Category Archives: Uncategorized

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)

Browser Wars (plural)

March 30, 2011 – 9:24 am

In a half hour, I’m going to be on the Web 2.0 Expo Browser Wars panel with a cast of incredible folks. A couple of weeks back, I had the privilege of doing something similar on a browser panel expertly moderated by Arun Ranganathan. As a part of that panel, Brendan, Lars, Arun, John, and [...]

By alex | Comments (1)

Performance Innumeracy & False Positives

February 3, 2011 – 11:49 am

tl;dr version: the web is waaaay too slow, and every time you write something off as “just taking a couple of milliseconds”, you’re part of the problem. Good engineering is about tradeoffs, and all engineering requires environmental assumptions — even feature testing. In any case, there are good, reliable ways to use UA detection to [...]

By alex | Comments (35)

On The Care And Feeding of Spinning Disks

January 24, 2011 – 5:58 pm

or: Why I spent last summer rebooting Windows or: How to compress several months of research into 50 lines of code and unblock a product launch, for fun and profit. Home parlor entertainment edition. Fun for all ages. Warranty void if seal broken. Offer not available in some states. Now that others have found the [...]

By alex | Comments (4)