A quote from Alan Storm

July 04 2009

Yes, it’d be nice if everyone kept up to date on the progress of the various W3C working groups. They don’t. There are a lot of people who asked what professional markup looked like and were told (right or wrong) that XHTML was the future. So they went ahead and… read more

Jeffrey Zeldman: XHTML WTF

July 04 2009

Jeffrey Zeldman: XHTML WTF. Reading the comments, it’s scary how many people are totally ill-informed about HTML5 and XHTML5. read more

FAQs about the future of XHTML

July 03 2009

FAQs about the future of XHTML. The XHTML 2 Working Group charter will not be renewed after 2009—as far as the W3C are concerned, XHTML5 is the future of XHTML. read more

Newspaper Club - A work in progress

July 02 2009

Newspaper Club—A work in progress. “We’re building a service to help people make their own newspapers. This is the blog where we’re alarmingly honest about where it’s all going wrong.” read more

Video for Everybody!

July 02 2009

Video for Everybody!. Reminiscent of the early days of Web Standards, Kroc Camen has created a fiendishly clever chunk of HTML which can play a video on any browser, starting with HTML5 video then falling back on Flash and eventually just an HTML message telling the user where they can… read more

Modernizr

July 02 2009

Modernizr (via). Neat idea and an unobtrusive implementation: a JavaScript library that runs feature tests for various HTML5 features (canvas, box shadow, CSS transforms and so on) and adds classes to the HTML body element, allowing you to write CSS selectors that only apply if a feature is present. Detected… read more

Codecs for

July 02 2009

Codecs for <audio> and <video>. HTML 5 will not be requiring support for specific audio and video codecs—Ian Hickson explains why, in great detail. Short version: Apple won’t implement Theora due to lack of hardware support and an “uncertain patent landscape”, while open source browsers (Chromium and Mozilla) can’t support… read more

PubSub-over-Webhooks with RabbitHub

July 01 2009

PubSub-over-Webhooks with RabbitHub. RabbitMQ, the Erlang-powered AMQP message queue, is growing an HTTP interface based on webhooks and PubSubHubBub. read more

Address Extractor

July 01 2009

Address Extractor. Running on App Engine, an address extractor web service using code from the EveryBlock open source release. read more

EveryBlock source code released

July 01 2009

EveryBlock source code released. EveryBlock’s Knight Foundation grant required them to release the source code after two years, under the GPL. Lots of neat Django / PostgreSQL / GIS tricks to be found within. read more

Using Mongo for Real-Time Analytics

June 30 2009

Using Mongo for Real-Time Analytics. MongoDB supports an “upsert” query, which when combined with the $inc operator can cause counter fields to be incremented if they exist and created otherwise. This makes it a great fit for real-time analytics applications (one increment per page view), something that regular relational databases… read more

MongoDB

June 30 2009

MongoDB. Lots of discussions about this at EuroPython today—it’s a document database, very similar to CouchDB but significantly faster and suggested for production use. Best of all, trying it out on OS X is as easy as extracting the tarball and running “bin/mongod --dbpath /tmp/test-mongo-db run”. read more

Firefox 3.5 for developers

June 30 2009

Firefox 3.5 for developers. It’s out today, and the feature list is huge. Highlights include HTML 5 drag ’n’ drop, audio and video elements, offline resources, downloadable fonts, text-shadow, CSS transforms with -moz-transform, localStorage, geolocation, web workers, trackpad swipe events, native JSON, cross-site HTTP requests, text API for canvas, defer… read more

cache-money

June 28 2009

cache-money. A “write-through caching library for ActiveRecord”, maintained by Nick Kallen from Twitter. Queries hit memcached first, and caches are automatically kept up-to-date when objects are created, updated and deleted. Only some queries are supported—joins and comparisons won’t hit the cache, for example. read more

Twitter, an Evolving Architecture

June 28 2009

Twitter, an Evolving Architecture. The most detailed write-up of Twitter’s current architecture I’ve seen, explaining the four layers of cache (all memcached) used by the Twitter API. read more