Episode 27 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week, Kevin Yank (@sentience) has a one-on-one chat with Rachel Andrew, the author of SitePoint’s best-selling CSS book, The CSS Anthology, 3rd Edition.
SitePoint Podcast的 第27集现已发布！ 本周，凯文·扬克( @sentience )与Rachel Andrew进行了一对一的聊天，后者是SitePoint最畅销CSS书籍《 CSS Anthology，第三版》的作者 。
Play this episode directly in your browser! Just click the orange “play” button below:
直接在浏览器中播放此剧集！ 只需点击下面的橙色“播放”按钮：
A complete transcript of the interview is provided below.
下面提供了采访的完整笔录。
You can also download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:
您也可以将本集下载为独立的MP3文件。 这是链接：
SitePoint Podcast #27: CSS with Rachel Andrew (MP3, 35.4MB)
SitePoint Podcast＃27：带有Rachel AndrewCSS (MP3，35.4MB)
Kevin: September 11th, 2009. On the show today, the author of SitePoint’s newest book, The CSS Anthology, 3rd Edition. This is the SitePoint Podcast #27: CSS with Rachel Andrew.
凯文： 2009年9月11日。在今天的节目中，SitePoint最新书《 CSS Anthology，第三版》的作者 。 这是Rachel Andrew撰写的SitePoint播客＃27：CSS。
Kevin: And welcome, Rachel Andrew, to the SitePoint Podcast.
凯文：欢迎雷切尔·安德鲁(Rachel Andrew)参加SitePoint播客。
Rachel: Hello.
雷切尔：你好。
Kevin: Why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to our listeners.
凯文：为什么不继续向我们的听众介绍自己。
Rachel: I’m a UK web developer and author of several SitePoint books, including The CSS Anthology.
Rachel：我是英国的Web开发人员，还是几本SitePoint书的作者，其中包括CSS Anthology。
Kevin: I’d say it’s fair to say that you’re actually one of SitePoint’s most prolific authors. You’ve written three editions of The CSS Anthology now. You and I collaborated on Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong. Is there any I’m missing?
凯文：可以说您实际上是SitePoint最多产的作家之一。 您已经编写了CSS Anthology的三个版本。 您和我合作完成了关于CSS错误的知识 。 我有什么想念的吗？
Rachel: There was a book about Dreamweaver.
雷切尔：有一本关于Dreamweaver的书。
Kevin: Yes, the Dreamweaver 8 book.
凯文：是的， Dreamweaver 8书。
Rachel: Yup, and I did rewrite of the original CSS book that SitePoint did.
Rachel：是的 ，我确实重写了SitePoint编写的原始CSS书。
Kevin: That’s right, you did the second edition of HTML Utopia. That’s right. So you’ve written far and away more books than anyone else at SitePoint and yet, writing books is not your day job; you are a professional developer. In fact, you run a web development business. So I guess the question I have is, why write books?
凯文：是的，您编写了第二版HTML Utopia 。 那就对了。 因此，与SitePoint上的其他人相比，您写的书远比其他人多得多，但是，写书并不是您的日常工作。 您是专业的开发人员。 实际上，您经营一家Web开发公司。 所以我想我的问题是，为什么要写书？
Rachel: Well, I was asked this question this last week. I started really because I wrote a couple of articles that people liked and someone from Glasshouse, part of Wrox at the time, at the time said would you write a couple of chapters?
瑞秋：嗯，上周有人问我这个问题。 我之所以开始，是因为我写了几篇人们喜欢的文章，而当时来自Glasshouse(当时是Wrox的一部分)的人说，您会写几章吗？
I’m actually from an arts background sort of entirely and so writing is something I quite enjoyed doing, probably unusual for a programmer, really. And so it really just gone from there that I started writing a couple of chapters and then eventually ended up with The CSS Anthology, which was the sort of first full book that I wrote that was just me.
我实际上完全来自艺术背景，因此写作是我很喜欢做的事情，对于程序员来说可能真的很不寻常。 因此，从那开始我真的写了几章，然后最终写了《 CSS Anthology》，这是我写的第一本完整的书，就是我自己。
But I had a fairly easy introduction into it and I do enjoy doing it. It’s certainly not my main job, however, I couldn’t do it if I didn’t do another job because everything I write about is really just things that I’ve discovered or little tricks I’ve worked out by doing the job that I do.
但是我对其进行了非常简单的介绍，并且我很喜欢这样做。 当然，这不是我的主要工作，但是，如果我不做其他工作，我将无法完成工作，因为我写的所有东西实际上只是我发现的事情或通过做这份工作而得出的小技巧我做。
Kevin: Do you find that because you’re writing books pretty much constantly, it gives you an excuse to take that time and refresh your skills and stay on top of the news of what’s changing?
凯文(Kevin)：您是否发现由于您一直在不断写作书籍，您是否有借口抽出时间来提高自己的技能并紧贴变化中的最新消息？
Rachel: I think so and particularly, it’s actually in my real job, I do an awful lot more backend development than I do front end. So I obviously do an awful lot of CSS work, as well.
Rachel：我认为是这样，尤其是，这实际上是我的真正工作，与前端相比，我做的后端开发要多得多。 因此，我显然也做了很多CSS工作。
Kevin: We should really get you to write a PHP book.
凯文：我们真的应该让您写一本书。
Rachel: That’s actually what I spend my days doing, is really it’s PHP and that’s what I do. And more and more, you know, as time has gone on I’ve become more interested in the backend and that tends to be what I spend most of my time doing.
Rachel：这实际上是我一整天都在做的事情，实际上是PHP，这就是我的工作。 随着时间的流逝，越来越多的人们对后端越来越感兴趣，而这正是我大部分时间都在做的事情。
Actually, I think if it wasn’t for the writing, I probably wouldn’t keep up to date with CSS as much as I do because, obviously, certainly in terms of new things that are coming up, we can’t always use those, the sort of things that we tend to be building at work which you have to be very robust in, in all sorts of varying browsers and things. So it does give me an excuse to go look into what’s coming up. You know, I wouldn’t really have much reason to look at CSS3, for instance, for most of the stuff we do at work. So that’s quite a nice aspect to it is I get to do a bit research and a bit of playing with things I wouldn’t otherwise look at.
实际上，我认为如果不是为了撰写本文，我可能不会跟上我对CSS的最新了解，因为显然，就即将出现的新事物而言，我们不能总是使用这些，我们倾向于在工作中构建的东西，您必须在各种浏览器和东西中都非常强大。 因此，这确实为我提供了一个借口去研究即将发生的事情。 您知道，例如，对于我们在工作中所做的大多数工作，我真的没有太多理由来考虑CSS3。 因此，这是一个很好的方面，那就是我需要做一些研究，并且要玩一些我本来不会看的东西。
Kevin: You know, I’ll take any excuse to have a chat with you, Rachel, but the reason we’re here talking today obviously is that the third edition of The CSS Anthology is out. And you mentioned that when that was the first book that you tackled all by yourself, you got a fairly gentle introduction to writing, did you say?
凯文：你知道，我会以任何借口与你聊天，雷切尔，但我们今天在这里谈论的原因显然是《 CSS Anthology》的第三版已经发布。 您提到过，当那是您自己专门解决的第一本书时，您对写作有了相当温和的介绍，您说吗？
Rachel: Yeah. Well, I think, the nice thing about The CSS Anthology, I think, as an author and also as a reader, and the feedback I’ve had is that it’s all those little sections. You know, it’s how do I do this thing and then there’s a solution, which actually as a writer, I think, makes it quite easy to write because you can sit down and say, “Well I’m going to write about this solution now.” Kevin: Yeah. Rachel: And in a way often they’ve really written themselves because this is something I’ve done at work and I thought, “Yeah, that would be a great thing to go in that book”, because it’s useful, almost like writing a tutorial really and the way the book is structured is very much like that. It’s individual solutions, you don’t have to read the whole book. And so in that way, it’s quite nice to write. I think it’s harder to write a book where you’re trying to weave a sort of common thread through it or build something from the start to the end. It is a relatively fast book to write in that way and to read, and sort of consume. You don’t need to feel you’ve got to sit down, devote a huge amount of time to getting through the whole thing.
