Category Archives: webdev

For Dave and David

April 4, 2012 – 7:49 am

Dave Herman jokingly accused me a couple of TC39 meetings ago of being an “advocate for JavaScript as we have it today”, and while he meant it in jest, I guess to an extent it’s true — I’m certainly not interested in solutions to problems I can’t observe in the wild. That tends to scope [...]

By alex | Also posted in openweb, programming, standards | Comments (16)

Bedrock

April 1, 2012 – 10:41 pm

Jetlag has me in its throes which is as good an excuse as any to share what has been keeping me up many nights over the past couple of years; a theory of the web as a platform. I had a chance last week to share some of my thinking here to an unlikely audience [...]

By alex | Also posted in dhtml, javascript, openweb, standards | Comments (6)

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 [...]

By alex | Also posted in chrome, economics, google, javascript, licensing, mobile, opensource, openweb, programming, standards, 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 [...]

By alex | Also posted in openweb, politics, standards | Comments (26)

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 [...]

By alex | Also posted in javascript, programming, standards | Comments (18)