Published January 28, 2008
Last week I spent some time dissecting what, I believe, is the reason behind the announcement that Windows Internet Explorer (née “Microsoft Internet Explorer”) will, as of version 8, include the ability to emulate previous versions of its rendering engine and, in addition, will default to emulating IE 7 when no version is specified (with the exception of HTML 5, which reputedly will trigger a genuine “standards mode” in IE 8).
At the time, I was only concerned with analyzing why Microsoft has chosen this route; I was mostly ...
Published January 23, 2008
For centuries Galactic civilization has stagnated and declined, though only a few ever realized that. But now, at last, the Periphery is breaking away and the political unity of the Empire is shattered. Somewhere in the fifty years just past is where the historians of the future will place an arbitrary line and say: “This marks the Fall of the Galactic Empire.”
— Isaac Asimov, Foundation
Amid clamor in the world of finance, the world of Web technology today is experiencing its own crash, of a sort. The unexpected announcement today ...
Published January 13, 2008
In the wake of the Dreamhost blog’s post on Rails and shared hosting, there’s been a bit of a meme going around with respect to deploying frameworks like Rails (or Django, or TurboGears…), and which more or less consists of people asking why, if you’re using one of these frameworks, you’re not just ponying up for a VPS or dedicated server. After all, it’s not like the offerings these days are that much more expensive than commodity shared hosting.
There are some problems with this ...
Published January 10, 2008
Today John Gruber linked to a post on the official Dreamhost blog lamenting the state of web-framework deployment on consumer-level shared hosting; while the post itself is largely concerned with Ruby on Rails, the current state of deploying popular (non-PHP-based) web frameworks on hosts like Dreamhost is, well, abysmal. A search for “dreamhost” in the archives of the django-users mailing list turns up nearly five hundred results, many of them people struggling to get Django working, and I imagine that similar searches of list archives for other frameworks ...