The Talk Show: Live From WWDC
7:00pm Tuesday • California Theatre
Tickets Available • Fun Will Be Had

Linked List: January 29, 2008

Tuesday, 29 January 2008

Paul Graham on his new Lisp implementation, Arc:

The kind of dirtiness Arc seeks to avoid is verbose, repetitive source code. The way you avoid that is not by forbidding programmers to write it, but by making it easy to write code that’s compact. One of the things I did while I was writing Arc was to comb through applications asking: what can I do to the language to make this shorter? Not in characters or lines of course, but in tokens. In a sense, Arc is an accumulation of years of tricks for making programs shorter. Sounds rather unambitious, but that is in fact the purpose of high-level languages: they make programs shorter.

John Resig: ‘Meta Madness’ ★

OK, one more link on the version-targeting proposal, from John Resig (the man behind the very nifty jQuery JavaScript library):

So, with that in mind, why even the attempt at making this sound like a “generally beneficial standardization issue”? Why go through the song-and-dance? Because if it was called:
<meta http-equiv="X-IE-VERSION-FREEZE" content="IE=8" />
then developers would surely, excuse me, shit the bed in frustration over being forced to add markup just to make their web applications render in a standards compliant manner.

It’s easy for me to say, I suppose, given the nature of DF’s audience, but I’m more likely to deliberately start blocking traffic from IE users than I am to add this bullshit tag to my markup. I want IE users to switch to another browser, so the last thing I want to do is help Microsoft hang onto IE users who might otherwise be tempted to switch to a standards-compliant browser.

IE 8 Version Targeting Roundup ★

If you want to read more about the IE 8 version-targeting proposal, Matthew Pennell’s roundup of over two dozen responses is a good place to start.

The B-List: ‘Legacy’ ★

James Bennett’s take on the IE 8 version targeting proposal is my favorite, perhaps because it’s the most optimistic. If you only read one, make it this one.

Surfin’ Safari: ‘Versioning, Compatibility and Standards’ ★

Maciej Stachowiak from Apple’s WebKit team, on why they have no plans to support this version-targeting proposal:

Finally, while we sympathize with the tough road that the IE team has to travel to achieve a high degree of standards compliance, we haven’t really experienced the same problem. The IE team has mentioned severe negative feedback on the IE7 release, due to sites expecting standards behavior from most browsers, but IE6 bugs from IE.

But WebKit already has a high degree of standards compliance.

Ian Hickson: ‘Mistakes, Sadness, Regret’ ★

Ian Hickson, lead author of the excellent in-progress HTML 5 spec (and, to keep any potential biases clear, Google employee), is adamantly opposed to IE’s proposed version targeting:

If Web authors actually use this feature, and if IE doesn’t keep losing market share, then eventually this will cause serious problems for IE’s competitors — instead of just having to contend with reverse-engineering IE’s quirks mode and making the specs compatible with IE’s standards mode, the other browser vendors are going to have to reverse engineer every major IE browser version, and end up implementing these same bug modes themselves. It might actually be quite an effective way of dramatically increasing the costs of entering or competing in the browser market. (This is what we call “anti-competitive”, or “evil”.)

Personally, I’m in complete agreement with Hickson. This switch would be harmful to every other rendering engine than IE. There’s a fork, where many new sites are built against cutting edge web standards, and many old sites (often corporate intranets) only work with non-standard IE behavior. Microsoft wants to have it both ways, so that IE can continue to work with new standards-based sites, but can also continue to support non-standard intranet sites with IE lock-in. The only purpose of this proposal is to help maintain IE’s lock-in with existing sites.

Jeffrey Zeldman: ‘In Defense of Version Targeting’ ★

Zeldman says yes for IE 8’s proposed version targeting, on the grounds that it’s the only way Microsoft will bring IE 8 into further compliance with standards:

With version targeting, IE stays on the path of web standards.

Without it, ineptly made websites “break,” putting IE’s standards compliance at risk.

If IE were to stop supporting standards, standards would stop working.

Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8 ★

So an interesting web standards debate began last week. Aaron Gustafson published this piece in A List Apart proposing a new means of targeting specific web browser rendering engines, which apparently is going to be introduced by Microsoft for IE 8. The basic idea being that Microsoft can’t fix the rendering bugs currently in IE to make IE 8 standards-compliant without breaking the layout of web sites that assume or depend upon IE 7 (and earlier) layout bugs and non-standard behavior.

I’ll follow-up with my favorite reactions as separate items.

Office 2008 for Mac Annoyances ★

New Flickr group from nit-picker extraordinaire Joe Clark.

iPhonesque Theme for Growl ★

Nice-looking Growl theme by Matthew Robertson, based on the look of Mobile OS X’s alert dialogs.

Five Whys ★

Joel Spolsky on uptime guarantees:

Really high availability becomes extremely costly. The proverbial “six nines” availability (99.9999% uptime) means no more than 30 seconds downtime per year. That’s really kind of ridiculous. […] Think of it this way: If your six nines system goes down mysteriously just once and it takes you an hour to figure out the cause and fix it, well, you’ve just blown your downtime budget for the next century.

On the Design of the NetNewsWire First-Run Assistant ★

I love how he sweats the details of every single word in the UI. Brent’s a great UI writer.