In a perfect world, Ethan Marcotte would star opposite of me in a web design-themed, buddy cop action comedy called Beep and the Squirrel.

Actually… I’m writing that one down, just in case.

Until that glorious moment, I’ll enjoy his raw intellect and seasoned wit while envying his creative talent in a suitably stalker-like fashion. (Unless you’re reading this, Ethan, in which case I assure you that I am in no way digging through your refuse bins looking for cast-off brilliant ideas and toothbrushes.)

While we’re in the vein of borderline creepy idol worship, I’m going to agree with Ethan’s succinct tweet on the W3C’s CSS Conditional Rules Module Level 3 Working Draft (which I’ll reduce to the much easier to remember abbreviation “CCR Module”, hereafter nicknamed the “More Cowbell” document). I feel cold.

I’m still perusing the document. Although any judgement leveled while shooting from the hips (hello, ladies) is bound to be rife with bad summaries and skewed views, in my opinion the module doesn’t seem to solve any problems that aren’t already being solved in a better fashion by good CSS practice or other techniques. It’s a lazy man’s shortcut to “supportin’ olla them thar browsers”.

As Dylan Wilbanks said, these aren’t the conditionals I’m looking for.

Just look at @supports, for the love of cheese (or dairy-free cheese alternative for vegans and the lactose intolerant). It lets you test if a browser supports a feature, before (in their examples) you then go and use the feature. What? How bizarre is that? I know in their examples you can get far trickier with not and or and doogie howser, but seriously?

When it comes to the problems that CSS is supposed to solve, although @supports and its ilk would work, they seem to encourage bad or unnecessarily laboriously bloated CSS documents instead of streamlining the process. And when it comes to @document I believe that the authors are trying to make CSS solve problems it wasn’t intended for.

Look, if you’re trying to get your CSS to be flexibly supported across different browsers and devices, I recommend checking out Ethan’s Responsive Web Design, or at least actually using your skullmeat instead of slapping shoddy shortcuts into your CSS. Capiche?

Today’s comic features inanity, a rather eye-bleeding shade of green, and Dylan Wilbanks. It does not feature any snide commentary on web design or development, a joke at Apple’s expense, or even any squirrel-related humor.

It does however reference the mighty peahen.

Consider this comic something of a mental enema, loosening up the blockage that has been plaguing me throughout the summer.

Quite honestly, I’ve been feeling like something of an imposter over this past year, a lurker in the forum that is the web development/design world. I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but it turns out the Internet is chock full of extremely talented website makers. Constant displays of their talent pour from my Twitter stream like Gideon’s moist wool, dripping all over the web with raw, unfiltered awesome. They’re not just rocking my face with their drool-inducing personal website redesigns. They’re not just filling Dribbble with jaw-dropping snapshots of amazing work. They’re drop-kicking monitors until they explode into fancy, limited-edition magazines that you put on the coffee table to impress both the lady you’re courting and your mother.

Look, I’m not saying that Elliot Jay Stocks is a curly-headed, 21st century typographic British Chuck Norris that groin-punched Comic Sans so hard that Bill Gates’ grandchildren will feel it. I’m also not saying that he isn’t.

It comes down to adequacy, and the occasional disheartening fear that you’re not up to snuff. With “you’re not” meaning “I am not”. In a world of Stocks and Santa Marias and Irishes, I’m aware that my design skills (which were never my selling point) are a combination of obsession with green and empty space and not much else, and that my Javascript skills, while far better, aren’t Olympic grade either. I don’t invent Javascript libraries, I just use them. I frequently feel like a Jimmy Olsen in a field crowded with Supermen.

The caveat is that ultimately I’m a commentator in the field, blending humor, a cartoon squirrel and occasionally a sense of outrage into bite-sized portions for people to chuckle at. Ultimately, I’m okay with that. All the way back in the first grade I accepted that my role in life was to serve as comic relief. But some days, which drag into some weeks or some months, I feel so irrelevant even in that role (perhaps without any good justification) that I can’t seem to muster the desire to put something out there.

