I always forget there are more than a hundred of people reading this particular blog and even more people knowing this site because of The Journalist — a theme created for WordPress years ago and popular even in this day and age of internet. Knowing there are people out there interested in what I do, makes me feel I want to write here. The problem with blogging (or any other activity) is that it brings back that peculiar feeling of restlessness. I’m a restless person myself, and young, but I can’t stand the feeling of being restless. It makes me ignore important things I want to do, create, design, achieve, believe and so on until I don’t believe in anything anymore. It’s a virtuous circle followed by a vicious circle.

Last month I started working on a different kind of project, namely Peculiar. An icon package that is made only in CSS with the purpose to help designers create user interfaces for the web without use of software programs and to help developers achieve as few HTTP requests as possible, thus speeding up web applications. This a challenge for me and for anyone interested in the future of user interfaces for the web, to make use of CSS as intelligently as possible — creating designs in Adobe Photoshop, slicing images and putting them as backgrounds in CSS doesn’t make a lot of sense anymore.

I want to say thank you to a couple of blogs for spreading the news about the development of this peculiar project. In no particular order, here they are: Think Vitamin, Echo Enduring, Faruk Ateş, Matthias Schütz and those chinese blogs. I also want to thank to the man that bought the first license for Peculiar.

After all that being said, he wants to change things that we accustomed to for the worst better.

For months I tried to design a new interface for my website. There have been lots of ideas and lots of thoughts. I wanted the old design to became a classic—maybe it did, maybe not—but then I changed my mind since I’m a man that likes to create new things and play with new ideas. One idea I experimented with the new layout is the vertical grid, every text line is vertically aligned between content and sidebar areas.

I wanted to get rid of the static pages, it was hard to update those. I wanted the new site to be lighting fast, so there are no images for the layout, all details are made in CSS and there’s no JavaScript at all. Pictograms that you see here and there are made in CSS too. I will release these icons for public use in a package called Peculiar.

You might noticed that there isn’t a logo anywhere. That’s because I have new ideas about how a new logo should look like.

Comments are disabled because they are the only thing that makes a journal to be a blog. I don’t want a blog, I want a journal of my online activities. I may also want feedback, but I think a short and interesting e-mail will do it better—of course I will answer to any of them.

After all that being said, he wishes he was born in a country where Romanian English was the official language.

Sometimes you just have to have the ball in order to play. Can I have some ball, please? Or should I go all over the place web for a slam dunk?

In today’s world where millions of documents are electronic we need a format that is easy recognizable by most devices and operating systems that we use: Mac OS X, Windows, laptop, desktop, Linux, iPhone, eReaders, etc.

From the start, I want to say that the idea, concept, examples and eventually writing the specification, are all mine. So, go ahead, read the lines below and blame me for things that aren’t the way they should be.

The name, Amatl, comes from a form of paper that was manufactured in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. There are more details about it on Wikipedia, of course. My Amatl is based on HTML5 and CSS (2.1 now and 3.0 in the future), two standards that raised the bar with what we can do in terms of layout, embedding fonts, typography, grid and images or blocks positioning. Basically, Amatl is actually a file format that wants to display paper documents inside browsers without any additional tools or software. The format isn’t intended at replacing Adobe’s PDF format or Microsoft’s XPS; it should be used as a complementary format, open and supported by the entire industry. The closest resembles to it can be EPUB format but they are two completely different concepts.

Compatibility

The good part about this format is that it can be recognizable by old browsers too, I name Firefox 2 and IE7 here. It’s just HTML after all, right?

Differences

There will be no differences when it comes to HTML5 syntax, maintaining the current specification is very important. Still, I recommend not using meta attributes because they will be present in a CSS metadata header.

The most important differences to CSS is introduction of a DPI value and a CSS metadata header. It will be used to write documents at a higher DPI than 96, which is the standard to all web pages on Internet today.

Structure

The Amatl document files should be packed in a ZIP container, having .am extension (like Document1.am) for offline usage and not only. Browser support will be needed for reading HTML files packed inside a ZIP. It can also be served directly from a server with the following structure:

index.html
page-2.html
page-3.html
|-- styles
   |-- screen.css
   |-- print.css
|-- fonts         /* embeddable fonts should be placed here */ 
|-- languages     /* support for multi languages documents */
   |-- index-en-us.html
   |-- index-en-gb.html
   |-- index-ro-ro.html
|-- images
|-- videos
|-- audios

Writing, printing and scaling the documents

It should be very easy to write an Amatl document, like writing a blog post with basic HTML tags: p, a, strong, etc. This is because the HTML5 structure of the format is very easy. You can view the source of this example: Document 1. Printing documents can use a print.css file or the browser should interpret the screen.css (remove styles for body and article tags) and print the pages exactly like they are displayed on the screen.

As I said before, Amatl will supports writing HTML5 with custom DPI through CSS. You can understand how this works by viewing the Warp example from Firefox (or any other browser that supports zooming) at minimum zoom. If browsers will adopt this format, you can view higher quality web documents right in your browser, including higher DPI images and graphics and you can print them right away without needing any other software.

Amatl can also use a single HTML file, that embeds CSS, fonts and images and separates pages accordingly. You can see this in the Document 2 example. This can be dropped from the specifications since I prefer a more standard structure for the format.

License

The format should and will be open since it’s based on open technologies, but it will require a commercial license for software products or web applications for writing, managing or printing the documents. More about this in the future and don’t forget there is an Amatl page dedicated for this very project.