please stand by. My template stopped working after upgrading to WP 2.1, and I’m using it as an excuse to redesign the template. Again. Because I decided I hated it. Again. Sigh. Anyway, please stand by.

that should not surprise you. I’m an American, and we as a breed tend to praise humility and look down on arrogance. Pretension, though, is a hot-button issue for me, something that never fails to get me riled up and ready to blog a rant. Pretension can be found anywhere, but nowhere is it so prevalent as in the art world, a planet peopled almost entirely by pretentious poseurs, snooty hangers-on, and long-winded pontificators, along with a select few of genuine talent.

And never, never, have I seen such a display of pretension like the one in this week’s TNR cover story (subscription required), an article bemoaning how crass commercialism and pop culture have made the art world lose its collective mind. I should have known I was in for trouble when the author (Jed Perl) said, in the third paragraph:

The people who are buying and selling the most highly priced contemporary art right now–think of them as the laissez-faire aesthetes–believe that any experience that anyone can have with a work of art is equal to any other. They imagine that the most desirable work of art is the one that inspires a range of absolutely divergent meanings and impressions almost simultaneously.

[...]

The paintings by Currin and Yuskavage that are now going for hundreds of thousands of dollars are engineered for an audience that believes that a work of art can satisfy radically disparate and even contradictory attitudes and appetites, and satisfy them consecutively or concurrently– it hardly matters. A painting is simply what everybody or anybody says it is, what everybody or anybody wishes it to be.

with palpable outrage. As if art is anything but in the eye of the beholder. Now, let it be known that I have never been a fan of modern art: I think of Pollock’s work as so many paint smears, and I’m not even going to start on giant rubber conveyor belts cut into strips and then arranged at the curator’s whim at every museum or gallery stop, or 6′ by 8′ rooms with an inch of dirt on the floor. Nevertheless, I am willing to respect, as much as I might not like it, that in someone’s eyes, somewhere, these pieces resonate with something, and can therefore be called art. OK, not the latter two, because to me they are just examples of those pretentious poseurs at work, but I can accept that Jackson Pollock was an artist, and a much-loved one.

If the article started out snooty, it just went downhill from there. Filled with obscure artist name-dropping, unnecessarily large words (including dialectical, incunabula, and painterly—an immediate sign that this discussion about art is going to be meaningless), and increasingly incomprehensible sentences, it was an exercise in just the sort of arrogant, New-York-City-is-the-center-of-the-world attitude that sets my teeth on edge. Here’s how the slide into hell began:

It hardly matters that what Currin doesn’t know about figure painting would fill volumes, since his collectors know even less, if that is possible. (What precisely is it that Currin doesn’t know? For starters, he does not understand that volume in representational painting can be–and to some degree, must be–generated through the power of contour as a two-dimensional expression of three-dimensional experience.)

Huh? What does that even mean? It took me three tries to even get through that last sentence, and another few to get to the point where I thought I understood what he was trying to say. I think. I’m feeling pretty bad by this point—not even halfway through the article. But then, to add insult to injury, Jed says:

One of the strange facts of our time is that although Picasso and Mondrian and Pollock are household names, the middle-class public has never entirely accepted modern art, never fully embraced its mystery and its magic. Even in the face of this deep distrust, however, the public has assimilated the old bohemian belief in a community of artists as a sort of freely established aristocracy, perhaps seeing here another version of the “democracy of access.”

So now I’m a middle-class philistine, incapable of understanding high art but nevertheless possessing a deep and unshakable belief in the inherent superiority of a community of artists? I don’t think so, buddy boy.

But let’s continue on. From here on, the article degenerates into more name-dropping and waxing poetic about modern art:

On West 22nd Street, the panels were black and white, and I was especially taken with two vertical works in which the tension between a single curved edge and a single angled edge yielded visual music, as if two strings had been plucked to create two sonorous sounds.

and:

Still, in these dark times you could receive an education if you walked from Freud’s show of figure paintings over to Currin’s folly a few blocks south. Freud’s manner of modeling the figure with an encrusted pileup of paint may finally be judged a misunderstanding of modernism; his celebration of the painted surface, while probably meant to clarify representational structures in ways we know from the work of Soutine and Braque, amounts to little more than a series of angsty decorative flourishes. But Currin understands so little about pictorial conventions, whether Old Master or high modern, that you cannot even begin to speak about his work in terms of a misunderstanding of modernism.

Or how about this?

This fall, Thornton Willis, a veteran painter, showed some wonderfully persuasive abstractions at Elizabeth Harris, comminglings of triangular forms, neither exactly crystalline nor exactly opaque, that suggest an emotional terrain at once rambunctious and saturnine.

Degenerates, in fact, into a morass of meaningless drivel. Think he’s done? Not by a long shot. He rambles some more, and then teases us with some of his actual point, viz:

And why on earth shouldn’t it be possible to enjoy The Sopranos and Sex and the City, which we take in with thousands of other people, and also the new work of an abstract painter that may be known to no more than a hundred? The trouble starts when people begin to imagine that all these experiences are equal.