Dylan, back in the end of June, wrote a piece that on the surface was discussing a spat between usability experts. Underneath that, it goes to the topic of feelings of adequacy as a designer, and a speaker, and even a participant in the always-on social stream of web development. His article got a bit of heat of its own due to perceived attacks on certain outstanding leaders in our field, which for the record I don’t think was his intent or point. But it also touched into a good conversation I had with him a month prior to that in a pizzeria in Seattle.

I’ve met Dylan approximately three times in the flesh, but I’d like to call him a friend. The most recent time was when I went to Web Directions Unplugged (which was an amazing event that I was honored to be invited to as a cartoonist-in-residence). On my first night there we met for pizza then started a small, two-man bar crawl while getting reacquainted and discussing our field. The topic went to the realm of conferences, and our mutual interest in participating in them as more than audience. He told me about his experience as a speaker in a higher education web conference and I mused about an interest in either speaking or even creating my own conference.

My main worry, as shared between pints of IPA, was a nagging concern that I had nothing to offer in a crowded web development conference world where the likes of Mr. Beep himself are there to blow your mind with cutting-edge techniques, Andy Clarke is ready to take an aggressive stance and make you angry, and Jared Spool is going to make you come dangerously close to experiencing a personal brownout in the pants region as you learn your personal limits on how much you can laugh in a single hour. Does the world need another thirty-something white guy who’s only moderately talented to take up a speaker slot in an industry that desperately needs to give more room to the packed crowd of web development superwomen that both we need to see more of and deserve the opportunity more than I do?

In the end, Dylan insisted I had something to offer, whether it be speaking in someone else’s conference or someday making a “Squirrelcon” of my own. Maybe he’s even right. That’s not relevant. But it meant a lot for a man of his experience to insist on my worth over pizza and beer mere blocks from offices packed with employees in Seattle’s various web-centric corporations. Whether he’s speaking to a crowd or just to me, I’ve found him profound.

I don’t need reassurances. I’m not seeking affirmation. I’m not wearing black eye shadow and reading Poe. I’m just getting something written down on this damn blog to get the gears rolling again, and I might as well share the insecurities that caused it to grind to a halt in the first place. Writing it, writing anything, is a vital step to contributing to the stream of awesome web designers that clogs your inbox every day.

Every time I make a prediction about when I’ll next post something, I’m usually wrong. So instead, I’ll say they you’ll hear from me again soon, and I may even be more on topic when you do.

Even if haters can’t admit it out loud, they probably need to admit it to themselves deep down inside: Nine is a contender.

For years, Internet Explorer has been out of the game when it comes to any discussion of what constitutes a modern browser. Version 8, as much as it was a drastic improvement over what had come before, was something I viewed more as a correction of 6 and 7′s many errors, and clearly not an effort towards embracing more modern features.

But Nine? Hardware acceleration. A blazingly fast JavaScript engine. Robust CSS3 support (missing things, but includes a decent chunk of what I wanted to see). HTML5 features like <video>, <audio> and even <canvas>. SVG support. On top of it all it’s got a slick, minimalist interface.

Internet Explorer 9 is a modern browser. Period. Dissenters and naysayers are at best nitpicking and at worse lashing out due to old habit.

There are downsides. I wish that they’d made it for XP, but as Microsoft is in the habit of selling operating systems I understand how complex of an issue that might be for their business model. It doesn’t include all the CSS3 I want to see (gradients, anyone?) but they do give a reasonable-sounding reasoning why (ostensibly, they don’t want to add a feature that has to be changed or removed later, and gradients currently have at least two exclusive syntaxes).

But the bottom line is that although IE9 isn’t perfect, it’s also not the flawed, stunted beast of ill-will and developer-consuming horror that its ancestors were. We, as designers, should be grateful that we’ve got another modern browser making our websites look better (and capable of doing more) without requiring us to craft different code for different browsers.

(But feel free to kvetch about the challenge in getting XP users to upgrade to a modern browser. My opinion on that? Tell them to use Chrome or Opera.)

The Orange, Flaming Elephant In The Room

I don’t, as a rule, use Internet Explorer as my daily browser. After all, I want the whole, real web, and historically it was not the best candidate for that. Now that Nine is out, I’ve found in the past couple days that my tolerance levels for my de facto browser, one Mr. Firefox, is suddenly waning.

