CSS Playground

I've been commenting on CSS specifications and testing implementations of CSS since the summer of 1998. I became involved in work on one implementation, Mozilla, soon afterwards, although I have maintained an interest in CSS in general (although with gradually less time to spend on it). I'm currently an invited expert to the CSS Working Group.

Writing

I'm working on a guide to user stylesheets that discusses some of the issues relating to good style in user and author stylesheets.

I have also written the following:

• Notes on an alternate stylesheet selection user interface: some rather disorganized and incomplete notes that are partially for Mozilla, but partly more general. (May 1999)
• Why's all that text on Microsoft web pages so tiny and why does it change so much when I change the font size? (May 1999)
• Notes on suggesting link styles (September/October 1999)
• Notes on stylesheet linking (September 1999)
• David's inline box model, an explanation of and a proposal for clarification and modification to the CSS2 inline box model (January 2000)
• Vector Graphics in CSS (see announcement)

The following are a few selected mailing-list messages that I think are important:

• Re: CSS vs XSL, what is going on (www-style/xsl-list, June 1999)
• On arbitrary XML tagsets (standards, December 1999)
• per-site user stylesheet rules (describing what's implemented in Mozilla)

Test Pages

I have written lots of test pages! The results table is probably the most interesting way to look at them. I have also contributed some tests to the W3C's CSS Test Suite and to the Web Standards Project's CSS reviews.

I have written up some lists of bugs in some browsers based on the W3C's CSS Test suite and other tests.

Fonts

I've written some notes on font sizes to explain the problems resulting from different definitions of font size. The results from my aspect ratio testing have an explanation of some similar problems. (My newsgroup post on 1999-10-09 may help to explain some of these problems from the beginning.)

My aspect ratio tester uses DOM Level 2 (although the first version may use some proprietary extensions - the spec is not yet finalized so it's not clear whether they'll be in it). It has two forms:

• version that may be compliant, but works on MSIE5 and on Mozilla
• definitely compliant version, Mozilla only

Miscellaneous

I use browser-sniffing to serve different CSS to different browsers. This technique has some problems with proxies. I have a sample sheet of server-parsed CSS, which is heavily based on Todd Fahrner's version, but with some improvements.

• Timing Function Graphs

(Back to David Baron)

LDB, dbaron@dbaron.org, 1999-05-01