Re: Standards Freshness

At 9:32 -0700 7/18/02, Joseph McLean wrote:

>In seeking to modernise my development knowledge, I'll be reading a bunch
>of XHTML and CSS books over the summer.  I noticed that a good deal of
>these books (like Eric Meyer's impressive "Cascading Style Sheets: The
>Definitive Guide") are a few years old, which seems to be at odds with my
>efforts to get *really* up to date.

    Glad you liked the book!  I hope my new tome[1] is as welcome, 
even though it is targeted at a very different audience.  Sorry it's 
taken me so long to respond to your post, but travel and a massive 
e-mail backlog prevented me from looking at this list's folder until 
this morning.
    I wanted to address the point you raise from my personal point of 
view, in the hopes it helps illuminate a small corner of the whole 
standards situation.  Even though CSS:TDG came out in spring 2000 
(just over two years ago), I've also fretted a bit about whether the 
book has passed its "use-by" date.  So why hasn't it been updated?
    The problem is that expanding the book to cover CSS2, as I would 
pretty obviously have to do, means I'd have to write a lot of "this 
is how things should work, but no browser gets this right yet" or 
"only one browser will handle this, the rest will gack up a 
hairball."  In a book like CSS:TDG[2], which is concerned as much 
with theory as practice, I vastly prefer to cover theory that can 
actually be put into practice. Who wants to read a 20-page chapter on 
generated content when it isn't fully supported by any known 
browser[3]?  We already have the CSS2 specification for that, and it 
doesn't cost USD$34.99 plus tax.
    That's a big factor in deciding when a second edition might hit 
the shelves. The release of IE6/Win actually delayed this process, 
because it added so little in the way of new and correct CSS support. 
Yes, it added "standards" mode, which backfilled a number of bugs, 
and that's important.  But almost nothing in the way of support for 
new CSS2 stuff was added.
    So there's an unfortunate chicken-and-egg cycle here.  Until 
browsers move support forward, I'm less likely to write about using 
CSS2-- but unless authors like me write about CSS2 and push authors 
to try it out, there is a lot less incentive for browsers to expand 
their CSS support.  I think this sort of dilemma is an obstacle for 
almost any standard, really; I'm just speaking from the realm I know 
best.
    Perhaps there is room for evangelizing authors to push forward 
with second, third, and later editions of their books on standards. 
You don't have to in the case of CSS:TDG, because I talked it over 
recently with my editor at O'Reilly and we're tentatively planning 
for a summer 2003 publication.  Which points up another problem: the 
lag time that print publishing inevitably enforces.  Balancing the 
timing of a book's publication against expected software releases, 
and the features they may have, can be incredibly tricky.  For 
example, I hope that by the time CSS:TDGv2 hits shelved, IE7/Win will 
be out.  But I have no idea at all what it may or may not support in 
CSS, let alone any other standard.  I can hope that it will at least 
support what IE6/Win does, but can I count on that?  No.  So that's 
another area to consider.  Is there sense in an effort to have 
browser companies disclose their standards-support plans far enough 
in advance for authors to make sensible writing plans?   Should it be 
a public disclosure, or an NDA-style program?  And so on.
    I don't pretend that these are the best ideas, or even that 
they're particularly good.  They're just what popped into my head as 
I typed.  But the issues that authors face are important, if it's 
judged important that mass-market books be timely, accurate, and 
practical enough to excite readers rather than frustrate them.


[1] <http://www.ericmeyeroncss.com/>
[2] On a personal note, I feel (although others might disagree) that 
CSS:TDG is actually MORE relevant today than when it was published, 
because CSS1 is very well and widely supported now.  When I wrote the 
book, even CSS1 support was kind of dodgy.  Today, it's behind the 
theory curve but very likely at its practical peak.
[3] The best generated-content support I've seen is in Opera 6 for 
Windows, but even it has bugs.

--
Eric A. Meyer  (eric@meyerweb.com)  http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/
Author, "Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide,"
  "Eric Meyer on CSS," "CSS 2.0 Programmer's Reference," and more
   http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/books/

Received on Wednesday, 31 July 2002 10:48:33 UTC