瑞秋：是的。 好吧，我认为，作为CSS选集的作者和读者，我所获得的反馈是，这些都是这些小章节。 您知道，这是我怎么做的，然后有一个解决方案，实际上，我认为作为一名作家，这使编写起来非常容易，因为您可以坐下来说：“好吧，我要写这个解决方案现在。” 凯文：是的。 Rachel：在某种程度上，他们经常真正地写自己，因为这是我在工作中所做的事情，我想：“是的，那本书很不错”，因为它很有用，就像写书一样实际上是一个教程，而本书的结构非常像这样。 这是单独的解决方案，您无需阅读整本书。 因此，以这种方式编写非常不错。 我认为很难写一本书，在其中尝试通过它编织某种共同的线索或从头到尾构建一些东西。 用这种方式写书，阅读和消费是一本相对较快的书。 您不需要感觉到必须坐下来，就花费大量时间来完成整个过程。
Kevin: SitePoint has done a few of these anthologies, these problems and solutions books. What are your thoughts on people who might pick up The CSS Anthology, planning to learn CSS? Is that a good way to go about it?
凯文： SitePoint已经完成了其中一些选集，这些问题和解决方案书籍。 您对可能打算学习CSS选集CSS的人有何想法？ 这是个好方法吗？
Rachel: You know, I think often it is. I think there are some very basic concepts that you need to get down and I think the HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables book was quite good for that in that it actually did take you through the very, very basic ideas of CSS. And we don’t do so much of that in the anthology, although there’s a sort of chapter at the beginning that sort of outlines the terms used and things. But once you’ve got that basic understanding, I think doing stuff is just the best way to learn. You know, people often sort of ask me how they can learn, how they can start to do this and I would say you just have to do it. Get the basic ideas down and then start playing. And I think the anthology is very good for that because you can say, how do I style lists, how do style data tables… or whatever it is, and you can just play at that and tweak things, change things in the style sheet. That’s quite a good way to get the grip with how things work.
雷切尔：你知道，我想经常是这样。 我认为您需要掌握一些非常基本的概念，并且我认为HTML Utopia：无表设计这本书非常有用，因为它确实带您了解了CSS的非常基本的思想。 尽管在开始时有一章专门概述了所用术语和事物，但我们在选集中并没有做太多的事情。 但是一旦您有了基本的了解，我认为做事只是学习的最佳方法。 您知道，人们经常问我如何学习，如何开始做这件事，我会说您必须这样做。 记下基本思路，然后开始玩。 我认为选集非常有帮助，因为您可以说，我如何设置列表样式，如何设置数据表样式……等等，您可以玩这个游戏并进行调整，更改样式表中的内容。 这是掌握事物运作方式的好方法。
Kevin: There’s this thing about learning, especially client-side web technologies. I don’t know if it’s the fact that you can view source on any website out there but there’s like – the process that I see so many people take to learning this stuff is they’ll learn the very basics, you know. CSS is contained in a file called .css that you link with a <link> tag and a rule looks roughly like this. And then they’ll go and start playing with other people’s codes, copying and pasting, and trying stuff out. And they’ll get a certain amount of distance along the journey that way and suddenly they’ll want to take a step back and learn it properly. And it seems I could see someone picking up an introductory CSS book like HTML Utopia, reading the first chapter and then just starting to play with a book like The CSS Anthology. And if and when they wanted to learn the in-depth principles of how the cascade works and things like that, you could go back to the tutorial style book. But The CSS Anthology seems uniquely suited, to me, for that learning by example, taking it one problem at a time that so many people seem to go to.
凯文：这是关于学习的事情，尤其是客户端网络技术。 我不知道您是否可以在任何网站上查看源代码，但事实是，我知道很多人学习这些东西的过程是他们将学习非常基础的知识。 CSS包含在名为.css的文件中，您可以使用<link>标记进行链接 ，规则大致如下所示。 然后他们将开始使用其他人的代码，进行复制和粘贴，并尝试一些东西。 这样一来，他们在旅途中会获得一定距离，突然之间，他们会想退后一步，正确地学习它。 看来我可以看到有人拿起HTML Utopia这样的入门CSS书，读了第一章，然后才开始玩像CSS Anthology这样的书。 并且，如果他们想了解级联工作原理的深入原理以及诸如此类的事情，则可以返回教程样式书。 但是对我来说，CSS Anthology似乎特别适合作为示例学习，在很多人似乎都去学习的时候就解决了一个问题。
Rachel: Yeah, and I think – and certainly anyone of my sort of generation, I’m starting to feel like an old lady of the web now. And you know, that’s how we learned because there wasn’t anything else.
Rachel：是的，我想-肯定是我这一代人中的任何一个，我现在开始感觉自己像网络上的老太太。 您知道，这就是我们学到的，因为没有别的了。
You know, when I sort of came to this, there were very few sort of real tutors about how to do anything more than very, very basic HTML. And certainly when CSS-P kind of came on the scene – I mean, I was building stuff very early on with that and there wasn’t really anything. You know, there were very few tutorials and things but it was really just the people who were doing it. You’d go and look at what they’d done and try it, and see it broke and fiddle with it. And I think those of us who have got a really very, very deep understanding of this stuff come from that kind of generation where we had to figure it out just by looking at stuff and playing around. I think there’s a lot of stuff out there now and some of it can be quite confusing; you know, where do you start if you want to learn.
您知道，当我谈到这一点时，除了如何做非常非常基本HTML之外，很少有真正的辅导员来介绍如何做任何事情。 可以肯定的是，当CSS-P出现时-我的意思是，我很早就在此方面进行构建，实际上并没有任何东西。 您知道的教程和内容很少，但实际上只是那些人在做。 您可以去看看他们做了什么，然后尝试一下，看看它破裂了而且摆弄着它。 而且我认为我们当中对这些东西有非常非常非常深刻的了解的人来自那种一代，我们只需要通过看东西然后玩弄就可以弄清楚。 我认为现在有很多东西，其中有些可能会令人困惑。 你知道，如果你想学习，从哪里开始。
You know, I think the anthology filters a lot of that as well. I mean, that was always my idea with this, that I would look at all the different techniques people were coming up with and the different ways to do things, and try and pick the things that will work really robustly across all the browsers you’re likely to encounter without too much hassle. So you know, some of them aren’t the most beautiful, elegant, technically perfect solutions, but they’re the solutions that work the best across all the browsers for people who don’t have hours and hours, and hours to spend tweaking every little thing.
你知道，我认为选集也过滤了很多。 我的意思是，这始终是我的主意，我将研究人们想出的所有不同技术以及不同的处理方式，并尝试选择在您所有的浏览器中都能真正有效运行的内容很容易遇到麻烦。 因此，您知道其中一些并不是最美丽，优雅，技术上完美的解决方案，但对于没有时间和精力，又不花大量时间进行调整的用户而言，它们是在所有浏览器中效果最好的解决方案每一件小事。
Kevin: You mentioned CSS-P – CSS Positioning – and that’s something that I think this book is especially good at because there are two or three ways of achieving any given CSS layout, and really, which one is best for the job can depend on several constraints. And this book, it’s got a chapter on CSS layout that it really goes, okay, if you have these constraints, this is the best solution. If you have these constraints, that’s the best solution.