[...]

The biggest danger currently faced by people who love painting and sculpture is this unitary view of culture, which in practice amounts to the view that all culture is, or should be, popular culture.

As unbelievably arrogant as that is, it is at least germane to the gist of the article, which is more than I can say about at least 50% of its text. But we can’t have that, so it’s back to the rambling for a while, until:

I am as tired as the next person of the high culture versus popular culture debates that obsessed intellectuals for much of a century.

Oh, really, Jed? You’ve been prosing on for 5 pages, but you’re tired of the high culture vs. pop culture debate? Not as tired as I am.

There was a deep vein of self-congratulation that ran through those discussions, in which the literati showed off their in-depth knowledge of the other side of the tracks.

He says, deadpan. Now, that’s ironic. As ironic as a bunch of people who don’t know the meaning of the word nevertheless dropping it into conversation at every opportunity, or, indeed, writing songs about it.

Sorry. Digression. Back to the battle, eh? Actually, let’s not. It’s just a few hundred more words of rambling, incredible arrogance. Now let’s get to my point. What I got out of this article was that (a) John Currin sucks (and really, he does), and (b) Jed Perl is a prosy bore who is so impressed with the breadth of his own vocabulary that he had to spend 6 pages sharing that fact with the world. Was it such a slow news week that TNR had to devote 6 pages of about 30, a full 20% of their issue to this, this…crap? There wasn’t anything more important to write about, like, say, the late-breaking developments on the leftovers growing mold in my fridge? Jesus.

The Illusionist: 3 stars.

This is a low 3. It would have been a high one (Well, three. Oh, you know what I mean), except for the last 5 minutes. I quite liked the movie up until then, but they had to go and ruin it by explaining the big a-ha down to the last detail. I cannot begin to explain to you how much I hate having every last thing spelled out to me, especially in movies like this. In fact, I found that all the little “clues” they showed throughout the movie had been a bit heavy-handed, and the cherry on top of that sundae of obviousness was the detailed explanation of the caper at the end—you know the drill; dramatic music, flashback montage, guy having the a-ha standing in slack-jawed amazement. In fact, there hasn’t been a movie since The Usual Suspects that has been as smart, as subtle, or done that ending montage nearly as well. That said, The Illusionist was well-acted and had a high production value, so it wasn’t a total loss.

By contrast, The Prestige (also a low 3, also well-acted), the other magician movie of 2006, had a different problem. There were so many plot twists, double-crosses and triple-crosses that, by the time the big a-ha rolled around, you didn’t care anymore.

First, let me make my excuses. As I have said before, I’m self-taught on all this web development stuff, so what I know is usually what I have had a need to use. Which means that sometimes I don’t discover features of the standards that would have been useful to me until pretty late in the game. And that is exactly what happened to me a few weeks ago with the inline-block display property.

Usually when I needed to give an inline element dimension and margins, I would give it a block display and float it to ensure shrink-wrapping of the content. But adding the float would bring its own host of issues to deal with, especially in IE, meaning that doing so was always a headache. So when I discovered the answer to my problems, in the form of the inline-block property—it allows you to give dimension to an inline element as if it was a block element, but it still lays out, and shrinkwraps, as an inline element would—I was ecstatic, for all of the few minutes it took me to discover that Firefox ≤2 doesn’t support inline-block.

So I did some searching, and all I could find on the topic were a few blog posts bemoaning the lack of support, or newsgroup posts asking for help on the subject. Then I came across a potential solution: the proprietary -moz-inline-block property, which was seen by Firefox and ignored by all other browsers. So I tried it, et voilà…it still didn’t work. Firefox seemed to be treating it as a block property; that is, it was forcing a line break afterward. Which didn’t solve my problem at all. After some more searching, I found that I wasn’t the only one having that problem. Back to square one.

More searching. Then I found what I thought was it: the -moz-inline-box property, which is actually supposed to behave like inline-block^*, even though -moz-inline-block, which has the same name as the property I want, doesn’t. Huh?

Nevertheless, I tried it, and it worked. But, and by this point you won’t be surprised, in only one case^**. The rest of the time, it made my content disappear entirely, or didn’t have the right dimensions, even though I had given those elements fixed widths in my stylesheet. Conclusion: Firefox’s support of inline-block is minimal, buggy at best. It’s best to act as if the property is not available at all.

So what did I do to solve the problem? Pretty much what I had been doing before. I left the element displays as inline-block (for Safari and IE, which support the property) and -moz-inline-block (for Firefox), but added float: left to make it all lay out properly. After all that, I had gotten precisely nowhere. Yeesh.

Despair not, though, gentle reader. Apparently there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

^* In most cases. As I found out today.

^** My theory on this is that -moz-inline-box will only work on elements with both a fixed height and width. Making it kind of useless in the long run.

Update 2008-07-03 13:04—Firefox 3, as I’m sure you know by know, supports inline-block, so the good news is that you only have to worry about your Firefox 2 users.

Tony Takitani: 3 stars.

