link round-up

[cellio]

Maritan Headsets (from Joel on Software) is a long but worthwhile article on software standards -- both not having them early enough, and having them and trying to enforce them. Parts of it made me laugh out loud, like the paragraph containing this passage: "[...] but of course when you plug the headphones into FireQx 3.0 lo and behold they explode in your hands because of a slight misunderstanding about some obscure thing in the spec which nobody really understands called hasLayout, and everybody understands that when it's raining the hasLayout property is true and the voltage is supposed to increase to support the windshield-wiper feature, but there seems to be some debate over whether hail and snow are rain for the purposes of hasLayout..."

Rescue me: a fed bailout crosses a line seems (to this non-expert) like a good analysis of what just happened to the market and the dollar. (Need a login ID? Try BugMeNot.) I am more scared, and more angry, about our government's economic policies than I've been in a while. As someone on my subscription list said (I forget who), the people who actually took personal responsibility and saved rather than spending recklessly are the ones who are going to get hammered by this, while the idiots who bought houses (or corporate holdings) they couldn't afford and racked up tons of debt will be bailed out because we can't stand to say "too bad you were an idiot".

As long as I'm saying "too bad"... too bad, Michigan and Florida. Agreed.

On a lighter note: Garfield Minus Garfield is surreal. And since seeing it a week or so ago, I haven't been able to read Garfield "straight".

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

Ah, Joel. I occasionally forget about him. Great stuff.

One thing that does disturb me about all this IE8 stuff is the "all browsers have a 'standards' mode". Sorry, I use Opera, and there is just one mode. It may not render everything perfectly according to how people think it should work, but it's closer to standards-compliant than most browsers. For some set of standards, of course.

And to counter myself, the HTML5 in-progress standards make me feel quite ill.

As someone on my subscription list said (I forget who), the people who actually took personal responsibility and saved rather than spending recklessly are the ones who are going to get hammered by this, while the idiots who bought houses (or corporate holdings) they couldn't afford and racked up tons of debt will be bailed out because we can't stand to say "too bad you were an idiot".

Word. I might get a few hundred bucks from this "tax rebate", but probably not. Fiscally irresponsible people will get much, much more. As are all of the banks who made poor investments in those people.

I won't comment about Michigan and Florida, assuming you can guess how I would feel. ;-)

Joel

[cellio]

That Microsoft, with their track record on IE, is claiming to follow standards just boggles my mind, quite independently of all the issues with what it means to be standards-compliant anyway.

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

I believe Microsoft claimed for both IE5 and IE6 that they were the most standards-compliant browsers, and offered complete CSS/CSS2 support. The claim was not worth the electrons used up in viewing it.

Probably no browser will ever be completely standards-compliant. Not because the standards are ill-defined or contradictory, but because they want most of those poorly constructed web sites out there to "look good", otherwise they get no piece of the market.