凯文：您提到过CSS-P – CSS定位–我认为这本书特别擅长，因为有两种或三种方法可以实现任何给定CSS布局，实际上，哪种方法最适合工作取决于几个约束。 本书中有一章是关于CSS布局的，实际上，如果您有这些限制，这是最好的解决方案。 如果您有这些限制，那是最好的解决方案。
Rachel: Yeah, I mean that’s … and a lot of that really comes from doing things at work, you know, and working out which of the things is sort of the most robust. You know, it’s kind of, this is a good place to start if you need to do this kind of layout and obviously there’s going to be exceptions to that, but you need a starting point, particularly when you’re just coming to it and trying to work out which on earth of all these techniques you’ve seen would be best to use.
Rachel：是的，我的意思是……而且，其中很多确实来自工作中的工作，您知道，并且确定哪些工作最可靠。 您知道，这是一个不错的起点，如果您需要进行这种布局，并且显然会有例外，但是您需要一个起点，尤其是当您刚开始使用它时，尝试找出您所见过的所有这些技巧中的哪一种最合适。
Kevin: This is the third edition of the book. It’s one of SitePoint’s most popular books which is the reason we wanted a third edition but from the author’s perspective, what justified for you updating this, writing a third edition?
凯文：这是本书的第三版。 这是SitePoint最受欢迎的书之一，这就是我们想要第三版的原因，但是从作者的角度来看，您更新此书并编写第三版的理由是什么？
Rachel: Well I think it’s a quite interesting point. When I go back to the very first edition, Netscape 4 was still on the scene, not as a majority browser but still was a browser that enough people, particularly into the universities and things, were using.
雷切尔：我认为这很有趣。 当我回到第一版时，Netscape 4仍在市场上，不是作为大多数浏览器，而是仍然是足够的人使用的浏览器，尤其是大学和其他领域的人。
Kevin: Yeah, it boggles my mind that SitePoint has published books that covered Netscape 4.
凯文：是的，我不知道SitePoint已出版涉及Netscape 4的书籍。
Rachel: I know! I know.
雷切尔：我知道！ 我知道。
Kevin: It seems so long ago now.
凯文：看来现在已经很久了。
Rachel: Yes, it makes me feel very old. This Third Edition thing is like your children growing up.
雷切尔：是的，这让我感到很老。 第三版就像你的孩子长大。
And then when we did the last edition, we were talking about IE7 and things. We didn’t really drop support for IE6 in any shape or form, it was still a very common browser. I think at this point, given the lifespan of a book maybe being sort of 18 months or whatever, we’re starting to see IE6 dropping away. Certainly at work, we are able to start saying to clients, “Well, yes, we can do all the bells and whistles. We’re going have to drop some of those for IE6.” So that might be using GIFs instead of transparent PNGs or various techniques. But we were just slightly dropping this. We’re not losing support for IE6. We’re not saying, “If you got IE6, you can’t view our site.” What we’re saying is this sort of top level visual design is not going to be quite as nice because it just doesn’t support those things.
然后，当我们完成上一版时，我们正在谈论IE7及其它东西。 我们并没有真正放弃对IE6的任何形式的支持，它仍然是一个非常常见的浏览器。 我想在这一点上，考虑到一本书的寿命可能长达18个月之久，我们开始看到IE6逐渐消失。 当然，在工作中，我们可以开始对客户说：“嗯，是的，我们可以尽一切努力。 对于IE6，我们将不得不删除其中一些。” 因此，可能使用的是GIF而不是透明的PNG或各种技术。 但是我们只是略微放弃了这一点。 我们不会失去对IE6的支持。 我们并不是说：“如果您拥有IE6，则无法查看我们的网站。” 我们要说的是，这种顶级视觉设计不会那么好，因为它不支持那些东西。
And if you’ve only got 10% of users, say, in IE6, then you probably don’t want to put a huge amount of your development budget into supporting that 10% as long as that 10% have got a decent experience of the site and can view everything.
而且，如果您只有10％的用户(例如，在IE6中)，那么您可能不希望将大量的开发预算用于支持这10％的用户，只要这10％的用户拥有不错的经验该网站，并可以查看所有内容。
So I guess that’s the way that I’ve gone to some extent in CSS Anthology. I still very much wanted all the solutions to work in IE6. So where I’ve used things that aren’t supported – a good case in point is the alpha transparency PNG thing; I have explained why it doesn’t work and ways around that. Whether you use some hack to force transparency or whether you do what we often do now at work and drop back to using GIFs because sometimes it’s just a case of changing the background image and using GIFs to remove the need for transparency.
所以我想这就是我在CSS Anthology中所采用的方式。 我仍然非常希望所有解决方案都能在IE6中使用。 因此，在我使用了不支持的功能的地方–一个很好的例子是Alpha透明度PNG东西； 我已经解释了为什么它不起作用以及解决方法。 您是否使用黑客手段来增强透明度，还是执行我们现在经常在工作中使用的工作，而放弃使用GIF，因为有时只是更改背景图像并使用GIF消除透明性的一种情况。
Kevin: I’m curious; we’ve spoken several times about the state of Internet Explorer 6 recently on the podcast. I’m very curious about what the response has been from customers to that kind of situation now. When you’re speaking to a client and you’re making that case for treating IE6 as a downlevel browser effectively, what is the response? Are they receptive to that now?
凯文：我很好奇。 我们最近在播客上谈到了Internet Explorer 6的状态。 我很好奇客户现在对这种情况的React。 当您与客户交谈时，您正在考虑将IE6有效地视为下层浏览器，那么会有什么React呢？ 他们现在接受了吗？
Rachel: Actually they are and I think it’s purely, to be honest, on financial reasons because usually, you can battle it out and get IE6. Even with things like alpha transparency, which does tend to be a thing which can take quite a lot of time, if you decide to go and hack it with PNG fixes and stuff which then causes all sorts of other problems… if you still say, “Well, we can try and do it or you can scale your design down.” And they’re looking at it and thinking, “Well, we could the design we want, get it working in 90% of browsers exactly as we want and then perhaps scale it back a bit.” And when they look at it in a purely practical and business way, it doesn’t make sense to spend a huge amount of time and it can be on a very complex design. It can be an awful lot of time put into a browser which is going away…
Rachel：实际上，实际上，出于财务原因，我认为这是纯粹的，因为通常情况下，您可以与之抗衡并获得IE6。 即使使用Alpha透明度之类的东西也确实会花费大量时间，但是如果您决定使用PNG修复程序和东西对其进行破解，然后会导致各种其他问题……如果您仍然说， “好吧，我们可以尝试做，或者您可以按比例缩小设计。” 他们正在研究它，然后思考：“好吧，我们可以设计出想要的设计，使其完全在90％的浏览器中运行，然后再将其缩小一点。” 当他们以纯粹实用和商业的方式看待它时，花费大量时间是没有意义的，并且它可以用于非常复杂的设计。 将大量时间浪费在即将消失的浏览器中……
Kevin: Are you in a position of having to quantify that for them? Are you having to say, “Look, if you want it to look this nice in IE6, it’s going to cost you this much extra.”
凯文：你有能力为他们量化吗？ 您是否要说：“看，如果您希望它在IE6中看起来如此漂亮，那将使您付出额外的成本。”
Rachel: I have taken to actually spelling out what it costs, rather than just wrapping it all into the design. Because for some clients, they might look at their stats and say, “Well, actually we only get 5% of people now.” It just depends on the site.
