Entries in category “Pedantics”
X-UA-8-Ball
Published February 19, 2008
Once again, with apologies to John Gruber…
Q: Do standards-based developers have to use X-UA-Compatible if they care about progressive enhancement for future browsers?
A: As I see it, yes.
Q: Doesn’t Internet Explorer already offer a fine-grained way to target specific versions?
A: Yes, definitely.
Q: So if there was a problem with the IE6 to IE7 transition, doesn’t that mean people weren’t properly using an existing tool which could have ...
The future of web standards
Published December 17, 2007
The world of standards-based web design and development has been undergoing something of a shake-up these past few days; Andy Clarke’s “CSS Unworking Group” seems to have opened the floodgates to expressions of dissatisfaction with the current method of progress (or lack thereof) in developing and standardizing new features for web developers and designers. Alex Russell’s “The W3C Cannot Save Us” and my friend and former colleague Jeff Croft’s “Do we need ...
A chronicle of the Ages of the Web
Published January 24, 2007
Sometime pretty soon (in fact, in the very next thing I write), I’m going to need some consistent way to refer to different periods in the history of the Web. I don’t know of any widely-accepted chronology for this, and I especially don’t know of any which really fits with the sort of references I’m going to need to make, so, with apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien, I present my ...
I can’t believe it’s not XML!
Published December 21, 2006
As you may or may not have heard, JSON came to Dave Winer’s attention today. He is, quite obviously, of the opinion that this is just a reinvention of what people are already doing just fine with XML, thank you very much, so what’s the point?
Of course, this ignores the fact that the Lisp folks have been making the same argument for years, wondering why there was this great pressing need to ...
Defenders of design theft
Published October 1, 2006
When a case of alleged design theft on the Web — the appropriation of one or more elements of a site’s design, without permission — is exposed, there is an elite group of mentally-challenged individuals who spring into action to defend said theft. Their arguments never vary; they stay the course and seem to assume that if they simply repeat themselves often enough, their lack of functioning neurons will be ignored.
Broadly speaking, these arguments fall ...
Mandy, I’m dandy
Published July 28, 2006
I don’t honestly expect any of you to remember this, but some time ago, when I posted an entry talking about Python and Ruby (on which comments are closed because the post is over a month old — hopefully this weekend I’ll get around to turning on the auto-moderation stuff I wrote up), I received a comment from one “Mandy Owens”, who seemed to think that, for both technical and marketing reasons, Rails makes ...
Django, gzip and WSGI
Published May 21, 2006
One of the many things I like about Django is the range of available middleware you can use to do all sorts of interesting stuff. But one in particular has got me a little bit stumped.
One of the available middleware components for Django allows content to be gzipped for output when the client specifies ‘gzip’ in its Accept-Encoding header; this is handy because it both conserves bandwidth and allows pages to be downloaded more ...
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