An interview with Jina Bolton

Next up in our now probably well known series of interviews is the lovely Jina Bolton, it’s good stuff, so keep reading!

1. Could you introduce yourself and give a bit of background?

   I recently moved to Silicon Valley after living 5 years in Memphis, Tennessee (I went to an art school there, and studied Computer Arts and Graphic Design). Somehow, I managed to turn my hobby of making websites into a career, and even learned this thing called CSS. I’ve been doing this as a hobby for about 10 years. I got into web standards about 6 years ago. I am passionate about typography, grid, and sushi. I miss making non-digital art.

2. Describe your opinion about the SPEED of css development in two words.

   Quicker, please?

3. Describe your opinion about the QUALITY of css development in four words.

   Already cool, potentially cooler!

4. How would you style a sushi roll using CSS3?

   Wow, there are so many ways I could do this one… This one is hard to show an example for, considering not everything is supported… Can I just explain how I’d do it? :)

   I’m thinking I’d use the ingredients of the sushi roll in an unordered list, to give me some hooks to style each of the elements that are in the roll. Let’s go with a California roll, since that’s pretty easy to name the ingredients for… You’d have nori (dried black seaweed), sumeshi (the sushi rice), avocado, imitation crab, cucumber, mayonnaise, sesame seeds, and some roe.

   That’s a lot of hooks there. But we want it all to make some sense in case styles are turned off, so we’d have maybe a header with a descriptive paragraph, to explain that these are the ingredients of a California roll. We might even create some Sushi Microformats, for the roll and all the ingredients that make up the roll. ;)

   So, for the roll to look more realistic, we’d probably use photography of the ingredients (like a pattern of nori, or a pattern of sumeshi), and then using some crazy concoction of CSS3 background and border s (taking advantage of being able to use multiple backgrounds, and then playing around with border-image… border radius?), we’d create the images needed in each list item for each respective ingredient. I’m not sure that any of the grid layout stuff appropriate, nor is the advanced layout, since we need stuff to kinda sit on top of each other, so we’d probably go with some old-fashioned positioning and z-index. The CSS3 component would probably mostly be in the backgrounds and borders stuff. It’d take a lot of time and effort, but it could be possible.

   If I had more time to play with this, I could give it a go… If it ever shows up on my website, I’ll let you know. ;)

5. Which CSS3 properties are your favourite and which should browser vendors work on implementing next?

   I’m really excited about the Grid Positioning stuff, which unfortunately, nobody seems to have implemented (which actually doesn’t surprise me, because I think it’d be kinda difficult to implement). I can’t wait to see it though, because I’m excited to test it and experiment with it. I think the Advanced Layout stuff is pretty cool, too.

   If I had to choose which would be implemented, I’d actually have to say all of the Selectors. Because I’m tired of using silly unnecessary classes just for visual details, and I’m sure other designers and developers are too.

6. Which should come first; browsers implementing a property, or the W3C finalising the spec?

   (an example that provokes this is that much of what is defined ready, as in CSS snapshot, are not what we’ve heard developers demanding)

   I think the way it should be is that W3C make the standards, and then browsers implement it. Waiting on common browser implementation for something to be considered standard seems very backwards to me.

7. You’re a member of CSS 11. What do you think is most missing from the various CSS3 modules, that would either make a designers life easier or enable new techniques?

   Well, one example is multi-columns - We can create these columns, but we can’t style them independently from one another (for example, alternating columns). To do so, we’d have to resort to the use of floated/positioned divs.

   I also interested in seeing some more typography CSS get implemented — I’m really into hanging punctuation, or kerning that goes beyond overall letter-spacing. Like if we could style the way two o’s are spaced when they follow one another without having to wrap them in spans, or if we could style ampersands that come in headlines, without additional spans… I know it’s really picky stuff, but it’s stuff like this that makes designers like me really happy.

8. How is progress on CSS 11 going?

   So far, so good. We’re still getting some things set up, and working out some of the details. But it’s about to get going pretty strong. Aaron Gustafson (one of the Eleven members) attended the W3C Plenary meeting in Boston a few weeks ago, and he’s got homework for us. ;)

9. Do you think CSS should be influenced by what is available to print designers and possible using the likes of Quark Express and InDesign?

   Certainly. However, CSS should never be dictated by what’s available to print designers, simply because web is just an entirely different media. But there’s nothing wrong with being influenced by print - I think having this influence is this very thing that will get more designers interested in standards and creating fantastic websites.

10. Much of what designers demand from CSS is already available in some form in SVG (such as text rotation, and transitions for example). How much do you think these specs should overlap and where do you draw the line? Should CSS perhaps be used as an interface to access useful SVG features using CSS syntax?

    I think it’s awesome that text rotation and transitions are being considered for CSS. CSS is for presentation. And contrary to what some developers believe, that kind of thing is totally presentational. It’s cool that SVG can offer this kind of thing as well, but for a designer like me, I want to have all my presentational elements in one place — my CSS. If I’m styling a heading in my CSS, and then I want to rotate it, I want that heading rotated in my CSS as well. :)

11. Which CSS tag is the sexiest? :)

    You mean which CSS property? Or which CSS declaration? I’m not familiar with CSS tags. ;) Hehe. Teasing. I am in love with text-shadow. I soooo wish more browsers had it implemented.

Thanks a lot for participating Jina!