Rachel：我已经开始真正地阐明了它的成本，而不只是将其全部包装到设计中。 因为对于某些客户，他们可能会查看其统计信息并说：“嗯，实际上我们现在只得到5％的人。” 这仅取决于站点。
Something that’s going into a very corporate market may have an awful lot more. But then, those kinds of designs are often an awful lot easier to implement. It tends to be the more cutting edge stuff and things for particularly for a youth market or whether where they really want to go for it and really push the boat out with the design. And often, those markets don’t have very much IE6 because they’re individuals who can upgrade, who do get newer computers and therefore, get newer versions of the operating system and newer browsers. So I think it’s worth actually spelling that out to clients and saying, “We can do it. I’m not saying this is technically impossible.” And we do this with all sorts of things, especially when we talk about the backend. People say, “Can you do this and can you do that?” And you say, “Well, yes, technically, we can do it but this is how long it’s going to take, and is it worth it?”
进入非常公司化市场的东西可能还要可怕得多。 但是，这些设计通常非常容易实现。 它往往是最前沿的东西，特别是对于青年市场，或者他们是否真的想去那里并真正将设计推向新的高度。 通常，那些市场没有太多的IE6，因为他们是可以升级的人，确实拥有更新的计算机，因此也拥有更新的操作系统和更新的浏览器。 因此，我认为值得向客户明确说明这一点，并说：“我们可以做到。 我并不是说这在技术上是不可能的。” 而且我们会做各种各样的事情，尤其是当我们谈论后端时。 人们说：“你能做到，你能做到吗？” 您会说：“嗯，是的，从技术上讲，我们可以做到，但这需要花费多长时间，值得吗？”
I think it’s exactly the same with front end design. So, I do try and spell out where money is going when putting together a proposal so it isn’t just all rolled up into some big front end design thing. And we do work with design agencies. I work for a company who works specifically with design agencies doing their web development. So we are in probably a slightly better situation than people who have to pitch to real end clients because we’re talking to designers who do understand a bit of what all this is about and what this means.
我认为与前端设计完全相同。 因此，我确实尝试拼凑出提案时要说明资金的去向，以便不仅将其汇总到一些大型前端设计中。 并且我们与设计机构合作。 我为一家专门与设计机构合作进行网站开发的公司工作。 因此，相比那些不得不向真正的最终客户推销产品的人，我们所处的状况可能要好一些，因为我们正在与确实了解所有这些内容和含义的设计师进行交流。
Kevin: Well with IE6 fading into the background is a feature of this book, I suppose, the new browser on the scene then is IE8. What’s your impression of IE8 so far?
凯文：我想，随着IE6逐渐淡出背景，这是本书的一大特色，那么当时出现的新浏览器就是IE8。 到目前为止，您对IE8的印象如何？
Rachel: Day to day, I have no problem with IE8, to be honest. I know the various things that the people discover and every browser has bugs. But actually, as a web developer, doing my job, I can usually build something – I work in Firefox, as my main browser. I can test it in Firefox. I can look at it in Safari. I can look at it in Opera. I look at it in IE8 and they will all look the same. I very, very rarely come across a situation where I’ve had a problem that is specific to IE8, which is brilliant because that’s what we all asked for. Of course, you’re going to have bugs and sometimes you come across something in Safari or in Firefox, you think what on earth is that doing?
Rachel：每天，老实说，我对IE8没问题。 我知道人们会发现各种各样的东西，并且每个浏览器都存在错误。 但是实际上，作为一名Web开发人员，我通常可以构建一些东西–我在Firefox中作为主要浏览器工作。 我可以在Firefox中对其进行测试。 我可以在Safari中查看它。 我可以在Opera中查看它。 我在IE8中看过它们，它们看起来都一样。 我很少遇到遇到IE8特有的问题的情况，这种情况非常好，因为这就是我们所有人都要求的情况。 当然，您将遇到错误，有时您在Safari或Firefox中遇到某些问题，您认为这到底在做什么？
Kevin: We’ve had the same experience very much. Almost invariably every time we have a problem in IE8, it’s because of something we did for IE7…
凯文：我们有很多相同的经历。 几乎每次我们在IE8中遇到问题时，都是因为我们为IE7做过某些事情……
Rachel: Yes.
雷切尔：是的。
Kevin: …that is now not necessary in IE8. I suppose that’s very much what IE7 was too. It was fixing big painful bugs. IE8 has done that a fair bit too, but is there anything new in IE8 that you find yourself either taking advantage of or wanting to take advantage of because a new release of Safari comes out or Firefox comes out and we’re talking about web fonts, we’re talking about being able to put shadows on things but a new version of Internet Explorer comes out and it seems like we’re talking about, “Oh, I don’t have to deal with that bug anymore.”
凯文： ...现在在IE8中不再需要。 我想这与IE7差不多。 它正在修复令人痛苦的大错误。 IE8所做的也相当不错，但是IE8中有什么新功能可以使您发现自己想要利用还是想要利用，因为新版本的Safari或Firefox出现了，我们正在谈论网络字体，我们谈论的是在事物上加阴影，但是出现了新版本的Internet Explorer，看来我们在谈论：“哦，我不必再处理该错误了。”
Rachel: I think that is the case. I think really it comes down to that people play with Safari and they play with Firefox. They often have these – particularly Safari’s brought in things very early on which are quite interesting to us web developers but actually, we’re probably not using for real sites. We’re not using at work, as it were, because we know that not enough people actually have that browser.
雷切尔：我认为是这样。 我认为，真正的原因在于人们使用Safari和Firefox。 他们经常拥有这些功能-特别是Safari早期引入的功能，这对于我们的Web开发人员来说非常有趣，但实际上，我们可能不将其用于实际网站。 我们没有像以前那样在工作中使用，因为我们知道实际上没有足够的人使用该浏览器。
I think the same is true with things that are in IE8 – the CSS tables stuff which of course, exists in other browsers already. We can’t really use it that much or to a great extent in production work at the moment because there are too many people with IE7, and even IE6, knocking around. The sort of work we tend to do – I’m pretty pragmatic about this stuff, it has to work and I will use the method that works well and is non-damaging and I do that. That tends to be where I go with this stuff because these sites are going to be around for a long time. I’m still maintaining sites that I’ve built six years ago. I know these things will be around for a long time and so, we’re trying to build in a very robust way because of that.
我认为IE8中的情况也是如此-CSS表的内容当然已经存在于其他浏览器中。 目前，我们无法在生产工作中真正使用或使用它的程度很高，因为IE7甚至IE6的人太多了。 我们倾向于做的那种工作–我对这些东西非常务实，它必须有效，并且我将使用效果很好且不会造成破坏的方法，而我会这样做。 我倾向于使用这些东西，因为这些网站将存在很长时间。 我仍在维护六年前建立的网站。 我知道这些东西会存在很长一段时间，因此，我们正因此而试图以一种非常可靠的方式进行构建。
I think that the problem with getting excited about new stuff in browsers is then you just get very frustrated and you’re like things aren’t moving on fast enough. I want to be able to use this stuff. So I think it’s balancing up saying yeah, look at all this new cool stuff but also well, I’ve got to do my job.
我认为，对浏览器中的新事物感到兴奋的问题是，您只会感到非常沮丧，并且您感觉事情进展得不够快。 我希望能够使用这些东西。 因此，我认为这是平衡的，是的，看看所有这些新奇的东西，但是好吧，我必须做好我的工作。
Kevin: So do you find yourself in the position of when you’re talking about, for example, we’re retiring IE6 then I suppose at that point you’re thinking wow, now we can start using these things that everything apart from IE6 supports. Your cool new features happen when you’re retiring old browsers.
凯文：那么，当您在谈论时，您是否处于自己的位置，例如，我们正在淘汰IE6，那么我想您正在考虑哇，现在我们可以开始使用这些东西，除了IE6支持。 当您淘汰旧的浏览器时，您会发现一些很棒的新功能。
Rachel: Yes, I think they do and for me, it is often just stuff like selectors that we can’t use because of IE6 or that we are currently having to replace with JavaScript if we do use them and that sort of thing. It’s little things like that actually that make the biggest difference, I think. Not needing to stick a class on your first paragraph to be able to make it look different to the others. That’s the stuff that actually day to day you notice when you start saying yeah, it’s okay if IE6 doesn’t have that first paragraph larger.
