Following on from something I read on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog, yesterday I was writing some regular expressions that would identify a file type for me. Sometimes I find regular expressions really tortuous and I was doing this code in C#, which is only something I’ve started using very recently. However, the code I wrote correctly recognised all 4 different types of files on the first run. Wow, that feels good.
John C. Dvorak has written in his PC Magazine column (found via hicksdesign) that CSS is fundamentally broken. This is so far from the truth I can’t believe it’s actually been written in an actual magazine. Although the columnists task is sometimes to provoke you into think about things, so writing it in the first place is fair enough.
Apart from a failure to grasp exactly how CSS works (huh, maybe that’s why you’ve struggled in redesigning your blog John?) he highlights what I consider to be a major problem with the majority of people who work with CSS, rather than CSS itself. John complains that each browser’s implementation of CSS is different, and that
“There actually are Web sites that mock this mess by showing the simplest CSS code and the differing results from the three main browsers and the Safari and Linux browsers. The differences are not trivial. And because of the architecture of this dog, the bugs cascade when they are part of a larger style sheet, amplifying problems. Worse yet, nobody except the most techie insiders wants to talk about this mess.”
In amongst trying to write the second part of my database clustering articles, I’m playing around with the styling of these pages. As I’m still using the site as I fiddle with things, James Cheezepie might call this a realignment, but I think I’ll stick with “needless fiddling” as the standard WordPress template is quite nice.
Anyway, the main problem I have with coming up with any design is what I’m going to call “sub-conscious plagiarism”, this being the phenomenon where you create a design and then boom, you notice a very similar looking design on a web site you’ve already been on. Perhaps this time I can get around this by doing little bits of fiddling here and there, and by admitting it when I “pinched” something from somewhere else. So the changes I’ve made under the title of each entry and come from the k2 Wordpress template. I figure as it’s already part of a freely available template, it’s ok.