Explorer -- since it ships with their operating system). They're not upset that you changed their text size since they get what they have always seen and have come to expect.

Now, in the case of a low-vision user, this is not the case. If someone struggles with the issue of low vision and surfs the web regularly, they've probably developed a method of dealing with it. Users with aging eyes, many times instead of changing the base font size of their browser, have simply learned to use menus or key commands to bump the text size up. They change to a more comfortable size when necessary, but sometimes are limited by the fact that the site breaks in some way as they increase their font size. With this 75%/.75em font calculation, they get what they expect because they surf at default sizes to begin with and they still have control as well as a usable site at any size they settle on.

There are the more extreme vision-impaired that change their default browser text to 32px, 45px, or whatever size works for them. If they've changed their default to 32px, using the 75%/.75em size puts them at 24px. They can still use a key command to increase the text size if necessary. They're probably the users that know the most about making your site work for them because they need it the most. I'm guessing a great deal of the web is difficult for them to use (with columns that have one or two words per line, overlapping, elements getting cut off, etc). So though they don't get their initial optimum size (which is, most probably a common occurrence for them since many sites still use pixel sizing), they have the tools to increase the size a bit more if it's necessary.

Now, do not misunderstand me and think that I'm saying that since the very low vision user is the only one that doesn't get what they initially expect, that they're not important. They are and all users and user agents should have access to the content. I'm simply saying that the first two groups, and even part of the third (for the not uncommon pixel-based sites) see what they expect to see. And with em-based layouts, they have the tools to change them--very smoothly giving them a great experience. That's all.

Free, I like free. I use free stuff all the time. Firefox, Filezilla, 7zip, and Thunderbird every day, for example. My server is on some flavor of GNU/Linux with Apache, phpmyadmin, Horde, mySQL and PHP (which also includes, I’m sure, TONs more software). I have a Yahoo, Hotmail, Myway, Gmail, and AOL free email address. All of those have a variety of free to them, some are open source free (GPL, for example), some are closed source free, some are just used for free (like Google, for example) where there is no source to see. Now, with open source, it is more than mere “free” software – it carries a philosophy with it, that software should be free. The preamble to the license includes:

The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its users.

Now, where this all gets ironic is the drumbeat for donations. I have several extensions I use in Firefox and a couple of them make heartfelt, earnest pleas for money, after all, they spend considerable time creating the software. If I visit open source software sites that aren’t currently backed by a commercial company, 90% of the time they are asking/accepting donations (if the product is any good and widely used).

So … which is it? Is it free or do you want money for it? I find it odd they would choose an open source license and then cite their time, effort and hard work that goes in to making the software work for reasons people should donate. If they want money for it, they should simply charge for it; if they want it to be free, really free – including “guilt free” then they should list it under an open source license.

Here is what I think has happened. They started a project as they though “hey, such-and-such application does that, it shouldn’t be that hard, I can do it” and then they wrote a proof of concept and it wasn’t that hard – maybe a month or even a few months of dedicated work on it. They are still in the excitement phase of a new project; the buzz from making something work is fresh in their minds. So they see all of the open source applications and how everyone just gets all giddy over them and elect to release the code in open source format. They have something that works and they release it at sourceforge and, then, someone else starts using it – but they find it doesn’t work right. So some bug fixes come in. The programmer, who has a family, life and such, continues to take time to make the fixes work. Some one else adds code to make it do something else, so the programmer adds it to the application and this keeps up for a little while. The novelty of the project is wearing off, it is becoming WORK. Bugs keep coming in, new feature requests and someone slams the project because their entire system crashed because of it (even if it is impossible, it just happened at the same time …) They don’t see a lot of help coming in, if any at all, and they see hundreds, if not millions, using their software and making money off of it – while the author is stuck making the changes and adjustments so the consumer can continue to make money off of it and the author gets??? They start to see the project as a time hole that sucks all of their free time making, fixing, updating and maintaining the application all without any compensation and decide that, maybe, someone will chip in some money to cover what they could be making if they were working on a commercial application or contracting.

The irony – they believe in free software as a philosophy, so strongly that anything that “touches” the software becomes free as well – but, not strongly enough not to ask for donations because they actually created the software.

So, for those open source author’s – put up and shut up or write commercial software, but don’t think using guilt, pity or such to garner donations is in the spirit of the open source philosophy. At a bare minimum, setup a license for those who want to contribute so that the viral nature of the GPL doesn’t apply to them and then, maybe you’ll get something for your hard work. When you give something away for free, people will value your work in to it as much as you’ve placed the value on the work (i.e. free). I know several projects I’d love to contribute to if they had an alternate license for those contributing – and several that I’ve actually given to, some from the value of the work to my business and others because it was way cool or had an alternate license.

OK, so I'm reading ALA (A list apart) on the latest new thing to come out of the web standards group, something Microsoft intends to implement in IEv8. One of the biggest issues we web developers face in developing web pages is the varied version of browsers and code compatibility. If you look at the offerings here at CMX, you will find, from time to time, articles that address this in some manner (as in, for IEv6, you need to include; for Firefox, include; for IEv7 do this and for IEv5.x, try this - oh and Safari v1, just give it up). The proposed idea is to implement a meta tag which allows you to specify the browser engine to render the page with - for example, if you specify IEv8, when IEv9+ comes out, it is rendered with the same, prior, version of IE, v8. The goal of the standard would also to be allow multiple browsers to utilize this same functionality so that Firefox, Safari and the rest could also use this to render pages in prior engines for their product line (so I could specify IEv8, FFv2 and Safari v3, for example). The implementation will look like:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

