Rob Eberhardt

Guess I'm not the only one who was baffled by the new W3C XMLHTTPRequest spec credits.

From Dare Obasanjo:

Interesting. A W3C specification that documents a proprietary Microsoft API which not only does not include a Microsoft employee as a spec author but doesn't even reference any of the IXMLHttpRequest documentation on MSDN. I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere. ;)

And then finally from Anne van Kesteren (one of the spec's authors):

Hereby my apologies to everyone who had to waste his time by writing a rant... The current draft reads: "Special thanks also to the Microsoft employees who first implemented the XMLHttpRequest interface, which was first widely deployed by the Windows Internet Explorer browser."

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.