The Mummy-Compliant Blogger Survival Kit

This article should be called “How to Prevent Your Mom From Reading Your Blog”, but it is called instead “What to Do When Your Mom Discovers Your Blog”. It’s all Blogger-oriented but some of the bits in there are true for any blog. You wouldn’t want your mother discover your true self, would you?

Use a Pseudonym

That is a proper advice. I think it shouldn’t be limited to blogs, though. If you care for your privacy, I think you should use pseudonyms as much as you can – my favourite being sébastien, after some long time of thorough analysis. It is indeed very easy via Google (and I made the experience with people I know – everybody has, I’m sure) to spot the interests of someone – that is, if this someone is active on the Internet. Scary how sometimes you cannot quite forget you’ve been involved in things such as LaTeX…

Go Multi-Lingual

This leaves with me with a dreadful dilemma: do I want my mother of my girlfriend to understand what I write? In any case, Ellen would understand either French or English. I may as well write in English. And that’s fine with me, English is gibberish to my Mom. She’d be so ashamed to read about what her son is really into, after all.

Search and Destroy Modify

Righteo: “use a Mom-friendly language”.

Pull a Tony Pierce

I don’t quite know who the hell your man may be. But the thing is: put on a disclaimer pretending that nothing you write is true. There you go, Weblogism’s new disclaimer: nothing in here is quite true. You probably noticed the sub-title “Wild imaginings”… There you go, son.

Go to the Source…

…And remove your site from Google. Who would be foolish enough to do that?! That’d be like cutting your arms off, wouldn’t it?

AIWA

Speak Up and Armin Vit pleased me today as they published an article about AIWA new logo.

sony_aiwa.gif

I was strolling along some day in the metro in Paris when I noticed this big ad with a fairly illegible logo. A bit stunned, I had to give a second look to finally spot “Aiwa”. My first thought was that it was pretty unfortunate that one couldn’t even read the name of the brand. And then I though that it was pretty ugly.

The following day, the topic came up in this conversation on one of my favourite forums, Typophile’s. The general opinion was somwhat close to mine. Some of Sony’s logos where shown by Jay Fraser showing the trend in Sony, ligature-wise. All in all, they can hardly be read at all. And yes, I thought it was AIVA.

Three conclusions for myself:


  • I’m not as tasteless as I first thought I was: the general opinion of Typophile’s as well as Speak Up’s experts seems to be mine
  • Still loooots to learn from people like Typophile’s members
  • Christmas is getting close, I’d better hurry up to buy presies, otherwise it’s going to be the usual rush to find anything at the last minute.

Tomorrow, Marquee All Over the Place

Mozilla supports <marquee>

I thought we were finished with the <marquee> tag. Not quite. As I am working on the re-design of a forum, I realised with horror that on the existing one, the news were displayed with a marquee tag. And that Mozilla supported it. It therefore means that such a page can be fully seen and appreciated, which is quite spooky, really.

After a bit of researching, I came across this. Soon, we’ll be allowed to prove our bad taste to the world and still validate.

Work Around (the Clock)

As I already pointed out yesterday the use of user style sheets to fight ad banners, I found on mozilla.weebeastie.net a way to disable this horrible spinning: 

marquee {
    -moz-binding: none;
    overflow: auto;
    display: block;
}

I also decided t’was time to finish with blinking as well. I then added: 

blink {
    text-decoration: none;
}

Now, the Oh Pointy Bird page looks more Andy Warhol-ish…

I’ve then fixed my personal problems, but this leaves me with a new one: how to do as ugly as the <marquee> tag with standard XHTML and JavaScript? I’m afraid I’m too lazy – and too respectful for the people who might decide to view any of my sites – to either write it or look for it… I guess I’ll wait until CSS3 is out… sigh

Off With Their Heads... Ads!

I had never been quite aware of how much a nuisance ads on the net could be. Of course, pop-up windows used to piss me off and then Mozilla came around and fixed that.

