2003-09-15 22:13 UTC
You may now sacrifice virgins to ensure there are no last call comments
This past weekend was quite a significant weekend for personal reasons, but of more interest to you, is the
fact that The CSS2.1 Last Call Working Draft has been
published! (announcement)
Some of the major changes to look at:
- The "computed value" of many properties has changed. For example, percentages on most properties now inherit as
percentages, not lengths. Inheritance always uses the computed value now. All properties now have a line in their
property definition that specifies exactly what the computed value for that property is.
- Margin collapsing is now well
defined. As part of this, we redefined how clear works.
- The definition of containing block has been
reworked to be much more well defined (amongst other things, it removes the very confusing contradictions that snuck into
CSS2).
- There is now an entire appendix devoted to
explaining in what order things should paint.
- There is now a well defined white-space processing model that
defines exactly which spaces should go where, even in bidirectional contexts.
- The inline box model has been tuned, and now explicitly mentions struts in two places, in order to explain
how 'line-height' works on blocks.
- We've added some new values: orange, pre-wrap and pre-line, inline-block.
- Backgrounds are better defined (or more
explicitly undefined in the case, for example, of background images on inline elements).
- The first-line and first-letter pseudo-elements are now
very much better defined.
- The :before and :after
pseudo-elements are now much more flexible. (This is setting the way for the CSS3 Generated and Replaced Content module, which makes them even more
flexible.)
- We revamped the way overflow and clip work to be better defined and more useful.
- All the many errata for CSS2 (there
were hundreds) have been merged into the text.
For those of you who doubt that there have been many changes between CSS2 and CSS2.1, and think that the working group
was just slow, it may be educational to look at the diff marked version. Look at chapter 9, for
instance.
Oh, and GwieF was most amused that I managed to get his name into the spec. Tee-hee!
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There are certain things that are quite obviously bad ideas, things that will obviously quickly cascade out of control.
For example, introducing a linguist to magnetic poetry.
I don't know who is to blame, but whoever it is deserves a good talking to. It should have been obvious what would happen!
Alphabet Soup: 
Someone really needs to go through these and put them in alphabetical order. I mean, trying to write anything is nearly impossible just because you spend so long looking through the pile to find the word you want that you end up forgetting what you were trying to write in the first place. And that's no good.
Life's not a song...
Dinner yesterday hit a CSS working group record: Four laptops, an
ethernet cable with DHCP, FTP, and HTTP servers on the end of it, a
wireless network, a flash card, a GPRS connection, some SMS
communication, and a bluetooth network with three bluetooth
enabled-phones and a bluetooth-enabled laptop. At least one device was
overtaxed and had to visit the doctor the next day.
Life is not bliss;
We will finish CSS2.1.
We will finish CSS2.1.
We will finish CSS2.1.
Life is just this:
Incidentally, pictures
from the last Dominion event are up now. There aren't any real good
pictures showing that the venue was a cave, though. Oh well.
It's living.
Friday I went to Dominion. That's a Goth-themed
club, although their venue apparently varies. Friday's venue was a
cave, which gave it a very appropriate ambiance.
As the theme was Gothic, many of the people wore black clothing. I
don't think it had the intended effect on me. I'm a larper (a
live-action roleplayer), and in larps, everyone wears black clothing
under their costumes, so that they can easily switch character simply
by changing their overalls. For example you might throw on a green
tabbard and be a peasant, or you might put on an orange cloak and be a
druid.
So I generally consider black clothing to be underwear.
Actually, there were quite a few larpers there. In fact, everyone
there was a geek of some sort. I met some interesting people.
I also took some interesting pictures. Or rather, I took pictures
of interesting scenes. The pictures themselves aren't too
interesting. You see, unfortunately, the cave was very dimly lit, so
most of the pictures look like big expanses of black with small bright
dots clustered around slightly less black expanses. Eira took some
much better pictures, but that's because she cheated. She used a
flash.
Of course that meant that every time she took a picture, the people
she photographed were left blind for several minutes
afterwards. Cecilie explained to me that this is how people who go to
Dominion events expect to hook up. Basically the blinding effect of
the flash has much the same effect as alcohol. You no longer see how
ugly the people you are talking to are.
This theory would also explain why people start to complain if Eira
doesn't take enough photos at Dominion events.
Today I got up early to get to the airport in time to receive Tantek and David. This week is one of
our quarterly CSS Working Group face to face meetings. I have one goal
for this meeting.
Finishing the CSS2.1 last call working draft.
If we don't finish this draft, I'm going to— we will finish
this draft. The work starts tonight, with a CSS2.1 Editors meeting. In
fact as we speak Tantek is fixing his pending changes.
Earlier we went on Håkon's boat, the 404 Not
Found. This time there was more wind than the last
time I went, so being dragged along was a bit more effort. Lots of
fun though!
Excitement abounded when we nearly lost Tantek as the cord he was
leaning against snapped and he went crashing into the
fjord. Thankfully quick reactions from everyone except me resulted in
a quick rescue. (It really was everyone except me. I heard a splash
and looked to my left to find out what it was. Not seeing anything, I
turned to my right and discovered Tantek trailing outside the boat,
holding on to a dangling rope, being helped up by Jim.)
We stopped for lunch on what I call Rabbit Island, an island in the
Oslo fjord that is overrun by rabbits. I have lots of photos of the
rabbits that I took last time I was there, but I'm sure you've all
seen rabbits before, so I won't bore you with that.
Now we're lounging about at Håkon's. Daniel stepped up as
cook, so we're going to have some Saumon à la
Daniel. It smells nice.
Geeks At Play (or is it work? hard to tell): 
Bon Appetit!