Linked List: August 15, 2007

Wednesday, 15 August 2007

Jeffrey Zeldman, on the supposed “crisis” in web standards:

Has HTML 4.01 stopped working in browsers? I was not aware of it. Has XHTML 1.0 stopped working in browsers? I was not aware of it. Do browser makers intend to stop supporting HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0? I was not aware of it. Do they intend to stop supporting CSS 1 and CSS 2.1? I was not aware of it.

David Weiss on Numbers ★

David Weiss:

Allowing anyone to read and write your file format is a bold move because it says in essence, “We don’t need a locked down file format to compete. The format can be available for everyone, and we’ll compete on the ease of use and efficiency of our applications. We have what we think is the best interface for reading, creating and managing Office documents, but if someone has what they think is a better way to build Office documents, wonderful, we welcome it!”

What Apple has done with Keynote, Pages and Numbers is exactly this.

I suspect many would argue about just how easy Microsoft has made it to read and write the new Office XML file formats, but the point holds. File compatibility leads to competition, and competition leads to better software.

Benchmarking in Your Pants ★

Craig Hockenberry (with help from Lucas Newman) ran some interesting benchmarks regarding iPhone performance: (a) JavaScript on the iPhone is about 80 times slower than JavaScript running in Safari on a 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo iMac; (b) compiled Objective-C code on the iPhone can run over 200 times faster than JavaScript in MobileSafari.

The New Frontier ★

For those of you too cheap (or too far away) to buy a copy of this month’s Macworld on the newsstand, here’s my latest back-page column:

This history is analogous to that of the automobile industry. In its early years, the state of the art advanced at a remarkable clip. Today, new cars come out each year, but with small refinements. Those changes add up: a 1997 car (even in mint condition) is clearly distinguishable from a 2007 model. But a 2005 and a 2008? Not so much. That’s pretty much where we are with OS X. Tiger is the 2005 model; Leopard is the 2008.

What’s Nu? ★

Tim Burks:

Instead of grafting two mature and overlapping language implementations together, I wrote Nu on, with, and for Objective-C. Instead of being problems to be bridged, the rich set of Objective-C classes became the building blocks of Nu.

Mike Zornek: C4[1] Retrospective ★

Another good C4[1] write-up.

Movable Type 4.0 ★

Long list of new features.

Tumbleweeds and Used Car Lots ★

Great piece from Rich Siegel, forking off from an early subject in the C4[1] panel discussion:

Today, thanks to the many-to-many communications that are possible in this Web 2.0 world of blogs and social networking, it’s very easy for schlock marketing — and as such, the products it pushes — to gain an air of legitimacy. How? Easy: Just start a discussion. By engaging in the debate on a particular subject, both sides in the debate implicitly acknowledge that the subject is worthy of debate; and when one side of a controversy is the side that might ordinarily live on the fringes, the debate works to the advantage of that side regardless of the outcome. That’s because all of a sudden, the fringe side of the debate — the voices and positions that had once rightly been relegated to the periphery — gain mainstream recognition.

This would have been a great direction to steer the panel discussion.

How to Make People Buy Books ★

Chip Kidd, book designer extraordinaire, in Esquire: “I cannot make you buy a book, but I can try to help make you pick it up.” (Via Steve Delahoyde.)