When
· Naughties
· · 2003
· · · October
· · · · 17 (2 entries)
GUIs and Browsers, Again · Jon Udell has another very solid piece on the GUI/browser tension. This issue isn’t going away, because I (and a lot of others) think that Microsoft has never really gotten comfy with a browser-centric world. For example read this, from Scoble last July, about all the ways HTML isn’t good enough and how they’re fixing it over in Redmond. My heart is on my sleeve; I think a modern standards-compliant browser hits such a huge sweet spot that it’s going to be hard to move the world past it. At Antarctica we’ve created a really rich, snappy, interactive and very graphical interface without pushing the edges of the browser very hard. Now if we could just get Microsoft to give IE a shot in the arm sometime between now and Longhorn.
UTF-8+names · Here’s the problem. You want to put “funny” characters in your XML, ones that aren’t on your keyboard, like “ñ” isn’t in Greece and “Δ” isn’t in Mexico. XML has a bunch of ways to do this; some of them require sophisticated software, others are really ugly, and if you want to avoid both the ugliness and the fancy software, you can use a DTD. Except for people don’t want to use DTDs either. This set of issues has been darkening the XML skies for years now, but we may have stumbled on a way out of the box. (Warning: Bit-banging technicalia of interest only to XML obsessives) ...