Rachel：是的，我认为它们确实可以，对我而言，通常只是选择器之类的东西，由于IE6而无法使用，或者如果我们确实使用它们之类的东西，我们目前必须用JavaScript代替它们。 我认为，实际上那样的小事最大的不同。 无需在您的第一段上贴上课程，以使其与其他段落看起来不同。 当您开始说“是”时，实际上就是您每天注意到的东西，如果IE6的第一段没有更大的内容也可以。
So I think there are sort of two things. There is the kind of geek in me that likes to look at all the cool new stuff that’s coming out and play with it, and then there’s the person who just has to run a business and do a job. And in that sense, it’s often the little things that make the biggest difference, like when we don’t have to worry about whether something has layout or not, will be lovely.
所以我认为有两件事。 我内心有些怪异，喜欢看所有即将出现的有趣新事物，然后玩弄它，然后就有个人只需要经营一家公司并做一份工作。 从这个意义上讲，通常是微小的事情会发挥最大作用，例如，当我们不必担心某物是否具有布局时，它们会变得很可爱。
Kevin: Absolutely. Speaking of has layout and hacks like that, it seems to me that CSS in general… the playing field between browsers seems to be levelling out a bit. Certainly, there is less need for hacks than ever before. Speaking for yourself, are you a CSS hack person or a conditional comment person?
凯文：是的 。 说到布局和黑客之类的东西，在我看来，CSS总体而言……浏览器之间的竞争似乎正在趋于平缓。 当然，黑客的需求比以往任何时候都少。 自己来说，您是CSS黑客人员还是有条件的评论人员？
Rachel: It depends on the job. I still maintain that if there are two things that need fixing in IE6 then using * html is perfectly fine because its two little things you put in your style sheet and you’re not having to add anything extra to the document. Where you’ve got a lot of stuff, for instance, if you’re hacking around transparency or something, then yet, I’ll use conditional comments because it means I can get that CSS and the JavaScript and anything else; it’s all out of the way and somewhere separate.
雷切尔：取决于工作。 我仍然坚持认为，如果需要在IE6中修复两件事，那么使用* html完全可以，因为您将这两个小问题放在了样式表中，而不必在文档中添加任何其他内容。 例如，在您有很多东西的地方，如果您正在研究透明性之类的东西，那么，我将使用条件注释，因为这意味着我可以获得CSS和JavaScript以及其他内容； 一切都在一个单独的地方。
So I think the answer really is it depends. I think most of the stuff that we do… that we’ve done recently, there have been significant amount of IE6 fixes and so, yeah, we have a tendency to put them into something attached to conditional comments. I have a bit of an issue about this sort of making comments parsable thing which has happened because of that. I’m not sure that’s such a great way to go but I think as with a lot of things, you use the best methods that you have available.
所以我认为答案确实取决于情况。 我认为我们所做的大多数工作……最近完成的工作，已经进行了大量的IE6修复，因此，是的，我们倾向于将其放入附有条件注释的内容中。 我有一个关于这种使注释可解析的事情的问题，因为这已经发生了。 我不确定这是一个很好的方法，但我认为与很多事情一样，您将使用可用的最佳方法。
Kevin: It’s really a strange thing, I actually find myself feeling okay about it as long as it’s just an Internet Explorer thing.
凯文：这确实是一件奇怪的事情，实际上，只要是Internet Explorer，我就会觉得自己还可以。
Rachel: Yes.
雷切尔：是的。
Kevin: As soon as it becomes something that other browsers want to do, then you start having a standard for the contents of comments and just feels icky.
凯文(Kevin)：一旦它成为其他浏览器想要做的事情，那么您就开始对注释的内容有了一个标准，并且感到恶心。
Rachel: That feels wrong. And I think also, it’s getting away from the place you want to be, which is that all browsers support the same stuff. If browsers start saying, “Oh, it’s okay that we do this in a weird way because you can get around it with conditional comments,” and so before we know it, we’ve got sort of like 20 style sheets. That’s not somewhere we want to be going and I think this stuff first came on the scene and I was very worried that it was going to be used as an excuse by browsers to say, “Well, it’s okay for us to do this differently or whatever.” And obviously that was something we were trying to get well away from. But that doesn’t seem to have happened and it just tend to being used now by people just to get around browser bugs in IE and that’s kind of okay because, if you’re dealing with a bug, I think whatever methods you have to use just to get around that, that’s probably okay and if you can do it in as clean a way as possible. So it’s not just tripping you up constantly afterwards, well, that’s helpful.
雷切尔：感觉不对。 而且我认为，它正在远离您想要成为的地方，这是所有浏览器都支持相同的功能。 如果浏览器开始说：“哦，我们可以以一种怪异的方式进行此操作，因为您可以通过条件注释来解决它，”因此在我们知道之前，我们大约有20种样式表。 那不是我们想要去的地方，我认为这些东西首先出现在现场，我非常担心它会被浏览器用作借口，说：“嗯，我们可以以不同的方式来做这件事，或者随你。” 显然，这是我们试图摆脱的问题。 但这似乎并没有发生，只是人们现在正使用它只是为了解决IE中的浏览器错误，这是可以的，因为如果您要处理错误，我认为您必须采取任何方法只是为了解决这个问题，那也许还可以，如果您可以以一种尽可能简洁的方式做到这一点。 因此，这不只是事后让您不断绊倒，还很有帮助。
Kevin: I’m interested in discussing how maybe the CSS code that you see in one of your books differs from the code that you actually write day to day in your work. Are there any differences?
凯文：我有兴趣讨论您在一本书中看到CSS代码可能与您日常工作中实际编写的代码有何不同。 有什么区别吗？
Rachel: Not hugely. I think certainly not CSS Anthology because I try to write as much as possible to be practical stuff or could just lift and use.
瑞秋：不是很大。 我认为肯定不是CSS Anthology，因为我尝试尽可能多地写一些实用的东西，或者只是尝试和使用。
Kevin: Well see, that it in itself is a constraint that I might not have in the real world when working on my own code. Every piece of code in CSS Anthology as much as possible has to stand alone. Do you have any dependencies when you’re working? Do you have a framework that you start from or are you starting from scratch for every project?
凯文：好吧，这本身就是我在编写自己的代码时在现实世界中可能没有的约束。 CSS Anthology中的每一段代码都必须尽可能独立。 工作时有依赖性吗？ 对于每个项目，您是否都具有从头开始或从头开始的框架？
Rachel: I don’t use a framework. I’ve had to use them before because I do a lot of work for design agencies, you have come to across existing stuff or they standardized on something and wanted to use it. I find it took far longer than just sitting down and hammering it out. I think a lot of that is due to the fact that I’ve just been doing this for so long that I’ve got to kind of framework in my head. But I’ve actually I find that what you end up with this, you end up with a lot of stuff to counteract the framework unless it’s been designed specifically for that. I’ve come across companies where they’ve standardized on a framework and their designers know the framework. So they design stuff they think will fit within it grids and whatever, which I guess is one way of doing things and I guess could let you knock stuff out very quickly.
雷切尔：我不使用框架。 我以前不得不使用它们，因为我为设计机构做了很多工作，您遇到了现有的东西，或者他们对某些东西进行了标准化并想使用它。 我发现它花费的时间远远超过坐下来并敲碎它的时间。 我认为很多原因是因为我这样做已经很久了，以至于我不得不对某种框架有所了解。 但实际上，我发现您最终会遇到什么，除非针对该框架进行了专门设计，否则您会得到很多抵消该框架的内容。 我遇到过一些公司，他们对框架进行了标准化，而他们的设计师也知道该框架。 因此，他们设计了他们认为适合网格的东西，我想这是一种做事的方式，我想可以让您很快地将东西淘汰掉。
Kevin: So you find it’s a bit limiting and as soon as you want to do something that the framework doesn’t accommodate out of the box, you have to work around it a lot more?
