Last year, a rag-tag group of cardigan-wearing psuedo-intellectuals put on a conference and posted video of the sessions (however low quality) on the web for free.
This week, at the LinuxWorld Expo in New York, the Chairman of Novell gave the keynote address, and I can’t find video of it online anywhere.
Boo.
It has always bothered me that while the web has well defined standards for defining documents, much of what we do on the web isn’t about documents at all. Rather, it is much more like traditional application development.
Ian Hixie, Mozilla hacker and Opera Software employee in Norway, is also bothered by this, and plans to try to do something about it.
This would be a difficult task, but it is worth watching.
A vulnerability in Internet Explorer allows spyware to get at Mozilla Firebird
I’m helping lead the Mozilla Visual Identity Team (scroll down to “Active marketing projects” for the info)
I’ve long enjoyed the photos in the MSNBC feature, The Week in Pictures and The Week in Sports Pictures. However, during a recent redesign, the format and display of these features has gotten much worse.
Update: A reader has pointed out that though it is still Flash-based, the MSNBC Week in Pictures feature now works in Firefox. Thanks.
If I go to The Week in Pictures using Mozilla Firebird, my default browser, and a popular standards-compliant browser, I see an error graphic telling me “Sorry. Your browser is not compatible with this interactive feature.”
Well, it’s not that my browser isn’t compatible with their “interactive feature”, but rather that their “interactive feature“ isn’t compatible with standard web browsers.
The features do work in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. However, I suspect we would be giving them too much credit to assume that MSNBC intentionally cripples features in non-Microsoft web browsers. Rather, I suspect that this is a matter of bad web development. If I’m wrong, though, and it is intentionally, then the behaviour is abhorrent, and given their anti-trust history, I hope illegal.
The Week in Pictures feature is now displayed in Flash. Flash is great for some things — but this isn’t one of them. Thanks to their use of Flash, I can’t, for example link to the individual images. I can’t even link to the entire slideshow due to their sloppy overuse of JavaScript.
What bothers me most about this is that they aren’t using some wacky Microsoft-only technology to display the photos. Mozilla Firebird can handle Flash quite happily. If you view the source HTML code on the page with the error message, you’ll see the URL of the actual Flash file. If you open this URL directly in Firebird, you’ll see that the feature actually does work in Mozilla Firebird.
Interested geeks can take a look at the JavaScript code they are using to incorrectly determine which browsers can access their feature.
Shame on MSNBC — I’d like to view their fine feature content — but I can’t.
It was so cold tonight that the liquid crystal in the LCD on my car stereo was moving visibly slow
Prince Edward Island to use more wind power – I hope they follow through
An older post discussed at a recent weblog meeting: Brester Kahle of the Internet Archive on Access to Digital Materials
What happens when you put a bunch of webloggers in a barn with beer and pizza? We’ll know tomorrow night.
