Bruce Lawson’s personal site

Standards

• Once again, discussion of installable/ packaged web app thingies. Major points:
  • Mozilla doesn’t want to reuse the W3C Widget spec because they want hosted, not installable apps. And the name “widget” is rubbish.
  • Hosted web apps are .. er .. web sites. But wrapped up, with a manifest, they can be monetized in a synergy of micropayment leverage.
  • “Installing” packaged apps can give them greater permissions than web sites. Hixie responded
    

    The “installation” security model of asking the user up-front to grant trust just doesn’t work because users don’t understand the question, and the “installation” security model of curating apps and trying to determine by empirical examination whether an application is trustworthy or not just doesn’t scale.

• Two New Proposals to Solve the CSS3 Vendor Prefix Crisis
• Last week I linked to an article that claimed adherence to WCAG didn’t magically solve all blind users’ problems. Here’s a rebuttal Methodological flaws put question mark on study of the impact of WCAG on user problems. It seems to me obvious that, while WCAG is very useful, it doesn’t replace brain, or testing.

Mobile and devices

• User Proximity spec
• HTML5 adaptive images: end of round one – my write up of the kerfuffle over the draft HTML features for adaptive images
• How Ignighter failed in its target market of the US and became an accidental success in India – my article
• 21% of Millennial moms use their phone in the bathroom and 12% use it during sex! claims headline-begging new report

Web Biz

• Wozniak calls for open Apple
• How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet – interesting read, although I think rumours of Flickr’s death are greatly exaggerated
• Why great companies die – repeatedly – and is Microsoft next? – very interesting article by Simon Wardley that isn’t actually about Microsoft at all

Misc

• Capitalists and Other Psychopaths
• James Buchanan – America’s real first gay president, 1857–1861
• Great things about being a virgin woman – triumphantly back-to-Victorian-times journalism from Times of India

Web Standards Song

“Like A Rounded Corner”, by Bruce and The Standardettes

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