凯文：所以您发现它有点局限性，一旦您想做一些框架无法容纳的事情，您就需要做更多的工作了吗？
Rachel: Yeah, you have to work around it. I’m not anti-frameworks. If people find that a useful way to work, then that’s cool but I think, yeah, I’d much rather actually take each project as an individual thing and build it in as clean a way as possible. But that’s just me; I’m not particularly religious about all this stuff.
Rachel：是的，您必须解决它。 我不是反框架。 如果人们发现一种有用的工作方式，那就太酷了，但我认为，是的，我实际上更希望将每个项目视为一件独立的事情，并以尽可能简洁的方式进行构建。 但这就是我； 我对所有这些东西都不特别虔诚。
Kevin: Well speaking of religion, what sort of tools do you use? Because developers seem get especially religious about their text editor.
凯文：说到宗教，您使用哪种工具？ 因为开发人员似乎对他们的文本编辑器特别虔诚。
Rachel: I only use what I use for PHP which is Zend. In fact, I’m still an old style Zend Studio user because I’ve never quite managed to get the Eclipse version to install on my Ubuntu box. So, there is a new version out, I really need to try and get this working.
Rachel：我只使用Zend用于PHP。 实际上，我仍然是Zend Studio的老式用户，因为我从来没有设法在我的Ubuntu机器上安装Eclipse版本。 因此，有一个新版本发布，我真的需要尝试并使其正常运行。
So yes, I’m using old school Zend Studio and I use that for everything. It’s a rubbish CSS editor but I just sort of type. I’ve always been someone who really just needs a glorified Notepad. I just type. I type very fast and very accurately and I don’t use a lot of the tools that are in editors. I like Zend for PHP because I like the fact that its intelligent enough to sort of deal with old PHP well and come up with hints for my own functions and things, which is nice. That’s useful on a big project but for CSS, I just sit down and type.
所以，是的，我正在使用老式的Zend Studio，并将其用于所有功能。 这是一个垃圾CSS编辑器，但我只是某种类型。 我一直都是真正需要荣耀的记事本的人。 我只是打字。 我可以非常快速，非常准确地键入内容，而且我不会使用很多编辑器中的工具。 我喜欢Zend for PHP，因为我喜欢这样的事实，它足够智能，可以很好地处理旧PHP，并为我自己的函数和事物提供提示，这很好。 这对于大型项目很有用，但对于CSS，我只是坐下来打字。
Kevin: What browser do you usually have opened when you’re developing? What’s the first browser you test in as you’re working?
凯文：您在开发时通常会打开什么浏览器？ 您在工作时所使用的第一个浏览器是什么？
Rachel: Firefox, and it’s mainly because I work on Ubuntu at work and I have a Mac at home. So I can use Firefox and Web Developer toolbar and things and Firebug I can have that everywhere. And it’s the same thing with Zend as well, I can install that on the Mac and on Ubuntu. So it’s nice to have common tools without worrying which operating system I’m sat in front of.
Rachel： Firefox，主要是因为我在工作中使用Ubuntu，并且家里有Mac。 因此，我可以使用Firefox和Web Developer工具栏以及东西和Firebug ，到处都可以使用。 Zend也是如此，我可以在Mac和Ubuntu上安装它。 因此，拥有通用工具而不用担心我坐在哪个操作系统之前就很好了。
Kevin: Let’s talk for a minute about CSS3 which you mentioned you had an excuse to keep up with because of you’re writing. What are your thoughts on the new stuff that seems to be coming in CSS3 and how it’s being introduced as opposed to the last wave of stuff they got introduced to browsers? Are they doing a better job of it?
凯文：让我们聊一会关于CSS3的问题，您提到CSS3是因为您在写作而跟上。 您对CSS3中似乎即将出现的新内容有何看法，以及与它们被引入浏览器的最后一波潮流相反，它是如何被引入的？ 他们做得更好吗？
Rachel: I don’t know, I think with all of these stuff, you kind of just have to wait and see how people use it and what people pick up on. I think that there is kind of two bunches of people out there; there is people who just … they just want to know about what works and won’t touch anything until they see other people use it and say, “Look, it works. It works in these browsers.” And I think that’s the point at which new things will get picked up, really is when the people who like to play with new stuff get it, play with it, write about it, and say, “Look, it works in these browsers, you can use this.”
Rachel：我不知道，我认为所有这些东西，您都只需要拭目以待，看看人们如何使用它以及人们会从中学到什么。 我认为那里有两束人。 有些人只是……他们只是想知道什么有效，在他们看到别人使用它并说：“看，它有效之前，他们不会碰任何东西。 它可以在这些浏览器中使用。” 我认为这就是获取新事物的关键所在，实际上是当喜欢玩新事物的人得到它，玩它，写它并说：“看，它在这些浏览器中可以工作，您可以使用它。”
Kevin: Whereas, I’m very much one of those people who get excited by a sexy spec.
凯文：但是，我是那些因性感的规格而兴奋的人中的一员。
Rachel: Yeah, when I have free time, I say I find that sort of almost academically interesting, you know, “What can this do? What will this bit of the spec, what will that introduce if that gets implemented?” I think most people probably really aren’t that interested in things until they can see a real use for it and they can see that it won’t break.
瑞秋：是的，我有空的时候，我说我发现这几乎在学术上很有趣，你知道，“这能做什么？ 规范的这部分内容将是什么？如果实施，将会带来什么？” 我认为大多数人可能对事物没有真正的兴趣，直到他们看到它的真正用途并且看到它不会破裂为止。
Kevin: So is there anything in CSS3 that passes that litmus test yet?
凯文：那么CSS3中有什么可以通过石蕊测试的呢？
Rachel: There are sort of bits of it isn’t there but I think that – I mean IE8 is helping obviously with particularly the CSS tables stuff and things. We’re starting to see more stuff become mainstream but it’s probably a bit early really. I guess we’ll get there…
Rachel：那里还没有很多东西，但是我认为–我的意思是IE8显然在帮助CSS表格方面有所帮助。 我们开始看到更多的东西成为主流，但实际上可能还为时过早。 我想我们会到达那里...
Kevin: It’s almost artificial to discuss CSS3 as a thing because it really is being approached as a bunch of little bits.
凯文：将CSS3当作一件事来讨论几乎是人为的，因为实际上它只是一小部分。
Rachel: Yes, I think it’s little bits as they come in. I think people probably wont even be thinking, “It’s CSS3. It’s just a new thing that works in the browser.”
Rachel：是的，我想它的引入有点。我认为人们甚至可能不会想，“这是CSS3。 这只是在浏览器中起作用的新事物。”
Kevin: The way they’re approaching it now CSS3 will never be done. They’ll just keep adding more bits to it.
凯文：他们现在正在接近CSS3的方式将永远无法完成。 他们将继续增加更多的比特。
Rachel: I think that’s it. I think its more which bits of it can we use and that’s really what I’m interested in because its stuff that can be actually used, even if it can only be used in Firefox, where sometimes you can get away with adding a few little tweaks, particularly for personal stuff or stuff that’s aimed at a particular market, even if only a few people actually see it. I think there’s quite a lot of people doing that sort of thing with their own stuff.
