Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 [...]

By alex | Comments (8)

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 [...]

By alex | Comments (2)

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 [...]

By alex | Comments (2)

Things the W3C Should Stop Doing

September 20, 2011 – 11:36 am

The time has come for the W3C to grab the mantle of the web, shake off its self-doubt, and move to a place where doing good isn’t measured by numbers of specs and activities, but by impact for web developers.

By alex | Comments (46)

Why “class” Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means

September 16, 2011 – 7:33 am

There’s a lot of “don’t turn it into Java!” in the comments on my last post, and I feel it needs a response — and not because I think there’s anything to like about Java’s class or type systems (perhaps that they exist at all? I’m torn on even that). Lets look at some possible [...]

By alex | Comments (6)