It wasn’t until today as I was chatting away with pierre that I realised how much I had grown accustomed to ad banners: they were part of the landscape, just still there and nothing to think of. Yet they were sometimes quite a pain in the ass, especially when they are big Flash animations or pictures right in the middle of the text. I know this sounds like I’m coming from another planet, discovering that only now. But if you look around you, people don’t bother: they simply accept the fact that ads are part of the Net.

Once again, CSS along with Mozilla appears to be the panacea in that matter. I found a user style sheet on the Web, placed it under: 

C:Documents and profiles&lt;myname&gt;Application Data&para;
MozillaProfilesdefault&lt;whatever&gt;.sltchrome

and when I restarted my browser, I experienced a totally new way of surfing: an ad-free one. And it’s only at that moment that one realises how irritating ads can be. As I’m a bit of an extremist, I even added the following: 

embed[classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"]

to the long list in order to hide Flash bits as well.

When you have a look at the user style sheet, it is only possible because Mozilla respects so much CSS standards. Thus, a selector such as *[href*"arandomdomain.net"]= only works in browsers which try to get close to the W3C recommandation.

Don’t Shoot the Ambulance, Verdana’s driving

I don’t quite understand why so many people keep complaining about Verdana. It has helped many a designer to create their design.

Down the Garden to Have A Fair Look

Since I keep reading rants about Verdana, I had to make sure: I went onto csszengarden.com to lead a survey in order to know what typefaces were used… csszengarden.com has become a somewhat good reference in web-designing when dealing with CSS (because apparently the anti-Verdana fight on this field). I browsed through the contributions, one by one, looked for the font used, and at what sizes. And there is no doubt. Verdana is still on the lead:

Use of fonts in CSS Zen Garden

Font name

Number of Uses

Verdana

21

Georgia

13

Arial

12

Times / Times New Roman

4*

Trebuchet MS

3

Tahoma

3

Geneva

1

Lucida Grande

1

Courier

1

​*(1 using browser default settings)

A good surprise, the designs made with Times in very tiny sizes do look good: see #41 and #45.

The survey in itself has been quite a laborious task: spotting the font used is damn easy; but then, when you want to find the sizes used, you sometimes to go through a whole lot before finding what you want. The “style” of size-setting range from “0.65em/1.3em” to “10px/1.4em” via “13px/140%”. Very often, I didn’t even bother finding the size, that was just too tedious a task.

What’s Wrong with Verdana, then?

The anti-Verdana are right: it’s not available on every system. It is very often not present on Linux platforms and the replacement font is in majority Arial. The problem is that a 75%-reduced Verdana looks fine. An Arial doesn’t.

The real problem, then, really is the size. I found some time ago a good article about that in The Noodle Incident, from which I excerpted this below:

“So I want two things from a text sizing method: that it present my choice

across the main browsers, but still be resizeable to respect people’s needs

and different hardware.”

I think alike.

A Linux user is quite entitled to complain to see tiny characters. But somehow, the Web designer chose some fonts – because it suited his website design, main audience, etc. As far as he’s concerned, his task is to provide ways to resize the size of the text if the reader feels the need to increase it.

The Linux user (let’s carry on with this example) has then several ways to work around this issue:

  • find Verdana somewhere;
  • write a user stylesheet which will replace the designer’s one (just about its role: overriding the designer’s choices);
  • resize the text.

I know this sounds terribly against accessible sites. The thing is the font problem is a never-ending story. Unless a universal font is created, both easy to read in small sizes and pleasing to the eye, no proper solution can be found but using Arial or Helvetica. But you know what? I don’t have Helvetica on my computer. That being said, Microsoft tried to create those fonts: they’re called Verdana and Georgia (by Matthew Carter & Tom Rickner). I can’t think of any similar success.

What’s Wrong with Arial, then?

For the same x-height, everything (Typeset in Arial).


For the same x-height, everything (Typeset in Verdana).