Firefox is slow.

Today’s comic makes light of this sad, sad bit of information.

Additionally, when using some newer “HTML5″ JS features (such as localStorage) I’ve found Firefox even locking up on what seems like a quick, trivial task for competitors like Chrome. And the old mainstay of my reason to keep Firefox, the plugins, is no longer as unique a feature as it was. I’ve been trying to stick it out until Firefox 4 is released, but I’m losing confidence rapidly in Mozilla’s formerly delicious love child. When using a laptop or trying to quickly load a page to show a friend a neat bit of code or a cute cat video, I’ve lost my patience with Firefox. I’ll fire up Chrome… or Heaven forfend, I’ve even used IE9 in the past day.

I’m not convinced that Internet Explorer’s plunge in its percentage of browser users is going to change yet, despite IE9. I do think, however, that if current trends continue then Firefox is going to find itself facing a plunge of its own while IE’s fortune improves. Of all the modern browsers out there it currently seems to be lagging the most.

That’s right, I said it. I think Firefox is lagging behind Internet Explorer now in terms of modernity.

It’s all well and good to support gradients and other CSS3 features. But right now with the blossoming trend of web apps and the general push to a web-based computer culture, speed is becoming the king of relevance in making a browser worth using. And at the moment, I’m not convinced Firefox 4 is improving enough to close the gap.

Nine isn’t going to be my browser of choice. It’ll take some time yet before Microsoft can convince me to get back to using the big blue e on a regular basis. But its dramatic improvement has made me strongly examine my current browser of choice. I hear Chrome has Firebug.

Good show, Nine. Firefox, time to pony up.

I know jack about fonts. Or typography. I don’t know what makes serif better than sans-serif in a given situation, or vice-versa. When I see a site making good use of fonts, I appreciate it on an instinctual level (and then fumble in an attempt to duplicate the same grandeur in a later project of my own), but I don’t know the why of how I feel.

In short, fonts aren’t too different from music for me. I know what I like, but I’ve got no theory as to why. (My description of why I like songs tends to be “It sounds crunchy” or “The way their voice changes in the chorus is sweet”.)

That doesn’t stop me from appreciating the impact good fonts have on my job as a web developer, however. When the talented designers at Mindfly produce a beautiful design for a site using sweet web fonts, I know I like them and then make the best use of the tools I have to reproduce the beauty in HTML and CSS on the Internet tubes.

The two guests in today’s comic are tool-builders and technique-inventors that help me greatly in what I do. And for that I thank them. Font Squirrel (aka Ethan Dunham) has a beautiful site that holds 100% free for commercial use fonts, as well as a lovely font-face kit generator which helps reduce my struggles with getting a font onto all browsers to little more than an exercise in copying and pasting. If you’ve never been to Font Squirrel, check it out. He’s my favorite non-me squirrel-themed web-designer-type person on the Internet. I use his site almost every day in my job, and it saves me (and as a result, my clients) a good deal of time and money as a result.

Paul Irish is, in my eyes, a man that’s slowly morphing into an Internet Folk Hero. His efforts in fighting the vicious, horrendous FOUT (flash of unstyled text) that afflicts websites using web fonts are legendary. If that heroic battle wasn’t enough, he’s also one of the people behind both the HTML5 Boilerplate (which taught me so much just by reading its code and comments) and Modernizr (which is now being included in every project I do with its lovely browser feature support detection and HTML5 shim for IE browsers). I discovered last week I wasn’t following Paul’s twitter feed and blog updates, and have since corrected this. Now I carefully trail after him, picking up whatever morsels of cleverness drop on the ground behind him and devouring them like the cruel crows eating the breadcrumb trail of Hansel and Gretel.

The only thing I love more than good tools are good tool-makers. If any of you haven’t seen their offerings, I politely suggest you go take a gander. Good on you, Ethan and Paul. Thank you very much.

