Archive for the 'The Web' Category

An article over at Slashdot mentions the news that Apple, Mozilla, and Opera have requested the adoption of HTML 5, a successor to HTML 4 and XHTML, both of which are aging. The draft spec for HTML 5 is courtesy of the WHATWG, a group that formed for the very specific purpose of creating a successor to what we use today. It seems that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been wasting time working on an incompatible replacement to HTML and XHTML, a decision that I feel is destined to fail (backwards compatibility is a definite requirement in moving the web forward).

Adopting HTML 5 is a great idea (HTML does need cleaning up), but unless Microsoft climbs aboard, we might as well start building the HTML 5 coffin. As much as people dislike hearing it, the fact is that Microsoft owns this kind of thing. If it doesn’t get into Internet Explorer, you might as well forget it. And I doubt that IE will migrate to something like this anytime soon. I mean, they just fixed their CSS box-model bugs! How many years did we wait for that? And after all that time, the rendering engine is still broken.

Perhaps Firefox will continue to take share from IE, giving the ‘little’ guys like Mozilla a voice in what direction to take the web. I’ve certainly got my fingers crossed.

An increasing number of links to photographs are making the front page of Digg, making an already weak collection of ‘news’ even weaker. There’s a petition for adding a new photography section to the site, and that would certainly help keep these links off the front page. Most of the photographs that get linked to on Digg are nice, but none of them are front-page worthy.

On a photography related note, I will be making some upgrades soon to the photo album software I employ here at this website. Don’t be surprised if the photo galleries are down for a while over the next few days. Some new features are coming, and I’m excited about them, so stay tuned for updates.

No programming tips here tonight. Just a few great stories I’ve recently found:

First Look at Firefox 3.0

Lots of love coming in 3.0. I simply cannot wait.

Mozilla Thunderbird 2 Beta 1

Firefox’s little brother is moving forward.

Clinton in Action

This man is super great.

DS Buttons

A very cool marketing idea. I heart my DS too.

Amazon Sales From Recommendations: 35%

Can you believe that 35% of sales come from the recommender? I’m shocked.

If the list above looks a little funny, do a browser refresh; I’ve updated the site style sheet to make this type of list a little nicer to look at.

It looks as if Yahoo! will be undergoing a reorganization effort in the future. Both Matt Cutts and Greg Linden provide some interesting commentary, and there’s plenty of other news on the subject.

I am not an expert on the search industry, but it seems to me that this was the only way for Yahoo to stay alive. If their recent TV listings overhaul is any sign of their current state of affairs, then I am ready to declare the company in shambles. The old TV listings page was light weight and usable; the new one is bloated, confusing, and very ugly. Although their primary competition (Google) doesn’t have a TV listing service, I can assure you that if they did, it would be light weight and responsive. Google knows what users want; Yahoo appears to only know what they want for their users. That kind of direction can only lead to collapse. Hopefully Yahoo can turn things around. As much as I love Google, we need some semblance of competition.

I’m going to go ahead and call this one: Ctrl+Alt+Del has jumped the shark. What used to be a mildly amusing online comic has devolved into something so far out in left field, so detached from reality, that I’m not going to bother reading it anymore. The current story line is just a joke. Each character is a mindless, empty shell of what they used to be. It’s sad to see the comic take this turn, but I can’t say I’m surprised. In some way, I sort of saw this coming.

Last year at this time, I was thinking about various content management systems for user over at Born Geek (sister site to this blog). I never made a decision, mostly because so many of the available options seemed weak to me. One year later, very little has changed and I’m still looking to migrate the site from the hand-built system I use today to a database driven solution.

Currently, I’m leaning towards using WordPress, the same package I use here at this blog. I like the interface that it offers, its documentation is top notch, and I’m already quite familiar with it. The only real downside I can see with the package is that pages are built on the fly. Every month, Born Geek averages 1.56 GB of data transferred, 542,818 hits, and 17,955 unique users. With this much activity on the site, I’m a little concerned about database accesses and the subsequent processor time needed to generate each page. A caching plug-in is available for WordPress, and I hear decent things about it. But will it be enough?

I’m seriously thinking about giving it a try later this winter (converting the site will take some time). So keep your eyes peeled. In the mean time, if you have suggestions for CMS-like systems that might fit the bill, let me know. I’m certainly open to suggestions.

The Concerned web comic, which is based on and set in the Half-Life 2 game world, recently ended for good. It’s a shame that it had to end so soon, but the goal all along has been stated in the comic’s description (”The Life and Death of Gordon Frohman”). If you haven’t read the comic, I highly recommend it (note that you should start reading from the beginning to best appreciate it). The writing was top notch, the visuals were great, and I will sorely miss the updates that I used to look forward to.