stumblelog

But then all of a sudden the Olympic opening ceremony comes along, and millions of people sense - instinctively - that it isn't either-or or us-and-them. You can like and respect and respond to both Elgar and Dizzee, both the romantic national myth of the countryside and the achievements of the Industrial Revolution, both the older traditions cherished by the Right and the post-war developments cherished by the Left. On Friday night, miraculously, it suddenly all seemed to be part of one narrative, part of a shared national story.

well, have you ever put any thought into how much memory it takes to store retina-quality text?

that display is approximately 8 times crisper than a regular non-retina display

and each pixel is actually a portrait of steve jobs

actually no

Once again we're at a crossroads with the Open Web, with the not-so-hollow threat from browser makers that are not Apple or Google to implement the -webkit prefix for CSS extensions. WebKit has long led the field for CSS extensions, implementing features such as text-shadow as far back as 2003, but the browser landscape has radically altered since the introduction of the iPhone. CSS features once considered idealistic have rapidly become a standard part of the web developer toolkit. The transformative effects of this new era of mobile computing are still being felt, and we've yet to see just how the dust will settle, with major players such as Nokia and Microsoft yet to find their footing. What is for certain though is that they won't give up without a fight.

I find it shocking that this incredibly strong business driver has yet to be recognised as the rationale behind this threat. Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera have all yet to properly assert themselves in the new mobile web economy, and all three are at massive risk of being left behind. The fact that Opera is a major player on a massive number of existing devices is next to irrelevant when you consider just how quickly phones are replaced in comparison to desktop computers. Mozilla also faces strong competition; for years the darling of open web advocates, Firefox has long had a reputation for being a slow, memory hog, but recently many in the technology community are finally switching to Chrome. When your previously biggest advocates are turning their back on you, it doesn't bode well for how the more fickle majority will act.

Then there's Microsoft. As I wrote two years ago, Microsoft needed to embrace the open web or risk irrelevance. To my surprise (but a pleasant surprise), this is exactly what they've done, and with Windows 8 they're forging a path away from Silverlight and towards a new era of apps built for touch devices upon open web technologies. But it's quite possible this is too little, too late. The iPad is utterly crushing the competition in the tablet market, and by the time Windows 8 is in the hands of consumers on a tablet device, the marketplace may have already decided that all they want is iPads. In turn, developers will be basing their technology decisions upon this. Finding no alternative, they will turn to the -webkit CSS extension wherever they want to make use of modern CSS features.

Which brings us back to the W3C. That there is no other choice but to use vendor prefixes in spite of the fact these target mature and reliable technologies is a massive indictment of the W3C's CSS working group. These should be features by now. If there is still debate over syntax, that the development community uses them anyway should be a big pointer as to whether or not that's an important debate (and before you assume this means that the -webkit syntax will always win, there are numerous examples of syntaxes that WebKit introduced that have been superceded; -webkit-gradient immediately springs to mind). Pointing the finger at the people who build websites when they have no reasonable alternative (other than to just not use the features!) is the worst kind of passing the buck, but when the remit of a working group is to be apolitical it's too easy not to recognise when you're being gamed. And that's precisely what's happening right now.

curl get.pow.cx | sh ; mkdir ~/Sites/foo ; mkdir ~/Sites/foo/public ; echo '<h1>hello world</h1>' > ~/Sites/foo/public/index.html ; ln -s ~/Sites/foo ~/.pow/foo ; curl http://foo.dev/