For a man who lives in the heavily hyped, increasingly referenced post-PC era, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

The iPad is an amazing device. The quality of experience you have when using one borders on the luxurious. Although I personally feel it’s better suited for consumption than production, it’s clear that it can serve the latter task. (I’d prefer some better multitasking support in that regard, however.) Browsing the web with one is a dream (until you hit a flash site), and watching videos feels like a guilty pleasure. Having seen the announced changes for the iPad 2, I can only assume it will build on the experience.

I’ve been recently planning on getting some sort of non-desktop computer. Despite being a tech-heavy individual, the only portable computing device I own is an iPhone 3G, which is a slow and devoted servant that doesn’t quite meet my mobile computing needs. I’ve strongly considered laptops, but would prefer less bulk. Netbooks seem like the right size, but once I get there, I start to think form and function… and after my experiences with the iPads of my co-workers, I can’t help but come to the conclusion that a tablet would serve me far better, most of the time. For my budget, purchasing one is a non-trivial expenditure, but it’s increasingly one I’d like to make. And since the current crop of tablets largely don’t feel right to me other than the iPad, I’m thinking that my money will be going to Apple. (I admit to interest in HP’s TouchPad, but haven’t researched it enough to know if it’s going to be a worthwhile contender.)

Even though I’m increasingly sitting in the pews, however, I’m still not ready to drink the kool-aid with Apple’s more enthusiastic supporters.

The comic today, featuring Faruk Ateş as the stand-in for Apple lovers everywhere, pokes fun at the hyperbole surrounding the iPad 2 and hints at some of my reservations regarding our alleged post-PC era. To listen to some of Apple’s more outspoken fans speak, this device is ushering us into some sort of golden era where we’ll recline on couches like ancient Romans, being fed grapes as we laugh about the old days where typewriter-like devices called computers chained us to desks.

We’re not in a post-PC era, folks. We’re not entering one, either.

We’re not witnessing the first automobile in an era of horse-drawn buggies. We’re in an era of cars and trucks looking at the first motorcycle.

Why?

Because the iPad and all other tablets are personal computers. Period.

Although they vary in form from a desktop computer, so does a laptop or netbook. This is just a more extreme change in form, with the keyboard disappearing altogether. But if my mother owned an iPad instead of her desktop computer she’d be using it for the same thing: checking email, browsing the web, watching and sharing videos of cats and sending me messages on Facebook asking me if I’m wearing warm-enough clothes and eating properly.

How she’d interact with the computer would be novel for her, admittedly. And to an extent, where she could do it would also be somewhat novel, but as a person who’s used a latop frequently she’s not going to find the iPad used in too many spaces she already hasn’t had computer access.

Now, for me, if I owned an iPad, I’d use it for much of (but not all of) my home computer experiences. Watching videos. Making notes or casually browsing the web, figuring out where I last saw an actor on a program I’m watching on television. But it won’t replace my desktop altogether just like the motorcycle didn’t make the truck obsolete. Complex graphics-related tasks, multitasking the many programs I use in my daily job, or any situation where I need two monitors to do the same task all represent situations where the iPad wouldn’t be the idea computer to use.

These sort of use-cases are far from ordinary. Most people, like my mother, don’t need a desktop over a tablet. I agree 100% with this assertion. But I’m going to argue that the iPad and its ilk are evolutionary products, not revolutionary ones. What Apple did was take a preexisting form factor for the computer (albeit, a largely unused one) and make it hotter and more relevant. Apple changed the public’s perception on what is a desirable form for their personal computers, they did not create a different category of device that replaces a computer.

Let’s celebrate the iPad 2. Let’s celebrate tablets. But let’s also recognize them for what they are. Personal computers. In this regard I agree with John Gruber. I don’t know what revolutionary device will replace the computer; however I bet that we’ll fail to predict it, will initially fail to recognize its impact on society and application, and that it will completely change our world.

The iPad’s impact is big. But it isn’t the kind of impact I’ve seen people describing it as.

As a parting request: Apple and any other tablet manufacturers out there… please, please, please unchain the tablet from the desktop. Let me activate and sync and use my tablet without any need for a laptop or desktop computer. Only then will tablets be practical replacements for desktops in a home.