Aug 20, 1998, 10:40am

Sigh, I am lame. I know.

I wrote two complete rants in the past two weeks, but never uploaded them. I will be putting them in my archive (which surprise surprise, might be done by this weekend!) and I'll link to them in their raw html format at the bottom of this rant.

Ok, a few new things. I've actually been very busy the last few weeks with other work, not the least of which is my company site, WebMotif. I finally launched the new version of it on August 12th. (Warning - a lot of techie stuff on coding web pages follows)

WebMotif. It has a long and weird history - the company started out as a collaboration idea between me and two people I knew in the States. That didn't pan out much, mainly because one person was too busy with her own projects and the other kind of took off for several months. I shifted focus and turned my old company, WriteDesign into WebMotif. I had some business cards done, used a rather crappy logo I designed for the company, and went from there.

Since the company's birth just under a year ago, most of the work I did came from word of mouth, recommendations from a few ISPs I do work with, and from people impressed with this site you're at now, impressed enough to ask me to do their company sites. I was written up favorably in some local press last fall, and because of this, work came in on a semi-stable basis. Next thing I knew it was April 1998, and I still didn't have my company site done.

Work was still not a problem so getting a site up to generate work for me was not an issue, but it was damned embarrassing at times... so I redesigned an entire WebMotif site. I never liked it, so I never uploaded it (wanna take a peek? Note the links are dead and yes, it's a goofy picture.). So I worked on a few other designs and eventually came up with the basis (not the final form) for what you see today.

The site is based around the look of the logo I designed. That logo was created only a few months ago, and it took me ages to figure out what to put in the middle of it. I'm still not entirely happy with it, but as they say, it will do for now. From that point, I worked on several concept sites, designing them in a single 570 by 350 pixel panel in Photoshop (after drawing them out crudely on paper). Then came the frustrating part.

If you haven't checked out the new WebMotif site yet, do so now, and go to the main page with the purple bar across the top. Then visit one of the sections (you can tell you're at a sublevel section because it has a red bar across the top).

The frustrating part. Oh yeah. Netscape 3. Grrrr. Grrrrrrrrr.

Those who know me well enough Net-wize know I much prefer Netscrape over Mikeysoft when it comes to browsers. Mikeysoft's long-standing "let me hold your hand, because I know best" approach to programs has long been a thorn in my side, and IE 4 is no exception. But I still loathe Netscrape for all the bugs they have, especially in the version 3 browser. The most annoying bugs from a design standpoint are all the table bugs - like javascripts document.write codes that don't work in tables, TD ALIGN problems, WIDTH problems and more. What annoys me most is that Netscape knew about these bugs when Navigator was still in beta, and they never fixed them.

Ok, back to the aggravation. My design concept called for a site that made use of the entire window in a browser, no matter the resolution it displayed on. Graphics would fill the screen from left to right (without producing a left-right scroll bar) at 640, 800, 1024 and above. I also wanted to have my initial navigation controls line up on the right of the screen, visually attached to my logo which was placed in the upper left portion.

Looks all pretty on paper, but doesn't quite work so easily in HomeSite.

First I tackled the stretching and compacting graphic problem. I considered javascript (and vbscript) and java, but almost immediately dropped it. Like most designers, I've used the TD COLOR trick to make single colors stretch and compact across a browser window, but I wasn't dealing with single colors. I was dealing with a graphic that had a beveled shape and a close-cropped drop shadow (to complete the 3D illusion). It wasn't simple, but the way I finally achieved the trick (after much editing to deal with other Netscrape and IE bugs) by creating many 1pixel high table cells that contained different hard-coded colors. The end result, after much sweat, is what you see at my site.

The much bigger problem was aligning my front page navigation bar to the right. It was a big problem because I had to make sure it lined up properly with the graphics above it to make it all look seamless. My first stab was using a nested table, but I ran into Navigator 3's TD ALIGN=RIGHT bug - anything coded this way will make the table cell's contents invisible in Netscrape 3. I tried a multitude of workarounds, and eventually coded about double the amount of code I normally would need to get it working. The end result is a design that works in Netscape 3 and 4, IE 3 and 4, and is passable in other browsers, but if that bug didn't exist, it would have been completed in half the time.

Which brings me to another point. I wrote about this in one of the previous rants - the Web Standards Project. I found out about this through Project Cool, and it was one of those things you say "it's about damned time!" when you see it. The WSP has one real goal - get both Microsoft and Netscape to fully and completely support HTML 4, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 1 and 2, Dynamic HTML (DHTML) and other standards ratified by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is recognized as the authority on web coding standards.

I can't tell you how frustrating it is from a web developer standpoint not to be able to use all the juice and tricks in CSS and DHTML. Well, sure I can use them, but if I wanted cross browser compatibility, I'd basically have to code two pages for every page I want. That sucks. What sucks more is that it's a pain in the ass telling my clients who want DHTML and CSS that it will cost them more - as much as 50% more in some cases.

I'm faced with this dilemma because IE and Netscape don't support the same brand of DHTML, and there are plenty of bugs and omissions in both browsers' interpretation of CSS 1.0. Stuff that looks ultra cool in IE using CSS looks crappy or just doesn't work in Netscape. And vice versa. This is much more frustrating than the old warz amongst the browsers when they just wanted extensions to the standard HTML code.

