In This Issue...

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Introduction

Last week was a pretty traumatic time for me. A mid-night break-in at my apartment early Tuesday morning (with me snug in bed!) had me talking to the police and insurance people for the rest of the week.

With my digital camera and MP3 player among the items taken, I've been a bit gadget-deprived this week. Thankfully, I have good insurance, so not only will the items be replaced, they'll be replaced with newer, better gadgets!

Meanwhile, SitePoint's blogs have really taken off! With recent posts on Flash decompilers, line endings in JavaScript, XML in PHP 5 Beta 4, GUIs for configuring open source servers, Python Server Pages, stateful Web Services, and stripping whitespace in ColdFusion output, there's something of interest to just about any Web developer! If you haven't already, dive into our blogs and see what you've been missing!

Happy reading!

Kevin Yank
techtimes@sitepoint.com
Editor, The SitePoint Tech Times

Editorial

CSS 2.1 -- A Step Backwards?

At a glance, the newly-finalized CSS 2.1 Candidate Recommendation may not seem like it holds much value for developers. After all, most of the significant changes are features that have been removed!

Granted, there are a few new additions. The color name orange is now part of the official specification, and the inline block display type (display: inline-block) supported by Internet Explorer is now standard, as is the progress mouse pointer (cursor: progress).

But the bulk of the changes mark the removal of CSS 2.0 features:

• compact boxes (display: compact), which should automatically sit in the left margin of the following block if they will fit there
• left- or right-side table captions (caption-side: left or right), which should wrap the caption text into a little box to the left or right of a table
• table cell text alignment to a string (text-align: <string> ), which should allow you to align a set of numbers in a table column such that their decimal points line up
• markers (display: marker), which should make more advanced list types and various before- and after-paragraph effects (like stylized quotation marks) possible
• various paged media properties, including page size, crop marks, and named page types, which should offer greater flexibility in printed output
• font density selection (font-stretch: condensed), which should let you select condensed or expanded variations in a font family
• font size adjustment (font-size-adjust: <number>), which should let you compensate for fonts that look especially big or small at any given font size
• text drop shadows (text-shadow: black 0 0 5px), which should make stylish shadow effects possible

I have to admit that, at first, I was disappointed to see these features "dropped". Having recently compiled the CSS2 reference for HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS, I was excited about the prospect of many of these features making an appearance in future browsers! Is the W3C now saying that these features were unworthy of consideration for future development?

As it turns out, those of you who feel this way have nothing to worry about. Allow me to explain...

The purpose of CSS 2.1 is to provide a "snapshot" of CSS as it is currently implemented in modern browsers. On the other hand, when CSS2 was published waaay back in 1998, it was intended to identify the features that should be implemented. With CSS3 nearing completion, it's time for CSS2 to become a statement of "how things are", to allow the new specifications to take on the role of explaining "how things should be".

With that in mind, it's no surprise that most of the features listed above, which have been removed from CSS 2.1, remain in the current working drafts and candidate recommendations for CSS3. In some cases, they remain largely unchanged from their CSS2 equivalents (e.g. text-shadow); in others, they have been reworked in order to be more useful and/or likely to be implemented (e.g. markers).

So, rather than a concession to slowing the innovation of Web rendering technology, CSS 2.1 represents a changing of the guard. The W3C recognizes that CSS2 has served its purpose in fuelling browser development, and it's time for the next generation specifications that make up CSS3 to take over. Now might be a good time to explore them yourself!

PHP5 Is Just Around The Corner...
But Object Oriented PHP Is Here Today!

Quick Tip

A Novel Use for <meta> Refresh

Ever need to edit a Web page on one computer and preview it on another? The refresh <meta> tag could save you a lot of grief!

Here at SitePoint, we spend a lot of time testing our new page designs (which are mostly CSS-based) on different browsers and platforms. While most of this testing can be done on a single Windows machine, Macintosh-specific browsers like Safari and Internet Explorer for Macintosh require a separate machine.

As any designer who has embraced CSS will tell you, modern Web design involves a lot of trial and error--especially when it comes to cross-browser testing. When you're testing tweaks on a separate machine, having to move to the testing machine to click 'Refresh' for every little change can become maddening!

A cute solution we like to use here at SitePoint HQ (where our Mac OS X testing machine sits in the corner of the room) is to add a refresh <meta> tag to the page while we're working on it. We can then load the page in the browser just once and have it periodically refresh to reflect the changes we've made on our development machine.

Here's a line that can be added to the <head> tag of any HTML page, which will cause it to refresh every 5 seconds:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5" />

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