This, it should be mentioned, is a high 3. This movie, based on the story of the same name by Haruki Murakami, is as lyrical, melancholy, contemplative and detached as Murakami’s prose. It is rare for a movie based on a book or short story to so perfectly capture the essence of the author’s writing, but this one does it admirably. It was beautifully shot, but so contemplative at times that it made me fall asleep, though only briefly. Recommended.

Making your site work in IE
So there you are, with a good understanding of the standards, armed with some great CSS UI conveniences, and a snazzy prototype. But then you fire it up in Internet Explorer 6 for Windows, and it all goes to hell. You’ve got unnecessary horizontal scroll bars, magically disappearing and reappearing content, and list bullets where you don’t want them. Mysterious extra right and left padding, odd positioning, and static content that jumps when you hover on a nearby link. Problems galore, and you’re ready to tear your hair out. (My colleagues say that they know when I’m working with IE because I start swearing at my computer.) It’s inevitable, really.

But cling to hope, gentle reader, because you’re not the first, and, I am confident in saying, not the last to have these problems. In fact, most of the problems you will encounter have already been found—and solved. But before I get to that, let’s discuss the problem of how to hack your CSS to work in IE such that it’ll degrade gracefully when your users inevitably upgrade to IE7.

Up till now, there have been a number of ways to create blocks of your CSS that are only visible to IE, but they’re, well, hacks, and can’t be trusted to work forever. The best way to add IE-specific styling, I’ve found, is by using conditional comments and an entirely separate stylesheet.

OK. Moving on. Now you know how to add IE-specific styling to your app, let’s find out what that styling should be. You’ve got a passel of problems, but no idea how to solve them. Where do you go for help? You go to the Bible: PositionIsEverything’s list of Internet Explorer bugs and their workarounds, if there are any. Another great article on the subject can be found at CommunityMX (a mostly subscription-only site, unfortunately): How to attack an Internet Explorer (Win) display bug.

For further reading on IE’s display bugs, don’t miss these articles:

• Internet Explorer and the CSS box model
• On having layout — the concept of hasLayout in IE/Win

Other articles you may find useful:

• Button width in IE, a discussion on how to get rid of all the extra padding IE seems to automatically add to buttons and submit inputs.
• CSS and browser compatibility

With all these tools in your arsenal, you can go forth and battle most all the weird browser bugs out there (more on this in another post) and come out the other side alive and even relatively unscathed.

CSS tips and tricks
If most of my standards references are found at W3Schools, then most of my CSS tips and tricks references can be found at A List Apart, the best webzine on the industry out there. INJMHO^*. Their design articles and how-tos specialize in clean, reusable and maintainable code, and are usually what I go to first when I want to make sure I’m not reinventing the wheel.

Speaking of reinventing the wheel, my three favorite tutorials from ALA are on three of the most common UI elements: multi-column layouts, tabbed interfaces, and CSS-mostly drop-down menus:

• In search of the Holy Grail, an excellent how-to for making a three-column layout with two fixed sidebars and a liquid center. Update 2007-03-07 14:03—Published recently on ALA, here’s another way of making a multi-column layout with equal height columns.
• Sliding doors, a discussion on how to use the sliding doors technique to make dynamically sized tabs.
• Suckerfish dropdowns, a great way to make (almost^**) entirely CSS-driven dropdown menus.
• Update 2008-06-20 11:04—Conflicting absolute positions is an elegant Javascript-less technique to make a multi-column layout that needs to take up the full browser window.

Everything else is more or less kid stuff, so I’m not linking it here.

Next up: Making your site work in IE.

^* In Not Just My Humble Opinion.

^** Almost because IE doesn’t support the :hover pseudo-class on anything but <a> tags.

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman – 5 stars.

If he hadn’t been already, this last book, an unrelated follow-up to 2002′s American Gods, would put Neil Gaiman on my automatic 5-star list. He is simply an amazing writer; he writes with effortless grace and humor, making it seem so much easier than it really is. With Anansi Boys, Gaiman brings some of the lighter sensibility from his time spent writing children’s and young adult novels to the realm of “adult” books, and the result is what I consider his best book. Fast, funny, and “scary as a spider on your arm,” Anansi Boys should be an immediate addition to your queue.

Thud! by Terry Pratchett – 5 stars

Like Charlie Huston, Terry Pratchett is pretty much an automatic 5-star author for me. He’s a masterful writer at the peak of his craft, and each book he writes seems better than the last (yes, you’ve heard me say this before). I loved Thud!, another in the Ankh-Morpork City Watch series of the Discworld novels. Bleak, funny and filled with dead-on satire—the best thing about which is that it never overtakes the story—this one is another great addition to the Discworld series.

No Dominion by Charlie Huston – 5 stars.

No big surprise here; I love all of Charlie Huston’s books, and this latest installment in the Joe Pitt casefiles is no different. In addition to his near-flawless writing and masterful plotting, I love the world he’s created here: complex and dangerous, with shifting allegiances, delicate balances and Machiavellian power-plays. I’m already anxious to read the next one, whenever it comes out. You know the drill. Go out and get a copy right now.