We made an important discovery today which will help us simplify the maintenance and version control of the style sheets for Wired News. It has to do with importing additional CSS files and referencing images from within any CSS file. Since I’m the original and final author of the CSS files, I like to keep a local working version of the design prototypes on my laptop. I was originally referencing URIs in the CSS using absolute paths, relative to the web server root — ie: url("/wired/images/logo.gif"). For the live site, we’ll be hosting both images and CSS files on Akamai servers, which obviously means I won’t be able to keep the same URI references in each of the CSS files. continued

It’s worthwhile mentioning that a lot of the initial research on multi-column CSS layout for the Wired News redesign was done while studying examples from Eric Costello’s CSS Layout Techniques at glish.com, as well as Rob Chandanais’ Layout Reservoir at bluerobot.com. I started by relying on CSS2’s float property to position boxes next to each other. I ended up switching to absolute positioning for the left and right columns. The switch was made for two reasons:

• Buggy browser implementations of float — Use of float still seems to be inconsistent in some browsers. This is especially true when dealing with widths of children that, when totalled, come close to their parent’s width. The problem with float is that if the width of the parent element is ever less than the total combined width of the child elements, even just so slightly, one of the floated boxes will actually get pushed to the bottom of another floated box, instead of appearing beside it. This is actually correct behavior according to the CSS specification. However, when one of the columns bounces back and forth between two entirely different positions as the browser is being resized, it appears to be buggy behavior. Use of absolute positioning avoids that problem. But it does introduce another issue, where the columns can end up overlapping at extremely small browser window widths. A sacrifice I’m willing to live with for a guarantee that all 3 columns will always start at the same vertical position.
• Order of data in the markup — To avoid multiple headaches dealing with the inconsistencies of older/smaller browsers, I’m using the @import directive to hide styles from browsers which can’t adequately render them. For Wired News, I wanted the center (Main) column, containing the most important content, to be rendered first in the HTML markup, followed by the Left and Right columns. This would ensure the Main column is rendered first in browsers that get the unstyled content. With the float approach, either the left or right column would always have to come first.

I should mention here one of the major reasons I’ve become obsessed with Web standards and CSS. My current project (as Design Director of Wired) is a complete redesign of Wired News. See a screenshot of the before state [.gif, 35.7 KB] from Feb. 2002. This WN has been sorely stagnate for over two years, and has been long overdue for a major facelift. Wired News has finally gained a priority status from Lycos, which means they can actually justify assigning me as a resource for the redesign. continued

Duly noted that the second broadcast for Leno has already begun on NBC means I didn’t even beat Carson and his Last Call to bed tonight.

Eric Meyer’s latest book, Eric Meyer on CSS, Mastering the Language of Web Design, just arrived from Amazon yesterday. I’ve already skimmed through the first three chapters. Although it seems I’ve already gleaned much of this information elsewhere, I’ve still learned new tricks or concepts in the first few projects. Eric’s familiar and easy to understand style of writing make this an enjoyable project-based book to work through. continued