It's great that XMLHttpRequest is finally becoming an official standard.  It's better though, that the "other" browsers didn't wait for this before implementing it.  Real progress has happened as a result, in particular the recent popularity (& naming) of the AJAX technique, and the somewhat-related "Web 2.0" phenomenon.

The news also makes me smile at the anti-Microsoft folks who have thrown stones at Internet Explorer's standards support -- once again the IE team innovated (*overused word through gritted teeth*) a proprietary extension, and it was such a good thing that the competition swiped the idea, thus making it a de-facto standard.

I'd rather have a good de-facto standard now, than an official one too-late. End result: Developers and Users win (and they already are winning).

Footnote: Anyone else think it's strange that the standard's authors list seems to represent every browser except for XMLHttpRequest's inventor?

Thanks to Clagnut, I'm observing CSS Naked Day on April 5^th.

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

For the remaining dotText-ers out there who want this to automatically kick-in every April 5^th, I just added this condition to DTP.aspx:

<%
// suspend styles on April 5 to observe CSS Naked Day - http://naked.dustindiaz.com/
DateTime dtNaked = DateTime.Today; 
if(!(dtNaked.Month==4 && dtNaked.Day==5)){
%>
		<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/mystyles.css" />
<%
}
%>

Via Dean Edwards' Links, meet HedgerWow's <SELECT>-Free Layer, a CSS-only workaround for Internet Explorer's SELECT bug with z-index.

It's not quite clear from the demo, but I think the magic is an absolutely-positioned + transparent + huge IFRAME inside the layer to show.  C'est trés hacky, but it still seems better (in a way) than the usual dynamic hide/show javascript approach.

Here's hoping that Microsoft will quickly windows-update us all with IE7 (which fixes this bug, hoorah), and free us of these sHACKles.

Yuck! ...It even says "everything you need, nothing you don't" -- very much unlike this Flashturbation.

I'd guess the Flash designer hasn't seen Microsoft's (great) parody of its own bad design habits, The Microsoft Ipod:

In this blog's 1.25yrs alive: It's received 193 legit posts and comments, and 1388 comment spams. (And that's with a basic spam filter in place to catch the obvious 80%!)

It seems like the breeeport experiment might've accelerated it. It didn't seem to affect overall visits tho.

...Man, I gotta finish switching over to dasBlog soon.

• Participating in Scoble's

  brrreeeport

  experiment.
• Syndicating Digg's Programming news here now (in the sidebar).
• Considering participating in Technet ScriptCenter's Scripting Games event, despite my busy-ness. (Hey, I could be a contender!)
• Baffled why UC would require its own Alumni (aka "prospective donors" to UC's board) to jump through Stone Age hoops to get a transcript (this is 2006, and phone isn't even an option), and they'll still take "5-10 days" to process it.
• Downloading various free VMwares at the moment. Oh, and eating cookie dough.
• Wondering why the machine I've reinstalled at least 12 times in 12 months -- due to strange disk problems, but with different disks -- now appears problem free after switching its filesystem from NTFS to FAT32 (which is supposedly more fragile).
• Also wondering why the Virtual NT4 Server I spent the last week fighting with just refuses to run IIS4.
• Avidly tracking shipment of my new little Athlon 64-based machine, due here Tuesday.
• Chuckling at the recent surplus of general serendipity.
• Remembering that Tuesday is Valentine's day....