Super Volatile

One of the things that I’m passionate about in my role at Microsoft is helping developers ensure that their sites provide an awesome experience in every browser. Yeah, yeah I know it seems odd that a Microsoft evangelist would say this but it’s the honest truth and anyone who’s worked with me before knows that I take great pride in this effort.

Given the fact that for almost a decade Microsoft was trying to kill web platform and even now can't keep up with other browser makers, a job of web standards evangelist there must be a tough one.

Only because browser vendors are shipping "experimental features" in non-experimental versions! Experimental features should be available only in "technology previews" of the browsers, not in stable versions. That way, everyone could still test the experimental features according to the W3C rules BUT Web authors would not use prefixed versions in production. Since almost all browser vendors switched to a fast release process, I don't see the problem here. A feature would move from prefixed to unprefixed as soon as the spec reaches stability, ie CR status.

Daniel Glazman defends CSS vendor prefixes from the recent uproar against them.

If you have content that demands semantic purity — such as a library database, a document that needs a table of contents, or an online book (i.e. anything for which semantic purity makes sense) — then by all means stick to the HTML5 outlining algorithm, and split hairs on which element should be an article and which a section. No customer-facing tool exists that takes advantage of this algorithm by producing a table of contents. No browser seems to exploit such tools either.

Front-end development is full of myths and things we would like to be true (but are not). Unfortunately, semantic markup seem to largely belong to that category.

A lot of people think this is a discussion largely about the future of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. While these are certainly important components which influence the web greatly, I think they actually represent the least important “pieces” of the web. A web composed of XML and Python would in my opinion still be the web. Alternatively, a native platform that happened to use HTML and JavaScript but forced you through a marketplace would hold very few of the virtues of the web.

Take a look at iTunes: it is well known that the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) is written in HTML and JavaScript and hosted in a WebKit View within the app. However, since it is confined to the iTunes cage, it couldn’t behave any less like the web.

A voice in the debate sparked by Joe Hewitt on the development of web technologies, especially in mobile.

The solution to this conundrum on the iOS platform has been the app: companies like Netflix and the BBC have applications to watch video on these devices. The result is that in the desire to push an open, plugin-free Web, companies are being forced to migrate away from the Web entirely.

On some non-obvious consequences of Microsoft's move do ditch all plugins in Metro version of IE 10.

Classes will give us a humane, interoperable inheritance syntax, but it leaves composition unaddressed by syntax. I’m hopeful that we bless traits in future versions, removing the use of inheritance in most cases. Similarly, I think we can find a way to repair “this” binding foot-guns with softly-bound “this”. Repairing the shared-prototypes issue, either through DOM or through something like Scoped Object Extensions, can and should be done. And once we have all of this, the stage will be set for a flexible, advanced type system that does not need to be all-or nothing and does not need to be hobbled by the ghost of C++/Java’s inflexible nominal-only types. That’s the dream, and we’re not shying away from it.

Alex Russel's ideas are at least controversial (Dojo comes to mind), but he is for sure influential and it's interesting to see what he thinks about the direction JavaScript should take in the future.

I'd been developing the spec solely at the WHATWG until yesterday, and received lots of good technical feedback there. I thought I'd post a heads-up to public-html in case anyone there was interested. Since I figured people would ask where the spec was going to be hosted, I mentioned that I wasn't planning to host it at the W3C. The result of this gesture to date has been one public e-mail, one private e-mail, and at least one blog comment and one Google+ thread concerned purely about procedural and political issues without any concern for the technical work that I spent six months on. And zero technical feedback. This is one basic reason I'm not interested in doing any work at the W3C.

A peak at behind the scenes of creating web standards. The author of recent editing API's specification, Aryeh Gregor, shares his frustrations with W3C process and why he prefers to work on his own and on behalf of his employer (Google).

Three main concerns are enumerated in the post: WebGL exposes too much sensitive, privileged, or unhardened code to the Web; depends too heavily on third-party code for security; and is too susceptible to denial of service attacks. The first of these is perhaps most significant. Video hardware and video drivers are traditionally only exposed to relatively "trusted" code—programs that the user has explicitly chosen to install. Display drivers are notoriously unstable and buggy, and developers of 3D software have to go to quite some effort to ensure their programs do not use (or misuse) the 3D hardware in such a way as to cause problems.

Microsoft refuses to implement WebGL, giving security as a reason. Interestingly, it's not an issue for every other browser out there and even for Microsoft's very own Silverlight... It's worth to read response of the VP of Technology at Mozilla, Mike Shaver.

In 2011, we think that mobile web technology is firmly back in play, and an area of renewed attention for many developers. We think Apple has a great opportunity to build again on the platform’s original prospect of first-class web applications.

Not that Apple seems to care about what developers want, but still, these things would be very much welcome.

Being a web developer is as awesome as Chewbacca riding a squirrel, fighting Nazis with a cross bow.

Front-end development style guide. Probably the best thing in this category since Web standards checklist.