Guess what? Switching (back) to Tumblr hasn’t made me write any more, at least when it comes to writing for myself. (Big surprise: it’s not the tools that make you write better!)

That said, I have been writing. Check out my weekly series, “Type News,” at Typedia.

On a recent personal project I decided to experiment with some of the pseudo-classes available in CSS 3. I was immediately smitten, especially with :last-child. The new pseudo-classes aren’t supported in any version of Internet Explorer (before version 9, now in beta), so I decided to use JavaScript to add an ie-last-child class to the appropriate HTML elements. My CSS looked something like this:

nav li {
    float: left;
    margin-right: 1em;
}
nav li:last-child,
nav li.ie-last-child { margin-right: 0; }

This worked great in Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7—but IE 8 choked: the last <li> still had a right margin of one em. What happened?

It turns out that IE 8 ignores any style declarations associated with any pseudo-classes (or pseudo-elements) that it doesn’t recognize. The workaround is relatively simple. You need to declare the styles twice, like so:

nav li:last-child { margin-right: 0; }
/* a separate declaration, to allow IE 8 to recognize the style: */
nav li.ie-last-child { margin-right: 0; }

In my case, this double-declaration resulted in a mere 20 extra characters of code to maintain, which isn’t a big deal. With this style change, though, I was able to avoid the problem entirely, by relying on the :first-child pseudo-class, which is part of CSS 2.1 (and is relatively well-supported in IE 7 and 8):

nav li {
    display: inline; /* kill the IE 6 double-margin float bug */
    float: left;
    margin-left: 1em;
}
nav li.ie6-first-child, /* be kind to IE 6, via JavaScript */
nav li:first-child { margin-left: 0; }

It’s worth reiterating that this is an extremely simple example. If you have more complex styles that rely on CSS 3 pseudo-classes or pseudo-elements, consider yourself warned. The most advanced (released) version of Internet Explorer will force you to write almost twice as much code.

A story by Zora:

Once there was an elephant named Seecas. Elephant was going to see a witch. The witch lived in a little house. There were some flying birds. There were three birds flying. The elephant said to the witch, “That’s my house—can you fly to your house?” The witch flew away because it was the elephant’s house.

Now the elephant went back to the house with the circle, walking like a family.

So. For a while I’d been working on a revised Django-powered system that effectively did what Tumblr does out-of-the-box, but I’d never really had the amount of focused time I’ve needed to get it working properly. (This is not an indictment of Django; it remains my preferred development platform.)

And I figured, why not just use Tumblr? I’ve had an account for over three years but haven’t done anything really useful with it, aside from connecting it to a writing class I taught in 2007.

It’s time for that to change. Let’s see what happens.

Hi, gang. Your teacher is watching!