Author Archives: alex

The Case Against Synchronous Worker APIs

May 15, 2013 – 6:28 am

Several times in the past few months I’ve been presented with this question: is it good or useful to provide synchronous APIs to web workers? Having considered the question at some length, it seems to me the answer must now be “no“. Consider IndexedDB. It’s not implemented in any browser yet, but some hard-working sould [...]

Posted in standards, webdev | Comments (0)

Why What You’re Reading About Blink Is Probably Wrong

April 3, 2013 – 2:00 pm

By now you’ve seen the news about Blink on HN or Techmeme or wherever. At this moment, every pundit and sage is attempting to write their angle into the annoucement and tell you “what it means”. The worst of these will try to link-bait some “hot” business or tech phrase into the title. True hacks [...]

Posted in opensource, openweb, standards, webdev, work | Comments (39)

Two Governments, Both Alike In Dignity

April 2, 2013 – 8:41 am

Disclaimer: I’m engaged to Frances Berriman, the front-end lead at the UK’s Government Digital Service. She did not approve this post. It is, however, the product of many of our discussions. You’ll understand shortly why this is relevant. It seems entirely rational to be skeptical about governments doing things well. My personal life as a [...]

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (3)

Cassowary on NPM

February 4, 2013 – 7:48 am

I continue to work on-and-off on the JS Cassowary port and now, thanks to some help from Isaac, new packages are up on NPM. The API is still marginally unstable and I expect we’ll be undergoing re-licensing sometime in the near future, but it’s very near a 0.1 release.

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Reforming the W3C TAG

December 7, 2012 – 5:24 am

And so it has come to pass that W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) elections are afoot. Nominations have ended and the candidates have been announced. There are four seats open and nine candidates running, so it’s worth understanding why anyone should vote for the reformers (myself, Yehuda Katz, Anne van Kesteren, Peter Linss, and Marcos [...]

Posted in openweb, standards, webdev | Comments (22)