Category: Geek

  • Multitasking is killing me (and probably you too)

    Multitasking has been stressing me, robbing me of my focus, my productivity, and my appreciation of the beauty of the exact moment I’m experiencing right now, and dammit, I want my brain back! Once upon a time, I was assigned 21 projects in my first month on a job. Distinct projects, working with different groups…

  • Guest on The Big Web Show

    This week I had the good fortune to spend an hour talking with Jeffrey Zeldman and Dan Benjamin about all things CSS on The Big Web Show. It was lively and fun despite my cell phone making weird noises during the podcast. (Ooops, sorry!) We talked about progressive enhancement, carpentry, testing, rounded corners, oocss, performance,…

  • Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS

    Last week, Stoyan Stefanov and I spoke at Velocity Conference about optimizing massive CSS. We talked about our experiences optimizing large-scale sites like Facebook and Yahoo!, and we discussed our findings regarding the CSS efficiency of the Alexa Top 1000 websites. Velocity was kind enough to share videos of the session. What is the state…

  • The media object saves hundreds of lines of code

    What is the internet made of? At least the UI layer is mainly composed of media blocks. I talked about the Facebook stream story before, and all the tiny objects of which it is composed. For the most part, the stream story is made up of the media object repeated over and over. The media…

  • CSS Variables Specification

    I don’t want CSS to become a programming language, but I do want it to be a better declarative language. I would like to see variables added to the CSS Specification. People have been begging for Variables or Constants in various incarnations forever. Variables will help us do more with less code. It is time…

  • How to create CSS objects? Get the granularity right!

    In my previous post, I said: Shoehorning CSS and HTML into PHP abstractions prevents the code from being DRY and ultimately leads to code bloat, because, the CSS and HTML require a far more granular object structure than the PHP. And then I didn’t expand on it, or give proper context. Ooops, sorry! In the…

  • Visual Semantics in HTML and CSS

    Each layer in the web stack has its own architecture. You wouldn’t expect the DB schema to be used to architect the PHP middleware, and yet people expect that of the HTML and CSS. HTML needs to be written with a sense of the meaning of the data or content, something I call code semantics.…

  • CSS Wish List

    Don’t get me wrong, I think CSS is awesome. It is a great way of defining the UI, but it could be even better. I’m excited about the special effects, transitions, and graphic elements currently being added to the CSS specification. They will help us write faster pages by eliminating the need for UI graphics…

  • Bread

    Outerlands is a lovely place to have brunch before a day at the beach. They bake homemade bread which is absolutely yummy. It is a small place run by a lovely couple who are very busy at their successful restaurant. Me (omg!): You have to bake bread every day? Owner (happy smile): No, I get…

  • HTML5, who is bad enough to take on canvas?

    I recently went to New York to hang with some people who are interested in HTML5 and figure out what I thought about the future of this web standard. I’m a skeptic by nature, so I went into our little quest expecting to be unimpressed by HTML5, but in fact, it isn’t so bad, and…