Author Archives: alex

Overdue Credit Where It’s Due

March 5, 2012 – 5:25 am

This is just the top of the backlog…there’s stuff still in my brain-bin from TPAC, but a couple of quick items worthy of a collective pip-pip!: MSFT Moves To More Aggressive IE Updates: Automatic updates work, and in conjunction with shorter development cycles they enable the process of progress to move faster. Kudos to MSFT [...]

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Misdirection

February 15, 2012 – 4:04 pm

As the over-heated CSS vendor prefix debate rages, I can’t help but note the mounting pile of logical fallacies and downright poor reasoning being deployed. Some context is in order. Your Moment Of Zen The backdrop to this debate is that CSS is absolutely the worst, least productive part of the web platform. Apps teams [...]

Posted in chrome, economics, google, javascript, licensing, mobile, opensource, openweb, programming, standards, webdev, work | Comments (35)

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 [...]

Posted in openweb, politics, standards, webdev | Comments (26)

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 [...]

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