Fairweather Zealot

I’m still a newbie at CSS, and I know it. I’ve delved into it quite a bit recently, and even have taken a ‘fully-compliant’ stance on all of my recent development. But it can be hard to keep up with the new discoveries and standards being developed. People like Shaun Inman, Mike Davidson and the folks at A List Apart are constantly coming up with better ways to stay compliant while increasing the muscle that CSS offers, often through Javascript. It makes it hard for a newbie to keep up.One of the things that has really interested me lately is all of the Image Replacement ideas out there. One of the things that I have found about being fully compliant is that you become stuck with some most widely used fonts – and yet using images to create more stylistic text is a big bandwidth hog. Luckily, they have come up with some great methods (including Rob Cameron and Tom Werner’s excellent WAC-IMR adaptation of Shaun’s original IFR. But I think I am even more impressed by Stewart Rosenberger’s Dynamic Text Replacement.

Still, with my limited PHP experience and my lack of Javascript skills, it can be a little overwhelming. For what it’s worth, does anyone know a good PHP book to get me started?

Links for Today:

• Color Whore – a great collection of hex colors
• Mike Davidson’s Scalable IFR
• How to Attack an IE/Win Bug – good article by Holly Bergevin

Can it be true? Will it be any good?

There are some movies that can only be ruined by continuing them, and as much as I love Clerks, I think that Kevin Smith doing a sequel could be a bad idea. I thought it was brilliant to do the trilogy plus (Mallrats, Chasing Amy and Dogma) in which the lives of the characters threaded between the stories without making MOST of them sequels. Of course, there is no excuse for Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, which might be evidence that this could end up being a horrid decision.

For more on the story, check out Kevin’s own site.

And I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. I enjoyed most of the coverage, although it was too Americo-centric for me. There were a lot of good competitions that we never saw because the Americans weren’t involved. Would it have been so hard to show some of the Iraqi team’s great showing? And there was next to no baseball coverage because the Americans failed to qualify. On the flip side, I have to laugh at the men’s basketball team - I actually found myself wanting them to lose because of their arrogance and lack of team play. Once again, the prima donnas on the team show why Larry Brown could take a bunch of role players (for the most part) and win an NBA championship, yet stars can’t win. Why? Because they aren’t a TEAM. Iverson was the key evidence of this – before the loss in the qualifying round, he said (and yes, I’m paraphrasing) “Practice? We’re professional players here – we don’t need practice.” After, he had the balls to say, “Well, we haven’t worked enough together and we got beat”. Hmm, I think that is what teams practice for, Allen…I do have to say that I was impressed with what Athens put on for a show. The opening ceremonies were very well done (I skipped the closing ceremonies), and although I kind of had Greece in the back of my mind for destinations, it’s a lot higher on the list after seeing the scenic shots NBC showed. My wife, of course, has wanted to go there for years – now I’m on board with her.As a whole, I thought that the Olympics were a success. Sure, there were some ugly moments but overall I enjoyed the coverage – and we watched a lot of it. My favorites: women’s beach volleyball and the swimming events, although I got to catch a LOT of gymnastics that impressed me.