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A while back, Douglas Bowman wrote an awesome pair of articles for A List Apart called “Sliding Doors of CSS”. The articles described a CSS technique for making a tabbed interface where the tabs scale gracefully as the user changes his or her font size.

Bowman’s sliding doors provided elasticity based on the size of a container’s content. But it’s also desirable to achieve elasticity based on a container’s external constraints. This paradigm is particularly applicable to data sets, where we want one column to expand or contract dynamically to fill the available space.

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Lately I’ve been hungry for some new kata. Doing kata gives me an opportunity to break from my normal programming routine and try something new. This keeps my brain stimulated by introducing unfamiliar problems, and also gives me a chance to play with new languages.

Remindo is a good example of a kata. Here are some more I’ve been thinking of:

• Write a language for interacting with simple HTTP services; for example:
  
GET http://twitter.com/statuses.xml
Authorization: Basic username:password
X-Requested-By: HTTPScript/0.1
ON OK: (...)
ON 4xx: (...)
ON 5xx: (...)

  Not yet decided as to whether I should really write a new language or perhaps just implement a DSL in Ruby. I like the expressiveness of the new language, but I don’t really want to go through all the trouble of writing a parser/evaluator for common constructs like conditionals.
• Write the beginnings of a runtime environment for Rails applications, similar to what AIR has done for Flex/JavaScript.
• Write a subscription service for Twitter. Subscribers sign up for certain event types; as events are published, they are repeated to any subscribers for that event type.