You see, CSS is supposed to bring a lot of ease and design originality to the business of web design. And in a perfect world, it would. DHTML was supposed to add the ability to create pages dynamically on the client side (at your end) which would dramatically increase the loading of a typical web page within a site. In a perfect world, this would be the case today too. But IE is slow to fix bugs, slow to implement full standards and Netscrape is even worse - dragging their heels on the subject and saying things like "we will support the standards that make sense to us", which is another way of saying, we'll continue to do what we want.

The WSP is hoping to change these attitudes, and I hope they do - that's why I signed on as a working member. The WSP's own surveys show this arrogance by Netscape and Microsoft has caused an unnecessary 25% increase in the cost of a typical website, and I think that estimate is too low. With all the cross platform testing I have to do, workarounds I need to memorize, and gee whiz effects I need to labor on instead of writing a few lines of code to produce, it takes me a lot of time to build sites, and costs my clients more money. Maybe that will change soon. I'd much rather give up some billed hours to save the frustration and stress I get from these inconsistencies.

Ok, enough soap boxing, and I'm wrapping up.

A few closing thoughts -- I saw an auto theft in progress last week, and clued a passing cop into what was going on - dunno if they caught them or not -- Spiffle's August issue is delayed, mainly because of my own stupidity - I lost some crucial files when organizing for a backup - some stories, some original Photoshop graphics (the ones used ot design the site graphics) etc. Suck. I'm working on it -- Jean and I have been having fun at network Quake lately. I turned her on to it, and she's addicted now -- My Mom was out here in Vancouver working for a few weeks, but headed back last Saturday -- Looking forward to this September when we might go to Ottawa for a few days -- Any other Canadian as pissed off as me about this new "levy" the government is going to put on CD-Rs? $2.50 per disc (which can be bought for as little as $1.50 today - that will make the price at least $4!). This "levy", the result of special interest lobbying in Ottawa by the music industry, will be put into a royalty fund to be distributed to music companies. The levy will be applied to cassette tapes, CD-Rs and DAT tapes. I think I've cut about 2 music CDs since getting my burner - I use it to back up my valuable data... why should I pay the music companies for that??

Well, that's enough for now. Thanks for stopping by and catch you next time. If you want to check out the previous rants, they are here and here.

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Mixelania

Photos from Algonquin Park
Photos from my trip to Algonquin Park this fall with my Mom and two brothers.

War Stories

Making Snow for the Fortress
One of the worst jobs I ever had... till I got out.

Webiffied

Tools I Use
The tools I use to build websites and lead a tech life.

iPod and iTunes Offline

iMark's iTunes and iPod isn't iPlaying anything right iNow.

Most Recent Songs

Fiddlers Green by The Tragically Hip

Around The Bend by Pearl Jam

Here With Me (Rollo's Chillin' With the Family Mix) by Dido

With arms open wide by Creed

truffle pigs by Matthew Good Band

In the News

Burundi and Beyond - NY Times
Great article by Peter Meehan - provided some background.

St. Petersburg Times
Side mention in an article about good machines

AP Story on Espresso
Background and information provided

NY Times - Grinders Article
Especially proud of this one - got the reporter to focus on grinders

Globe and Mail
LOL - showing bad reporting, dude says I'm an American-based site!

The Olympian, WA
Talks about my love for the El Sal Siberia Pacamara

Seattle Times - Clover
Interviewed for comments on the Clover brewer

NY Times - How it Works
Background and information for various espresso machines

Time Mag Article
Just a brief mention, article about roasting beans.

NY Times
Front page article about consumers getting into specialty coffee.

Washington Monthly
Quoted reference to what I wrote in an article at CoffeeGeek.

USA Today - Barista Jam
Intereviewed for my thoughts on what the epitome of espresso is.

WSJ Article
The Wall Street Journal has interviewed me 3 times. This is the first time my name got in a story.

Reuters Interview
Interview with Reuters, Jan 2 - this is the USA Today version.

My Other Stuff

CoffeeGeek
Launched Dec 22, 2001, this is THE online community for espresso and coffee fanatics.

CoffeeKid Website
It's all new, as of March, 2002. My personal coffee obsession site.

WebMotif Services
My company's site - needs an update!

Amazon WishList
Hey, if you feel the need to buy me something, check here!

Daily Visits

enGadget
Great gadget site run by the guy who used to do Gizmodo.

Google News
This is how I get my daily news fix.

DPReview Forums`
The most active forums for digital photography online today.

Daily Zen
Need my Daily Zen fix!

Jalopnik
A blog about car stuff. Vroom Vroom.

MoCo Loco
An industrial design blog. Very cool stuff.

Friends and Family Plan

Beata Blog
Beata's got her own blog! She updates it most days.

Riddla on Flickr
Matt Riddle's flickr account, updated regularly

Irdy Photos
Irdy, my friend from Jakharta, on Flickr

Recent Acquisitions

Canon EF 24-105 f4 L Lens
The best lens I've ever owned. Super sharp and quick.

Canon 5D
A full frame dSLR, with luscious colour reproduction.

Alzo Digital Lights
Some amazing florescent cold lights for product photography

Canon Xsi dSLR
Amazing technology and image quality in a tiny package.

Canon 40D
Latest prosumer camera from Canon - a much better upgrade than the 30D

Fujitsu P1610
Great 2.2lb computer that does most of my travel / writing needs

28mm f1.8 Lens
A great lens for closeup work and full picture photography

Foodsaver Advanced
Finally got the right tools for freezing green coffee.

Canon 50mm 1.4
Most amazing lens I've ever owned. Produces stellar photos.

Canon 10-22mm
Super wide angle (full frame fisheye) zoom for my Canon 20D