As for the whole Microsoft/AOL/IE thingy, see the MozillaZine item for lots of links to lots of places.

My big question is, what does this mean for web developers? It looked like we were on the road towards there being more standard-compliant browsers, which would mean less goofy hacks and workarounds for buggy browsers, and it might still mean that, but it’s too early to tell. I agree that it would be stupid for AOL to kill off Netscape now, as it is they could take a small fraction of the $750 million and support Netscape/Mozilla development for years to come, even if it’s just for insurance against Microsoft, and honestly, doesn’t everyone need an insurance policy against Microsoft?

(I know, Mozilla the browser, and Mozilla the organization won’t just disappear if Netscape goes away or AOL jettisons it, but it would be nice to have AOL keep paying for some of it.)

I’ve noticed that on this site, Mozilla has been surpassing Internet Explorer in the stats lately, which I see as good thing. Though I admit with some other sites I’m involved with, the IE numbers are quite high.

Still, I think Microsoft will eventually have to do some sort of development on IE, as it stands now, it’s feature set and lack of standards support is holding back the web. Web designers and developers are wondering what’s up with IE, as we have to create sites that work in that sorry old browser. Yes, IE is the new Netscape 4.x.

Tim Bray blames Microsoft, and I do to… I spent wasted a number of hours this week trying to get IE/Windows to do what Safari, IE/Mac, and all the Gecko-based browsers got right.

Once again, damn you Microsoft!

From Scripting News:

If you don’t pay, the bottom-line is that you lose. It may look like you’re not losing, but you are.

Cost of Apache: $0
Cost of Red Hat Linux: $0
Running www.scripting.com using Apache on Red Hat Linux: Priceless

The word “free” has many meanings, as does the word “open.” I’ll leave it as an exercise of the interested reader to investigate how those words apply to software…

Need to change or get a file’s type or creator code? Got the Developer Tools installed?

Look in the /Developer/Tools directory for command line utilities GetFileInfo and SetFile.

These are quite useful if, you know, you have to deal with those people living in the past, using an old, outdated operating system like Mac OS 9… ;)

(Update: Looks like Mac OS X Hints has a blurb on GetFileInfo and SetFile as well.)

There are also other goodies in the /Developer/Tools direcory, but we’ll deal with those later.

You know you’re a GNU-freak or license-lunatic when you add the phrase ‘as in beer’ or ‘as in speech’ after every occurence of the word ‘free’…

For instance, if you’re at your local bank, and the teller says “Would you like a free balloon?” and your response is “Is it free as in speech?” - you need help…

Or your initials are RMS…

Chances are, you can ignore this… It’s probably useful only to me:

• May 2003 / odd days
• June 2003 / even days
• July 2003 / odd days

Resume normal operation… Now!

The scene is an imaginary tech support transaction…

user: This web site keeps making my browser quit!

support: Can you tell me exactly what happens?

user: Well, I went to the site, and it was full of good information, and it said ‘PRESS CONTROL-D TO BOOKMARK US!”

support: And what did you do?

user: I held down the Control Key, and then pressed the D key…

support: And what happened?

user: The browser quit!

support: Hmmm, what browser are you using?

user: Lynx!

support: ???

Dear publishers of print magazines, who just happen to also have web sites, please read what Jon Udell has to say in this piece on experimental journalism.

Did you read it? Ok, good… Did you get any new ideas?

I forgot to post my photos from the Pilgrim Wedding. Unfortunately my digital camera got a digital jam and I only managed to get one good picture before my non-standards-compliant camera started spewing error messages and stopped working… Enjoy!

Mark and Dora

The Guardian Unlimited has an article about the whole weblogs/Google controversy, and this one line really stood out to me:

It is a simple task for us to switch search engines if our trust is abused.

Is it such a simple task? Sure, I’ve set my default search engine to AlltheWeb right now, and there are others to choose from, but this really only handles the basic web searches. If you use the Google Web API for anything, you probably know it’s a cool thing, but do other engines offer anything similar? Would you have to re-write your apps? Does AlltheWeb’s Advanced Search match up against Google’s Advanced Search? People use the term google as a verb - “Did you google for an answer?” and some recently released browsers have a Google toolbar built into them…

Don’t get me wrong, Google is a great search engine (I’ve even got a Google t-shirt somewhere, and have been known to wear it from time to time) and I still use it, but I’d really prefer to not become completely reliant upon it. Reliance upon any one entity for something isn’t always a good thing. (Microsoft, Apple, etc.)

So back to the statement, that it will be a simple task to switch search engines, for some people it will be simple, and for some applications it will be simple, but if Google disappeared from the web today, could you easily switch search engines and not notice a difference, and still find what you’re looking for?

Like Russell said “I’m in Wired News” in a piece titled Search Results Clogged by Blogs, there’s a quote from me. Here’s part of it:

He believes the trick to achieving prominent search rankings is fairly straightforward: “update frequently and provide good content.”

Yes, that’s me quoting Wired News quoting me… and that’s the so-called secret I tell everyone who wants a popular site. Of course ‘good’ is going to mean something different to everyone, this isn’t rocket science, right?

Aside from that though, it really seems like the old saying “any publicity is good publicity” right? I mean, what’s the difference between being famous and infamous? Well, supposedly if you are infamous then you are somehow bad, but ultimately they both mean “well known” right? I suppose until the search engines can start to determine the meaning and context of words and phrases we’ll be seeing the infamous alongside the famous. Which might actually be a good thing…

I’ve been reading O’Reilly’s Mastering Regular Expressions. The plot is a little thin, but it’s got some great characters…

A quickie on traffic stats, it seems that for April 2003 we served up the RSS feed for this site three times more than we served up the home page, and the RSS feed accounted for over 25% of the page requests. Oh, and NetNewsWire was by far the most popular aggregator. (Way to go Brent!)

Today an intern wanted to ask me some questions. He was working on a page that was giving him some problems, and as I looked at the source, and asked him some questions, he said he was authoring the page in XHTML Strict. I commended him, and asked about the debate of whether or not the Content-type should be text/html , application/xml, or some other variant, and while he wasn’t up on the subject, it just warms my heart to see the kids embracing the standards…

My friends, there is hope for the future…

Just a warning, the RAD or ‘Radar Avoidance Device’ that I employ here was temporarily offline, and in the event I happen to appear on any sort of radar device, just ignore it…

Unless you don’t want to ignore it, in which case you could fully embrace it.

Either way…

I recently solved a CSS problem that was causing me to repeatedly pound my head against the desk, and honestly the desk has already sustained quite a bit of damage from previous head banging incidents.

I was surprised to learn that I got completely different behavior between Internet Explorer 5.00.2920.0000 on Windows 2000 and
Internet Explorer 5.00.2919.6307 on Windows 98. Ok, I wasn’t exactly surprised, more like annoyed by the CSS bugs in MSIE. I don’t know if it had anything to do with the differences between Windows 2000 and Windows 98, or was fully the result of the 0.00.0001.3693 revision. Perhaps they fixed a single bug and release a new version.

Anyway, the next time MSIE 5.xx.xxxx.xxxx is giving you CSS problems, curse a bit, bang your head against the desk, and then try rearranging the elements in your CSS file… And if that doesn’t work, just repeat the process until it does.

(Of course it’s always a good time to switch to a Gecko-based browser like Mozilla…)