Did you catch the dashboard? That page is my new hub for my online activity. And it is all done without one single line of javascript. I wanted to see what I could get out of CSS transitions, and this was the result. (If you don’t see nice animations when you hover over elucidblue or my name, you need to update your browser.)

Back to this page: More CSS transitions when you click “comments” on the right or “explore” on the left, though of course those have a little help from javascript to detect the clicks.

Look down below; you’ll see a link to my last post. Go ahead and click it, then click your browser’s back button. Neat trick, huh? That is some hashbang-free ajaxy goodness. Suck it Twitter; hope you enjoy keeping that block of javascript in your app indefinitely now. I think it’s even more fun after you open up comments first.

Anyway, you get the point. I had fun with this one. Hover over things, click things, see what they all do. My goal was to take everything not essential, and push it aside or fade it to be non obtrusive, and then only bring it out when you actually need it. I believe in the power of white space, so you got it in heaps. Hope you enjoy!

» How I learned to stop worrying and set my mobile web sites free

It seems like today’s choices are either implement (and not keep up) or keep up (and never have time to implement). Today’s mobile web expert really does need to be a rocket surgeon. I would posit that it is not possible keep up fully, at all.

Yeah, I hear that.

I want to have more continuity to my career than just a series of jobs.  I’m active on social networks and I dabble in a couple other blogs, but I haven’t had a single central hub for my online activity. Considering my career as a web designer and developer, that’s not a good thing.

From now on, Elucid Blue will be that hub. I have no illusions that I will blog here with any regularity–my blogging habits come in spurts and then vanish for years–but I will do my best to keep the links up to date and the code presentable. In the coming weeks I’ll be working on a redesign to reflect this change.

The blog here will serve mainly as a log of my programing and designing ventures: new technologies and work practices I’m learning about or experimenting with. My more eclectic posts will happen over on Gruntled Coder.

At least, that’s the plan until my career as monkey juggler really takes off.

• Choose who sees what. Plain and simple select box, up front, every time you write a new post. And those users can easily see a list of folks who are also privy to the conversation.
• It tells you about new followers when you log in. Notice what it does not do: it does not clutter up your inbox with “Jim Beam is now following you” emails. Granted, it does clutter up your inbox with plenty of other stuff, but that is easily fixed. (Quick addition to that lifehacker article: also check the “Mark as read” box on the filter; you can rely on the Buzz interface to indicate unread messages.)
• Search! This is the upside to all Buzzes landing in your Gmail: you can always find an archived message. Need to find that link you saw in your Twitter feed three months ago about Super Bowl predictions? Good luck!

Oh, and need I mention the single click it will take me to add this blog post to my Buzz stream?

CSS 3 and HTML 5 are somewhere down the chute, and will eventually be widely supported. Both are highly anticipated. Both address a lot of today’s problems in the web design world. But neither is good enough.

I know I’m not the first to bang on this drum. In fact, I’m basically about to parrot back the biggest complaints. The reason for this is that I haven’t seen the problems of both specs brought to light in the same place, which seems like a rather glaring mistake; they need to work hand-in-hand. Solving the issues of only one does not fix the whole problem.

HTML 5 — new limits on the same problem

The most noticeable problem with HTML today is found in the battle for semantics. We champion the need for semantic markup, but when it really comes down to it, we can only do half of the job: even the best designs still need a handful of abritrary <div> tags here or there. We have to, because the CSS only works if we give have a hook to hang it on, and a truly semantic markup doesn’t give us enough.

The next version of HTML promises to correct this difficulty, and, to an extent, it does. It introduces more meaningful tags like <section>, <chapter>, and <nav>. These are a huge improvement on having a page with a dozen meaningless <div> tags. But as John Allsopp has pointed out, these only address the problems of today, with little to no thought given for the future of the web.

What happens when need new trends in web design emerge, making common some other practice, such as a site map in the footer? What tag does that get? We have no idea what the web of tomorrow will need. And HTML 5 makes no room for that. Some day we will hit the limits of <section>, <aside>, and <header>, just like we’ve hit the limits of <div> today. Then what? Grumble and complain and wait around for the next long-overue spec? The next generation of HTML needs to be extensible by the designer, so that he can be tho one to define the constraints of his design, not some arbitrary spec.

CSS 3 — fun toys and not much more

Okay, I’ll admit it: I can’t wait to start using rounded corners, @font-face, and multiple backgrounds without care or difficulty once the CSS 3 spec is widely-supported. We’ve been hacking in these things for years, and it will be a breath of fresh air to see them finally become effortless. Hallelujah.

Now, the grocery list of things CSS 3 does not do (most of these are taken straight from Matt Wilcox):

• multiple columns of equal height
• set an unknown number of containers to equal width, summing to a maximum, defined width
• any sort of vertical grid (at least not when its contents are dynamic)
• move elements to a position relative to another element

In short: layout. Coding with a meaningful HTML source order, independent from the design of the page? That’s a dream. A designer has to do backflips to keep the HTML source order the way he knows it should be. It’s amazing what we’ve been able to do with floats and absolute positioning, but we all know it takes far more work to pull off than it should.

CSS styles elements, but it does not lay them out. Not really. It can’t do basic math; it can’t traverse nor control the DOM; it doesn’t allow you to set variables — I mean, after all these years, we still have to type in the same 6-digit hex code three dozen times in our stylesheets to color several elements the same. Isn’t it fun when we decide to change that color later? And that doesn’t even touch on the power variables would give over layout controls. We need a layout system, and CSS is not it.

Time for a change

We need to rethink this thing. The new specs are a step forward for now, but they are both ultimately only plugging holes when we need a new dam. So how do we start over without breaking the web? Well, I have an idea. And I am looking forward to sharing it.

Part 2 coming soon.