There’s no need to be an expert to say that Verdana in the example above is much more legible than Arial because it’s wider for roughly the same x-height (l’œil, in French). By the way, it would have been just about the right place to use font-size-adjust, wouldn’t it?

Non-breakable Space Story

I’m quite fond of this new fashion, that is, displaying the language of a page after the link. This can be done by using the content property generating, well, err… content in that manner: 


a[hreflang]:after {
content:" ["attr(hreflang)"]";
}

What I was a bit frustrated by was that this text between brackets was sometimes sent back to a new line, which is, IMVHO, a bit of a disgrace, typographically speaking – or maybe it’s just another French national sport, caring for the line breaks. English-speaking people don’t even bother thinking of where to hyphen a word.

Browsing through the W3C recommandation, I found out that you were allowed to put Unicode-coded escape sequences. That just suited my needs; my code looks now something like: 


a[hreflang]:after {
content:"A0["attr(hreflang)"]";
}

As far as I can see, it works just fine. With Mozilla, that is.

Libération’s New Layout

The French paper Libération changed its layout on October 13th. I had not had the occasion to take a look at it, but on Friday, I just couldn’t resist: I had to buy it just to see…

Well, first thought, “here we go, another paper which tried to get a trendy look, website-like”, which, in my eyes, is a somewhat negative thought. Sans-serif fonts have invaded the pages (a bit too much for my humble tastes), Minion has been given up (I really love the ‘Q’, ‘j’ and ‘y’ in this typeface) and replaced by something thicker with an ugly ‘3’ and lots of fantasy typefaces. I am also going to miss Matrix Script which I had got used to…

3d86f14d53661ec8a1b7abcad5e38bd8.png

Then I saw the headers and sighed… Le Monde has no reason to worry yet. The whole thingy looks like it’s been done to please the young reader – quite okay with me, except that it seems to me that I’m not in the target – and to keep an eye on the Internet. Well, just a slight detail: there’s no hyper-text link in a paper… But, hey, they managed to insert a review for a porn on DVD.

One good thing, though, the Gotham font, by the Hoefler Type Foundry, looks quite good in any size, especially the Gotham Condensed Book and Medium characters.

The Scribe and the Longhorn

Microsoft is really teasing us with Longhorn and I am really getting impatient. I must say I was not really enthiusastic about Microsoft products so far, influenced by hearsay as well as the “Big Willy” position of MS. That being said, having worked with .Net for quite a while, I think it’s getting in the right direction. I’ve worked for quite a while with Java and I think I’m rather objective when I write such a thing. Of course, there are some drawbacks which can be very painful, but it really gets easy to have things up and running.

Anyway, back to the point, Longhorn has thought of typography. It provides through XAML in Avalon elements to support “quality typographic presentation to the user”. The Typography class gathers properties to provide typographic features, such as StandardLigatures.

The whole lot is based on OpenType, developed jointly by Adobe and MS in a cross-platform perspective – OpenType fonts can be used on Mac. It is based on Unicode, thus providing a greater support for world’s languages and ligatures and real small-caps.

With such a support, the question is: will it be used in its full strength? I cannot imagine developers, who are not even aware of the existence of ligatures in this world, getting worried about ligatures or small-caps. They are the ones today who don’t even see there’s something wrong with a quote such as “ ‘ ”.

On the Edge, Staring at the Bottom

People now begin to stare at each other with suspicion and every strange move is immediately interpreted: the figure has just been dropped as a bombshell, confirming all the rumours which were running wildly through the halls. The grapevine has once again proved its strength and accuracy.

  1. Kind of figures you hear everyday on the news which tended to sound as remote and boring as a war on the other side of the planet. But when you start to consider you might be the 1 in 171, you start to wonder. And to shake.

Next, names will appear on a sheet of paper, or at the top of a somewhat brief email. People will start receive their letter thanking them for their valuable contribution (“Well done, but better do it elsewhere, now, you’d be so kind”) and the lengthy process of finding a new job will begin rather soon.

The question now? Well… Who?