The Web Standards Project has announced a joint task force with Microsoft to promote web standards in products like Visual Studio and ASP.NET.
I imagine this was probably a factor in the decision to divest themselves of Browse Happy last month. Certainly this project is more in line with their core mission—promoting the use of standards on the web—and fits right in with the Dreamweaver Task Force they ran with Macromedia back in 2001.
The ridiculous Firefox/Opera rivalry (it’s software, not religion) has given rise to one annoyingly persistent meme: the belief that tabs are just MDI (Multiple Document Interface).
They’re not.
MDI, as implemented in many Windows applications and eventually abandoned by Microsoft, involves having a mini-desktop inside your application, with its own windows that you can minimize, maximize, and rearrange. If you have a taskbar-like interface it can look a lot like tabs, and you can certainly use it the same way as tabs, but it’s a different UI paradigm.
A tabbed interface is very specific. You have only one view at a time in your application window, and you switch between them based on a row (or column) of tabs along the window’s edge. You can look at it as a proper subset of MDI, but it is not the same thing.
Additionally, classical MDI uses one master window for the application. All documents appear in that window. Tabbed interfaces often (though not always) allow you to have more than one window, each with its own set of tabs. This makes it possible to group documents, web pages, etc. by category in a way that you can’t with a single-document interface or classic MDI.
So when people claim Opera had tabs first, they’re thinking of MDI—which Opera did have before Mozilla did. Tabs were showing up in browsers like Netcaptor and Galeon, however, long before they showed up in the Mozilla suite—and long before Opera hid its MDI capabilities under a tab-like veneer.
(reposted from Spread Firefox in response to Asa Dotzler’s post on the history of tabbed browsing)
Since we saw the trailer for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory last week, I’ve been trying to figure out just what Johnny Depp’s Willy Wonka look reminds me of. Then last night it hit me:
He looks like Amélie!
But then, while looking for photos to demonstrate this connection, I discovered a more disturbing resemblance:
Hmmm… A Chocolate Orange?
Well, I finally found out the reason for the Grass Under Renovation signs. I passed a median where a road crew was setting out what I first thought was sod, but then realized was Astroturf.
Nice one. I suppose it’ll save money on water and maintenance, but then so would painting the concrete green.
Couldn’t they just put in some native plants and leave them alone?
Why do some spammers insist on prefacing their junk with statements like “THIS IS NOT SPAM?”
Some idiot just posted a bit long letter offering to let me put my “products” on their online store. No, they didn’t send me an email about, say, the comic book collection I’m selling. No, they didn’t offer to sell prints or digital copies of my photography. No, they didn’t offer to publish my writing or Katie’s writing. They certainly didn’t look for contact information on any of those pages, because if they had, they would have found it and used proper channels. (Well, probably. I occasionally get comments on my Flash site via eBay’s “Question to Seller” feature because people don’t see the email address at the bottom of the page, but they do see the link to my eBay profile.)
They posted a very generic form letter—so generic that I can’t tell what they’re offering to resell—as a comment on a two-year-old blog post in which I remarked on some new comic books I had started reading.
And you know what? That’s spam. You can yell all you want that it isn’t, but when you post a completely off-topic advertisement on someone’s site, when you send someone a (supposed) business offer without checking to see whether it’s relevant—particularly when you claim to have checked them out, but clearly haven’t bothered—that’s spam.
And denying that fact won’t make me accept the offer (or leave the comment visible) any more than the “Please do not discard” statements on credit card offers will get me to fill out an application.
We went to see Howl’s Moving Castle (Miyazaki’s latest, excellent as always) tonight, and as we walked past the Oakley store, I suddenly realized: that’s why General Grievous looked familiar!
Though Katie pointed out, it also looks rather like the Omni-Droid.
Well, technically, the fish is severed…
