thoughts posts

Do not feed evil, or it will surely grow.

He who lives by the sword shall see violence as the solution to all ills.

Pure or complete freedom is an impossible theoretical. There will always be constraints on a persons activities. Lack of constraints and control is essentially what freedom is. One is not free if one is constrained. And removing certain constraints for one person can allow them to constrain another.

After reading through a few more CSS wishlists, such as Chris Coyier's and Ahmad Shadeed's, I have come up with some more wishes I have for CSS, in addition to those I brought up in my recent CSS Wishlist post.

After reading Eric Meyer's and Dave Rupert's recent CSS Wishlist, I decided to make my own. Working with CSS for many years, I have come across many things I'd like to see. Many have come about or improved since then, but there are still things I come across that I'd like to see. I agree with many of Eric and Dave's items, and put them in my own list if I had more to say about them or especially want them. Here is the list of what I could come up with:

I reduced my political and philosophical postings since combining my personal and professional blogs, but this election season and other recent events have reminded me of the importance of doing something individually towards my beliefs and interests and goals. Continue reading post "#3089"

we are free up until we reach the edge of our cages

Everything has a cost. Everything we have, do, don't. Continue reading post "#2399"

Some years back, I saw a hyena at the Miami Zoo running alone in circles around its fenced in area. Continue reading post "#2160"

Part of me believes that everyone is a super-hero in the right circumstances.

Having something requires giving something else up

Listening to some music, I thought it quite powerful, that it presented some imp…

I am definitely a proponent of open source / free software and other things. I don't mind paying a fair price for things that I like and that benefit me: It's one way for me to speak my preferences to the creators, and it provides them a livelihood and incentive to continue. However, in a way, for both developers and society, open source is all we truly have, available to all to use and evolve. I think this is similarly true for non-code things as it is for code, and the same reasons and advantages can apply, even if the tools aren't developed to the same degree.

The web industry is filled with open source and free sharing of ideas, methods, and practices. I use open source projects and freely shared knowledge every day to do my job, to solve problems, to improve my work, and to have a starting point that includes work that has already been done and improved upon by others. This job would be a lot harder without open source and shared knowledge, and the results, the countless websites across the world, would be far worse without it.

CSS provides the "content" property for inserting content into documents, usually before or after elements. This can be bad if the content inserted is not strictly for presentational purposes, but when it is, it can be a very useful tool for changing a sites appearance with only CSS.

The property can be used to insert strings, images, even counters. Unfortunately, DOM elements cannot be inserted. Why would you want to insert DOM elements? Doesn't that go against the separation of content and presentation even further than the "content" property already allowed?

Ideally, in marking up a document, one should not need to consider presentation at all, only the proper elements to stick a given block of content into. The CSS would be created separately and form those elements into any appearance desired. There are a lot of reasons this can't currently be done, including sort order and hierarchy. Another is the limit of what is available to be styled in the HTML document.