Author Archives: alex

Vendor Prefixes Are A Rousing Success

November 18, 2011 – 7:36 am

tl;dr version: Henri Sivonen’s arguments against vendor prefixing for CSS properties focus on harm without considering value, which in turn has caused him to come to a non-sensical set of conclusions and recommendations. Progress is a process, and vendor prefixes have been critical in accelerating that process for CSS. For a while now I’ve been [...]

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Function-ality

October 6, 2011 – 2:51 am

I’m sitting here in Derek Featherstone’s amazing a11y talk at Fronteers and I feel like I need to follow up the last post with a quick primer on the zen of function for (both of) the spec authors who read this blog. The reason it’s offensive to the JS hacker for WebIDL to disallow new [...]

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Real Constructors & WebIDL Last Call

October 3, 2011 – 7:10 am

For those who haven’t been following the progress of WebIDL — and really, how could you not? An IDL? For the web? I’d like to subscribe to your newsletter… — the standard is now in last call, which is W3C for “alllllllllllmost done”. Which it is not. Before I get to why, let me first [...]

Posted in javascript, programming, standards, webdev | Comments (18)

Standards Are Insurance

September 21, 2011 – 12:47 pm

I keep getting distracted from writing this long thing by responding to the discussion created by the last short-ish thing, but I wanted to explicitly call out one aspect, namely that standards are a form of insurance. More correctly — and apologies if this sounds like a Planet Money episode — vendors sell derivatives contracts [...]

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What A Breakup Would Look Like

September 21, 2011 – 11:12 am

Karl Dubost asked what a plan would look like for a W3C split along the lines I proposed in my last post. It’s a fair question, so let me very quickly sketch out straw-men while noting that I would support many alternative plans as well. The shape of the details might matter, but not as [...]

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