That's Greece

You hear a lot of FUD regarding Greece these days, mostly justified. Still, don't believe everything you see on TV, there is always an other side of the story:

Theory and practice

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.


Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut/Yogi Berra

The evolution of browsers

A new month, a new version of Chrome is released. Don't get me wrong, WebAudio is interesting (one more nail in the coffin for Flash) and NativeClient may be a solution to the primary roadblock in the evolution of the Web towards an application platform (namely JavaScript).

Still,  I would prefer browser vendors to go after some low-hanging fruit first. I mean, emerging HTML5 technologies are cool and all, but how about concentrating on the actual HTML part first? How about implementing common forms controls (date/time pickers, rich text editors, improved validation and more)? How about fully implementing CSS Paged Media? How about implementing MathML? How about replacing .pdf with .html first and then focus on killing Flash?

And while we are at it, how about improving bookmark management in Chrome? The current interface leaves a lot to be desired (i.g. multiple categorization of bookmarks using tags and/or hierarchical folders, similar to the categorization available in Google Docs).

In short, I would like to see more pragmatic features sooner rather than later.

HTML parser for JavaScript

I needed an HTML parser for one of my projects. As I am using exclusively JavaScript lately (and loving it) I searched for a JavaScript solution. Envjs looked interesting but the messy source code (and global namespace pollution) was discomforting. Finally I decided to package Java HTML5 parser used in Envjs for NarwhalNarwhal.

The tricky part was to make the parser compatible with Sizzle but I am happy to report that they both work great together now. You can find the source code for the package here.

Hardware accelerated HTML rendering

When you resize an image in an HTML page, you get a pixelated mess, no bilinear filtering. I never understood that. And while WebGL,  O3D, etc are cool, I always waited for an HTML rendering engine that utilizes my expensive GPU.

The wait, thanks to Microsoft, is over:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/IE-9-Surfing-on-the-GPU-with-D2D/

Now, this is a great feature!

Amazon Kindle International Edition

My main hobby is reading. Reading newspapers, magazines, sites, blogs, PDFs and books. I especially like reading books. I am really pleased to see that as of today, Amazon Kindle is finally eligible for international orders.

To tell you the truth, I would prefer to get the DX version (PDF or an equivalent open standard is the future of e-reading if you ask me).

But I can't help it, I have to place my order right away!

Marketing acquisitions?

When marketing people drive company acquisitions you can expect peculiar results.

Consider Nokia. They bought Trolltech, yet they used GTK over Qt in Maemo5 (though I am hearing they 'll switch to Qt in the next version).

What about Novel? The acquired Ximian (founded by Gnome hackers), yet they offer KDE as the default SuSE Linux desktop (true, they where probably more interested in Mono).

Go figure...