September 27, 2005 – Jarrett House North

A trifecta of interesting CSS links in my aggregator this morning. First, Luke Melia points to an interesting post about maintainable CSS, and proposes modular CSS and Dave Hyatt’s rules for CSS use in Mozilla skins as possible solutions. For myself, I lean toward the former approach; I separated structural markup (the definition of header and sidebar boxes) from presentation markup (type and colors) within different sections of my stylesheet when I was doing the first round of design improvements. Other interesting solutions in the comments to Simon’s post, including this article from Digital Web Magazine about Architecting CSS.

Second, A List Apart provides six methods, of varying degrees of semantic correctness and coolness, for achieving multi-column lists with various combinations of XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Third, ALA also talks about the multi-column module in CSS3, and introduces a Javascript parser for the CSS syntax that helps bootstrap the new capabilities in browsers that don’t yet support the extensions. You have to see some of the examples, particularly numbers 2 and 5, to get why this is so cool, but once you do it’ll make you swear off long scrolling layouts forever.

I regret making a crack about Bavarian food last night without putting it in context. One of the most spectacular things about Oktoberfest was the smell of the food—primarily the spit-roasted chickens for sheer olfactory pleasure, but with contributions from sausages, potatoes and other delights. In fact, I ate well all week.

Too well. I gained five pounds in the seven days I spent on the ground, and would have kept going had it not been for a mounting sense of bloat. Which is only natural, really. I don’t think that even the locals eat Bavarian cuisine all the time. It’s not possible. To see what I mean, here’s a rundown of some of the meals I had:

Schweinshaxe (crackled pig’s leg): The first joint of a pig’s leg, grilled until the skin crackles; served with kraut and potatoes. The meat was exquisitely flavorful and unbelievably greasy.
A dish of rahmschwammerl (meatballs) and button mushrooms with spätzle. The meatballs were airy but huge, and the sauce on the spätzle was deceptively deadly. I couldn’t finish the plate.
Chunks of deer meat in a brown sauce with potatoes and a salad. This was one of the lighter meals.
On Saturday the four of us went to the Nuernberger Bratwurst Gloeckl am Dom (an Augustiner restaurant, naturally) and ate a platter of 25 grilled bratwursts (which mercifully are small, about the size of a breakfast link), along with a few Münchner Stadwürste, on a bed of sauerkraut with horseradish and the most sublime warm potato salad I’ve ever eaten.

Add to that a beer or two—generally hefeweizen, dunkel, or the Oktoberfest wies’n beer—and the effect is total gastric paralysis. Not to be too graphic here, but when I got home it took a week of intensive fiber before I felt even close to normal.

But God, it was worth it. Oh those bratwurst! Oh that beer!

Bonus links: Beyond brez’n and bratwurst; Oktoberfest at Epicurious; and threads about relocating to Munich, eating in the city, and general tips for Bavarian food from eGullet.