雷切尔：我想就是这样。 我认为这是我们可以使用的更多内容，而这正是我感兴趣的，因为它的内容可以实际使用，即使只能在Firefox中使用，有时您也可以添加一些内容。进行调整，特别是针对个人物品或针对特定市场的物品进行调整，即使实际上只有少数人看到它也是如此。 我认为有很多人用自己的东西做这种事情。
I think it’s very easy to sort of think the timeframes for all this stuff are so long but actually when you look back, when you think it’s not actually that long ago, we were battling with Netscape 4, and thought it would never go away and that we’d never be able to do CSS layouts in a sensible manner.
我认为很容易想到所有这些东西的时限都很长，但是实际上当您回头看时，当您认为不是很久以前时，我们正在与Netscape 4作战，并认为它永远不会消失并且我们永远无法以明智的方式进行CSS布局。
Kevin: This stuff comes in waves and we’re very much in the midst of a wave crashing over us right now. The browsers are coming thick and fast with new features.
凯文：这些东西一浪高过一浪，我们现在正处于一阵浪潮中。 浏览器功能日趋强大，功能强大。
Rachel: Yeah, I think it’s just… it’s people, and I guess people like us, who do write about this stuff, looking and being a bit of a filter for the majority of people who will only do stuff when they see some expert say, “Here it is, you do it like this, and it works in these browsers.” I think that’s very much what I do as an author.
Rachel：是的，我认为这只是……是个人，我想像我们这样的人确实在写有关这些东西的信息，他们为大多数只会在看到专家的意见而做事的人中寻找并成为一个过滤器，“就是这样，您可以这样做，并且可以在这些浏览器中使用。” 我认为这就是我作为作者所做的工作。
I like to look at stuff and actually say, “Well, you can do this and here is a way around it for browsers that don’t support it…” I think that’s what the book does for a lot of things and particular things that aren’t going to work in IE6.
我喜欢看东西，然后说：“好吧，您可以做到这一点，对于不支持它的浏览器来说，这是一种解决方法……”我认为这就是本书在很多事情和特定事情上所做的不会在IE6中工作。
Kevin: Well you mentioned you code in Zend Studio because you spend a lot of your time in PHP. I wanted to take a few minutes before we wrap this up to talk about Perch. Perch is a CMS product that you are selling, is that right?
凯文：嗯，您提到您在Zend Studio中进行编码是因为您在PHP中花费了大量时间。 我想花点时间讨论一下Perch 。 Perch是您要出售的CMS产品，对吗？
Rachel: Yeah, it’s a really little CMS. As a company, we have a big CMS framework that we developed, which a lot of our projects are based upon, which is sort very flexible, but a key thing about it is that it’s template based and it doesn’t sort of force any reliance on a certain markup language and it allows people to use things like microformats and things.
Rachel：是的，这是一个非常小的CMS。 作为一家公司，我们开发了一个大型CMS框架，该框架是我们许多项目所基于的，该框架非常灵活，但是关键是它基于模板，并且不会产生任何作用依靠某种标记语言，它使人们可以使用微格式之类的东西。
The big problem with a lot of CMS, large and small, is this problem of you get a big text area that you’ve just blab your text into. So you lose the ability to have structured content and of course, with things like microformats, structured data is quite important.
大小不一的CMS所面临的最大问题是，您遇到了一个很大的文本区域，只是将文本拖入其中。 因此，您将失去拥有结构化内容的能力，当然，对于微格式而言，结构化数据非常重要。
Also, I’m a bit of database geek and I like to store things properly. If something is an event, I want it stored as an event because that might be useful in the future and it means we can use it elsewhere.
另外，我有点数据库极客，我喜欢正确地存储东西。 如果某件事是事件，我希望将其存储为事件，因为这将来可能会有用，这意味着我们可以在其他地方使用它。
Anyway, I mean that was somewhere that we’ve got with work and with our sort of main product, the thing that we build a lot of our big stuff on. But then we were also getting, you know, because we work with design agencies, people who had very, very small products – things they needed to launch in a very small brochure site, but they wanted it to be editable, and obviously, it was a complete overkill for us to do an implementation of our big CMS on these things.
无论如何，我的意思是那是我们在工作和我们的主要产品上建立的东西，我们在上面建立了很多重要的东西。 但是后来，我们也得到了帮助，因为我们与设计机构合作，他们拥有非常非常小的产品–他们需要在很小的宣传册站点中发布这些产品，但是他们希望它是可编辑的，而且显然是这样。 was a complete overkill for us to do an implementation of our big CMS on these things.
Kevin: Well, yeah and you mentioned when we were discussing CSS frameworks before that often learning the framework and ways around it is more trouble than just doing it yourself. I find that’s true with a lot of CSS. They’re called CMSs, but in most cases, they are full frameworks where you start with the CMS and then you code to the style mandated by the CMS. What I find really attractive and interesting about Perch is you start with your own code.
Kevin: Well, yeah and you mentioned when we were discussing CSS frameworks before that often learning the framework and ways around it is more trouble than just doing it yourself. I find that's true with a lot of CSS. They're called CMSs, but in most cases, they are full frameworks where you start with the CMS and then you code to the style mandated by the CMS. What I find really attractive and interesting about Perch is you start with your own code.
Rachel: I mean that was the thing, we wanted something to let people build things in the way they already build things. I’m sure if they want to use Dreamweaver, they can just build their pages like they normally do and they don’t have to think about will this work, will I be able to split this up? Because even using something like WordPress, which a lot of people say, oh well we can do that for free with WordPress; it’s quite a lot of work to get to the point where your templates work. And if you’re a designer and not a coder and don’t want to be a coder, that can seem like quite a learning curve to get that going.
Rachel: I mean that was the thing, we wanted something to let people build things in the way they already build things. I'm sure if they want to use Dreamweaver, they can just build their pages like they normally do and they don't have to think about will this work, will I be able to split this up? Because even using something like WordPress, which a lot of people say, oh well we can do that for free with WordPress; it's quite a lot of work to get to the point where your templates work. And if you're a designer and not a coder and don't want to be a coder, that can seem like quite a learning curve to get that going.
So that was the thing with Perch; we wanted something that was very, very simple for people to get up and running, but that also allowed this structured content, that allowed people to get their clients to add contact information as a contact and to be able to not just provide people with a big sort of text block to type into, although they can do that if that’s what they want, but I think a lot of the power is this template idea where you can create just with normal HTML, these templates, which then are used to structure the data.
So that was the thing with Perch; we wanted something that was very, very simple for people to get up and running, but that also allowed this structured content, that allowed people to get their clients to add contact information as a contact and to be able to not just provide people with a big sort of text block to type into, although they can do that if that's what they want, but I think a lot of the power is this template idea where you can create just with normal HTML, these templates, which then are used to structure the data.
I think it has been very successful, I think there was a need for it, and people are doing all sorts of interesting things with it. It’s great fun seeing the sites that people build with something and it’s a big departure for us because we’ve just done services.
I think it has been very successful, I think there was a need for it, and people are doing all sorts of interesting things with it. It's great fun seeing the sites that people build with something and it's a big departure for us because we've just done services.
Kevin: As a product that was developed initially for internal use, I imagine… how long has Perch been around?
Kevin: As a product that was developed initially for internal use, I imagine… how long has Perch been around?
Rachel: Some of the concepts came from the big CMS we have so obviously, this is some of the ideas and the way it worked, but actually as its own product, it was developed very quickly because by that point, we knew exactly what it should be. But I mean, yeah, there were concepts in there that go back a very long way.
Rachel: Some of the concepts came from the big CMS we have so obviously, this is some of the ideas and the way it worked, but actually as its own product, it was developed very quickly because by that point, we knew exactly what it should be. But I mean, yeah, there were concepts in there that go back a very long way.
Kevin: So it wasn’t a case of taking something you had and writing the documentation and polish for it; it was, you took a bunch of ideas and put them together.
