Having just received my promo copies of Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3 that I wrote with Stephanie Sullivan, I found it interesting that Eric Meyer and Jonathon Snook were discussing the topic of CSS resets on their blogs today. During the writing of the book, we actually used Eric’s reset in one of our chapters. But, honestly, I have to say that I agree with Jonathon, in that while Stephanie tends to use the reset often, I actually rarely do. Instead, I tend to do the same as Jonathon – I rarely reset anything, preferring to simply write a rule or two to address any inconsistencies between browsers. As Jonathon points out, whether a list has a circle or a square doesn’t really impact the design – and if it does, then a rule can be created to address it. Anyway, that’s my take on things… if anybody actually cares what I think. :-)  Cheers!

The worst part about writing a book (which just arrived today – no, this is NOT an April Fools joke), is the fact that print is so damned permanent. And once the chapter leaves your word processor and heads off into editorial production land, there is no easy way to “fix” a mistake or update a topic. And just this very thing happened with the project in Chapter 6 of the book.

In that chapter, Stephanie and I wrote about using the Spry Framework for Ajax to create an art gallery. In approaching the project, we chose to use the “new” Sliding Panels widget which was added in the 1.6 release of Spry. Unfortunately, what I didn’t “notice” during the writing of the chapter was that the panel sort of stuttered when clicking upon the panel navigation the first time after the page load. Apparently this is something that others have seen as well, because I was recently asked about that very problem in an online seminar that Stephanie was presenting and in which I was frantically answering questions in the chat window. So, there’s the issue and, more importantly, here’s the fix. (more…)