The articles went on to talk about the prior attempt to have web pages rendered differently using the doctype declarations. Both articles are a good read (not so much on the comments to the articles). It is my opinion that this is a good thing. I believe it will allow us to create a work on the web and not have to freak out when the next version of whatever comes out, worried our sites will break. I also believe it will aid us in transition from one browser to the next. Likewise, I have a couple concerns as well - how well will the future browsers render prior versions? and if I have a site created for IEv9 and you have IEv8, what happens? The articles from ALA are:

Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8
From Switches to Targets: A Standardista's Journey

Well, it continues to happen and I'm not surprised. This time an open source company, mySQL, is bought by another company, SUN. I am curious, given the open source product development, as to the profits. See, a long time ago I heard a proprietary software developer laugh at the open source movement, something like "Someone is going to make a lot of money off of that and it won't be the contributors". Well it seems those words came to pass. The owners of mySQL are raking in a fortune while those who made it happen (the little people) got to participate.

Compound that with companies, like facebook, which use open source tools, like mySQL and who sell parts of their company for millions - you've just got to wonder - how can I get a staff of people working for an open source project I own for free so that I can sell the company, who owns the main copyright of the open source project, years later for millions?

To the point of the purchase, I do wonder what this will hold for mySQL? What will SUN do with the project? Will it become like Red Hat's distro for Linux - all for profit entries with the source files for the distro off somewhere else? Will the pre-install licensing change? One thing is for sure, the mySQL is open source, so they can't change that - and it will still be widely used and installed for some time to come. I would love to see the database make it to the next level of maturity and include enterprise level functionality (beyond what it has now) that will make it a slam dunk decision for most applications. What I think would also be really awesome would be an application distribution, like MS Access, to bring it to the desktop or to be married to Java somehow and made inter-operable with the language! Now that would be cool!

Something that had me quite frustrated for some time was a dynamic textfield in a button interfering with a mouse click. The buttons were added to the application dynamically when needed and the dynamic textfield was populated with the name for the button when added. Yes, I had the textfield's selectable property set to false but it was still a problem if the button's buttonMode and useHandCursor properties were set to true. The text field blocked any kind of mouse event through to the button. The solution was simple but poorly documented. I did not see this property in the help menu so here you go:

textfieldName.mouseEnabled = false;

Set this property before setting the selectable property to false and away you go. I hope this saves you some hair-pulling and you found this easy enough if you've been searching for a solution to this problem.

As I sit in my sun room, looking out a a thin blanket of fresh snow in the back yard on this last day of 2007, I find myself getting a bit reflective.

Like any year, 2007 had its ups and its downs. Attending and speaking at TODCON is always one of the ups for me, but this year I received a special treat; I was invited to speak at Adobe MAX. I am hoping to be invited back to both again in 2008. They are two completely different types of conferences, both a lot of fun and hard worked combined.

2007 also saw me teaching more than I ever thought I would. I held down two courses at Centennial and 2 - 3 courses at Humber. The total number of students ranged between 130 - 150 each week. I was relieved when the winter break set in but also proud of myself for making it through the semester without a nervous breakdown!

In early 2007, we lost my brother-in-law to a terrible brain disease. He was only a year older than me, and it certainly gave me a far too keen sense of my own mortality. But his loss was traumatic on many more levels other than my own selfish ones. My wife lost her "baby brother," my niece and nephew lost their father and my sister-in-law (who exhibited phenomenol strength and determination, taking care of David at home) lost her husband and love of over 20 years. Many, many others lost a dear friend. The neighbourhood lost a kind-hearted man who always had a smile and a positive thing to say.

Family and friends grew closer through this ordeal, however, and those bonds are continually strengthened. We spent many a happy moment with Sharon, Lindsay and Myles over the holidays. It seems to be true that some good can come from bad.

Every year my house gets the royal treatment for Christmas. We have a crawlspace on one side of the house that contains nothing but Christmas decorations. Santas, snowmen, all manner of glittery objects get pulled out, unpacked and set up for the month of December and early January. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a process that occurs over days, not hours.

One of my personal joys is setting up my Christmas village. Miniature houses, people, animals and even a functional trolley get laid out - usually in a different location each year. This year it was the fireplace mantle. This 10 inch deep slab of maple gave me over 8 feet of length to set up the scene this year. And while somewhat limiting, I like the challenge of making the town work.

In the basement/rec room, I commandeer two book shelves and set up a winter wilderness scene with a (not functional) waterfall, river, mountains and a couple cabins, surrounded in a heavy blanket of polyester snow. 

I also set up a model train which runs around the tree. Well, it runs if the cats haven't derailed a boxcar at some point in the night.

Both the train and the trolley were gifts from my Dad, from his own collection. Even some of the houses were left to me. He had his very own room at home where it was nothing but trains. I have a bit of the bug, but not so much that I've blockaded a room yet.

So it's kind of bittersweet when I bring the town to life each year; makes me feel closer to him and at the same point, makes me miss him all the more. He was a bigger kid at Christmas than me and that's saying a lot.

2008 brings with it a whole new semester with new students. I won't be teaching as much as in the fall, but I'll be busy nonetheless, including an exciting project with Peach Pit Press, presenting at a local camera club and of course, writing for Community MX.

I hope 2008 brings other things, too. I hope it safely brings back home our friends and family serving overseas.

I hope it brings a calmer climate, both politically and geophysically.

I hope it brings the Canadian dollar down just a bit, so my CMX cheques pack more punch and I can yet again offer web design deals to my American cousins!

I hope you have all had a wonderful, safe and happy holiday so far. If you're out celebrating tonight, make sure to bring change for a cab - or a sleeping bag - so you can enter the new year safe and sound a