Kevin: So it wasn't a case of taking something you had and writing the documentation and polish for it; it was, you took a bunch of ideas and put them together.
Rachel: Yeah, once we realized that that’s what we wanted to do, it was sort of built as a new thing, there’s no sort of legacy, crafty stuff, it’s all PHP5 and built in that way. It’s new in itself, but yeah, I mean the ideas go back a long way. I’ve been building sort of custom content management systems since 2001. So everything we do, it is sort of built on that knowledge and knowing what works and what doesn’t.
Rachel: Yeah, once we realized that that's what we wanted to do, it was sort of built as a new thing, there's no sort of legacy, crafty stuff, it's all PHP5 and built in that way. It's new in itself, but yeah, I mean the ideas go back a long way. I've been building sort of custom content management systems since 2001. So everything we do, it is sort of built on that knowledge and knowing what works and what doesn't.
Kevin: So Perch – it’s written in PHP clearly, but you don’t have to necessarily know PHP very well in order to implement it.
Kevin: So Perch – it's written in PHP clearly, but you don't have to necessarily know PHP very well in order to implement it.
What’s exciting to me is CMSs these days, they’re either free open source or they cost thousands of dollars and purchase rather unique in that it’s got a very, very… how much does it cost for a license?
What's exciting to me is CMSs these days, they're either free open source or they cost thousands of dollars and purchase rather unique in that it's got a very, very… how much does it cost for a license?
Rachel: It’s £35.
Rachel: It's £35.
Kevin: Well, there you go, yeah, and that buys you for a domain or a site? How does it work?
Kevin: Well, there you go, yeah, and that buys you for a domain or a site? 它是如何工作的？
Rachel: Yeah, it’s on a domain basis, but we thought about this a lot because we wanted to sort of protect what we’ve done, but we don’t make it a pain to use for people. So basically, people set up their domain and they set up a test domain so they don’t have to keep changing and they can switch those at any point. I mean, really obviously we want… you can’t protect things to any great degree, as we all know, things like the PDFs for books and things.
Rachel: Yeah, it's on a domain basis, but we thought about this a lot because we wanted to sort of protect what we've done, but we don't make it a pain to use for people. So basically, people set up their domain and they set up a test domain so they don't have to keep changing and they can switch those at any point. I mean, really obviously we want… you can't protect things to any great degree, as we all know, things like the PDFs for books and things.
I mean, there’s always going to be a problem with people copying stuff, but we wanted… so that people knew that yes, they did need to pay for a site and hopefully, people will and they won’t try and subvert that. But we don’t want to make an absolute pain because it’s no fun if it’s pain to use something because the protection that’s been put on it when you’ve paid for it legally.
I mean, there's always going to be a problem with people copying stuff, but we wanted… so that people knew that yes, they did need to pay for a site and hopefully, people will and they won't try and subvert that. But we don't want to make an absolute pain because it's no fun if it's pain to use something because the protection that's been put on it when you've paid for it legally.
It’s a bit like being made to watch those awful introductions to DVDs that you’ve bought that tell you not to pirate them. You say “Well I bought this, why am I being made to watch this?”
It's a bit like being made to watch those awful introductions to DVDs that you've bought that tell you not to pirate them. You say “Well I bought this, why am I being made to watch this?”
Kevin: But still, it’s nice to have a price on the website because so many commercial CMSs you go to the company, how much does it going to cause me and they go, “Well how much money do you plan to make in using it?”
Kevin: But still, it's nice to have a price on the website because so many commercial CMSs you go to the company, how much does it going to cause me and they go, “Well how much money do you plan to make in using it?”
Rachel: Yes, exactly. We wanted people to know… we wanted it to be a cost that people could absorb into their projects quite easily. If it saves you an hour of time, then really, at most people’s rates, that should be saving you money. We wanted to make enough in it that it was worth us continuing to support it and continuing to develop it because obviously, yes, we could have had an open source project for instance, but we’re really busy web developers and we have to eat, and had we just sort of put it out there, you know, we’ve got things that we’ve built and put out there and actually finding the time to then do any more work on them is a struggle.
Rachel: Yes, exactly. We wanted people to know… we wanted it to be a cost that people could absorb into their projects quite easily. If it saves you an hour of time, then really, at most people's rates, that should be saving you money. We wanted to make enough in it that it was worth us continuing to support it and continuing to develop it because obviously, yes, we could have had an open source project for instance, but we're really busy web developers and we have to eat, and had we just sort of put it out there, you know, we've got things that we've built and put out there and actually finding the time to then do any more work on them is a struggle.
Kevin: Like I said, it’s interesting. Just the fact of putting a price tag on it in itself helps it stand out from the crowd because the world isn’t going to take that much notice of yet another open source CMS for PHP; let’s be honest.
Kevin: Like I said, it's interesting. Just the fact of putting a price tag on it in itself helps it stand out from the crowd because the world isn't going to take that much notice of yet another open source CMS for PHP; let's be honest.
Rachel: We are giving people lots of support for that money. That’s the the rub with a product of course is that suddenly you have customers to support.
Rachel: We are giving people lots of support for that money. That's the the rub with a product of course is that suddenly you have customers to support.
Kevin: It’s an incredible bargain.
Kevin: It's an incredible bargain.
Rachel: Yeah, which is new. I mean, that’s very new for us to have customers rather than clients. We really, as a company, have a fairly small number of clients who we work with for a very long time because we’re working with design agencies, so obviously they’re getting new jobs and we’re doing the development for them.
Rachel: Yeah, which is new. I mean, that's very new for us to have customers rather than clients. We really, as a company, have a fairly small number of clients who we work with for a very long time because we're working with design agencies, so obviously they're getting new jobs and we're doing the development for them.
Kevin: Well, there you have it listener, get in quick before they have to turn up the price to justify the support, yeah.
Kevin: Well, there you have it listener, get in quick before they have to turn up the price to justify the support, yeah.
Rachel: So there’s definitely a whole lot of stuff I could write about going from being a company that does services to being a company that has a product because the two are very, very different and it’s been very interesting, that sort of journey.
Rachel: So there's definitely a whole lot of stuff I could write about going from being a company that does services to being a company that has a product because the two are very, very different and it's been very interesting, that sort of journey.
Kevin: Well then, we may have to get you on at some point for another conversation along those lines.
Kevin: Well then, we may have to get you on at some point for another conversation along those lines.
Thank you for joining us, Rachel.
Thank you for joining us, Rachel.
Rachel: It’s been good.
Rachel: It's been good.
Kevin: It’s been an absolute pleasure.
Kevin: It's been an absolute pleasure.
Kevin: And thanks for listening to the SitePoint Podcast. If you have any thoughts or questions about today’s interview, please do get in touch. You can find SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom and you can find me on Twitter @sentience.
凯文：感谢您收听SitePoint播客。 如果您对今天的采访有任何想法或疑问，请保持联系。 你可以在Twitter上找到SitePoint @sitepointdotcom ，你可以找到我的Twitter @sentience 。
Visit sitepoint.com/podcast to leave a comment on the show and to subscribe to get every show automatically.
Visit sitepoint.com/podcast to leave a comment on the show and to subscribe to get every show automatically.
We’ll be back next week with another news and commentary show with our usual panel of experts.
下周我们将与我们通常的专家小组一起再次发布新闻和评论节目。
The SitePoint Podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker and I’m Kevin Yank. Bye for now.
SitePoint播客由Carl Longnecker制作，我叫Kevin Yank。 暂时再见。
Theme music by Mike Mella.
Mike Mella的主题音乐。
Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.
谢谢收听！ 欢迎使用下面的评论字段让我们知道我们的状况，或者继续讨论。
翻译自: https://www.sitepoint.com/podcast-27-css-rachel-andrew/
