Day: May 15, 2012

Update (5/29/2012): Upon working further with the project that formed the basis of this post, I discovered that my solution did not work, or at least, no longer worked. It’s not uncommon as I get deeper into a project with a large CSS file that there are subtle, inadvertent effects of the various CSS properties that get added along the way. Looking back now, I can’t determine for sure whether my solution did once work with the simpler version of the site, and something else I added later counteracted it, or if I was just too eager about a solution to realize it never quite worked in the first place. As a result, I had considered deleting this post entirely, but I have decided to leave it live, to further the discussion of the topic, or at the very least to serve as a monument to my challenges.

WebKit, the rendering engine “under the hood” in both Safari and Chrome, has a known issue handling the CSS letter-spacing property at certain small increments, and at certain font sizes.

Specifically, if defining letter-spacing in increments smaller than 1px or 0.1em, it seems to just ignore the property altogether… except at larger-than-default sizes.

I typically use em or % these days to define text sizes in CSS. So in my situation, I’ve found that my letter-spacing: 0.05em works if I also specify font-size: 125% (or larger), but if I have font-size set to 100% or less, the letter-spacing gets ignored.

Typically, after loading reset.css, I set a baseline font size for the document with body { font-size: 100%; } (or some size… actually it’s usually 80% but these days I’ve been leaning towards larger type).

I decided to play around with this a bit to see if I could resolve the letter-spacing issue, and I found a nice, easy solution that works at least for the particular site I’m currently testing it on. Your experience may vary, depending on how your HTML is structured and how complex your design is.

Here’s the solution:

body {
  font-size: 125%;
  letter-spacing: 0.05em;
  line-height: 1.3em;
}

body>* {
  font-size: 85%;
  line-height: 1.3em;
}

You may want to adjust the exact values of font-size to suit your needs. (And, yes, I’m aware that mathematically 125% and 85% don’t cancel each other out, but they’re close enough for my purposes.) It’s important to include the line-height property in body>* to define your target line height; otherwise your lines will be too far apart. Set it to whatever your ideal value is. (I usually prefer line-height: 1.5em personally, but for larger type, as on the site I’m currently working on, it gets too spaced-out.)

So what’s going on here? Well, strangely, it seems WebKit can actually render smaller type with line-spacing less than 1px or 0.1em just fine, but it won’t unless somewhere in the “cascade” the type has been defined as being a certain amount larger than 100%. I don’t get it, but until the bug (which it seems clearly to be after all of this) gets fixed, at least this seems to be a reasonably clean workaround.

It’s very important that you use body>* and not just body *. If you don’t know why, well… try it out and see. (The upshot: we’re applying a uniform scaling-down across the board on all elements directly under body, which is practically the same as just defining our target font size directly on body itself, but with the benefit of working around the letter-spacing bug.)

Note: I have only tested this using em as the unit of measure for letter-spacing. I’m aware of the issue with px as well, but I’m not sure this solution will work for that. But… really… just use em instead!

Aside from the fact that both topics would put the average blog reader to sleep before the end of the first…

OK, now that they’re asleep, let’s talk. Throughout most of my career, open source software and Microsoft’s (or, really, any software behemoth’s) enterprise “solutions” have seemed diametrically opposed. But the more I think about the situation, I begin to find some startling similarities, at least in their implementation (and reasons for said implementation), if not in their actual structure and licensing.

If you’re the one person (besides me) who’s spent any significant amount of time reading this blog, you probably know two things: 1) I don’t like Microsoft, and 2) I don’t like Drupal. So these are the objects of my scorn in today’s post as well, although the problems I’m describing can be generalized, I think, to the broader sectors of the software industry that they represent.

When I worked in the corporate world, I resented Microsoft’s dominance across the board from operating systems to desktop software to enterprise systems. It just seemed that most of their tools weren’t really that good, and eventually I began to realize that the reason they were successful was that Microsoft’s customers were not the end users, but rather the IT managers who made purchasing decisions. These decisions were largely based on their own knowledge and experience with Microsoft’s software (to the detriment of other, possibly superior options), but also (I believe cynically) to preserve their own jobs and those of their staffs. Microsoft’s systems require(d?) constant maintenance and support. Not only did this mean bigger IT staffs on the corporate payroll, but it meant lots of highly paid “consulting” firms whose sole job was to promote and then support the sales and implementation of Microsoft products.

In the indie developer world, where I now reside, the culture and software platforms are different, but perhaps not as different as they seem. Apple’s computers dominate the desktops in small studios, and the tabletops in coffeehouses where freelancers can frequently be spotted hunched over their MacBooks hard at work while sipping lattes and meeting (usually a little too loudly) with clients. And open source software dominates at the server level.

But just like Microsoft’s platforms, I think most open source software just isn’t really very good. And the problem, once again, is the customer (or… well… whatever you call the person who makes the decisions when selecting a free product). It seems that the end user experience is rarely given much priority when most open source software is being designed and developed. Part of the problem is a lack of direct contact between the development teams and those end users (or, to be honest, even between the geographically scattered members of the development teams themselves). Devs don’t really know what end users want or need. They only know what they want or need, along with what’s been submitted to their bug trackers.

It’s not that these devs are bad people, or bad at what they do. There’s just a disconnect between coder and user, and as a result the goal of building good software isn’t met.

So, why do independent developers still use tools that are not really the best for their clients? Again, cynically, I wonder sometimes if job security isn’t a factor. It’s a lot easier to build something that works, but that requires indefinite, ongoing attention and support, than to build something that is flawless, that you can hand off to your client and never touch again. It’s easier… and it provides built-in job security.

Now, I’m not perfect, and I’m not above all of this. There is no such thing as flawless software, and I have ongoing support contracts with some of my bigger clients. But I’m proud to say that’s mostly because I’m constantly building new sites for them, or building functional enhancements onto the sites they already have, rather than doing endless bug fixes and technical support because the tools I’ve sold them are too confusing or simply don’t work right. Sure, the bug fixes and tech support do happen. But the tools — primarily WordPress and cms34, my own CMS — are built much more with the end user in mind, and have managed to avoid the pitfalls that mean a guaranteed job for me at the expense of a mediocre user experience for my clients.

That’s harder, and riskier. But it’s better. I’m delivering a higher quality product to the clients, and I’m keeping my own work interesting and moving forward.