Pack is written in Ruby and runs from the command-line. However, you could easily daisy chain it to Capistrano when doing deploys, like Andrew has done for Viddler, to make it one less step to deploying code that is optimized for page load.

Oh, and his post includes a cat. So there’s that.

Pie Guy is a fun game for your iPhone that is free, is installed via the Web (it is a fancy Web page), works offline, and is actually a lot of fun (works sorta like Pac-Man).

Neven Mrgan, the developer of Pie Guy, built the game – not only so people can enjoy the game – but to help show what is possible via HTML, JavaScript, and CSS for building games or applications on the iPhone using the Web browser rather than native cocoa technologies.

“If you find Pie Guy a fun game to play, well that’s grand.

But, I hope Pie Guy will also be an opportunity for the code-savvy among you to learn a trick or two about making serious web apps for the iPhone. Just grab my source code and tweak it. I’m not talking about just a fancied-up webpage here; this is a fullscreen game, with fast gameplay and responsive touch controls. I can’t wait to see what a better programmer does with this stuff (it’s not hard to program better than me!)”

A very notable thing to do and I hope a ton of talented developers take him up on it. I’d love to see stuff like jQuery for iPhone games/apps (which I’m sure exists in some form or another).

Also of note: As Neven pointed out in his announcement post – don’t try this on your first generation iPhones. This game only performs well on an iPhone 3GS.

But, such as it is you are here, reading something on my site, and so I should – at the very least – show you a site that you can read. I didn’t say that I’d cater to you. No no, none of that here. But I will try my best to have my site display just well enough that you can read this – and perhaps switch to another browser.

While at Podcamp Hawai’i I pulled my site up on a screen in front of an entire theatre full of people. There was only one computer available to me that was already hooked up to the projector. I thought “How bad could it be?”. Well, it was pretty bad. My site looked like this. Yeah, that bad.

So today I pulled out a ton of negative margins, a few class specifications that, for reasons I will probably never know, Internet Explorer does not support – and now you can see that the site looks relatively normal in IE.

I could probably do better with my site’s document code and styling to set myself up for multi-browser success. I know this. But, seriously. You could do much better if you’re using Internet Explorer as your browser-of-choice. So there.

If you are a like me then Shaun Inman’s proposal for CSS Selectors will probably leave you with a furled brow.

Rather then being left standing in the dark I tried to wrap my head around what Shaun was trying to accomplish with his proposal.  I didn’t get.  But I wanted to.  So I setup a quick example page that illustrated my question.  I then hopped, skipped, and jumped over the Shaun’s Web site, and asked what I was missing.  Shaun, kindly and succinctly, replied.

The non-CSS guru explanation of the CSS Selector proposal

I can’t be sure that any of you reading this are in the same boat as I was.  In fact, I’m sitting here thinking at all of you are smarter than I am when it comes to these things, and that you’re not even reading this right now.  But if you are, and you’d like to understand this debate a little further, here is as simple an explanation as I can give.

A style can not be attributed to a parent element when a specific child element is present.

I don’t even know if I worded that correctly.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t.  So here is the long-winded version.  In Shaun’s first example he shows that an image, that is wrapped with a link, would have the same style as a normal link.  The problem is that, currently, CSS can not determine the differences between a normal link and a link that has an image within it.  It just isn’t “smart” enough.  That is, without the help of something that runs after the DOM has loaded fully like the awe-inspiring John Resig’s jQuery plugin.

Here is a quick explanation of what John Resig’s JavaScript is doing.  Once the page loads, jQuery parses through the entire HTML document, determines which links “has images” (see documentation here) and then you may run specific JavaScript functions on those links specifically.  You could, for example, add classes to those links dynamically with jQuery, rather than mucking up your code with classes inline.

Shaun’s proposal is to help make CSS, and browsers, “smart” enough to determine when styles should be attributed to links and when not to be attributed to links that contain images.  This was only his first example, Shaun gives others.

I really hope I did an okay job explaining this for those of you that, like me, didn’t understand it before pounding my head against my desk.

Addendum

Shaun has hit me back with a succinct definition that correctly uses the lingo.

“CSS allows you to style elements based on their parent/ancestor elements but it does not allow you to style a parent element based on the presence of a descendant element.”

You can look backwards, but you can’t look forwards.  Thanks Shaun!

To participate, all you need to do is rip out your style sheet for one day, leaving nothing but your naked site to show in all of its semantic glory. I will be participating, TUG.n will be, as will many other sites. Will you?

Vote for CSS Naked Day on Newsvine.com.

Update: I decided instead of participating on cdevroe.com (since I have a very minimal audience), I’m going to try to advocate the movement itself – in other ways.

[tags]css, web standards, fun[/tags]