A list of IE8’s proprietary CSS extensions (which are mostly sane).

I like Joel Spolesky. He’s a great writer, and he’s got a good head for managing software. But he is blind to Microsoft’s insanity, taking the agnostic-zealot position. I can forgive him, though, as he writes passionately and is willing to question the other zealots.

What Joel and the other flamers have missed is that standards conformance is easy, if you can pull your head out of your ass long enough to realize that it’s already solved. If Microsoft could place nicely, they would be able to cooperate and join the Webkit fray. The world would be a better place.

Apple, Nintendo, and others have figured it out. Why build your own browser? Why not just pitch in to an existing effort, or license something? Standards are easier if you don’t insist on building it yourself.

Standards are easy. It’s NIH that is difficult.

The .NET framework compared to the human genome. Perhaps Slashdot isn’t quite dead yet.

An interesting side-note on the potential Yahoo-Microsoft deal: Microsoft has only $17B in cash/liquid reserves, but has bid $44.6B for Yahoo. Even if they sell of the diluted stock immediately after purchase, both companies will lose ground. The only motivation I see is to kill Yahoo search and peel off a few useful properties for sale. It appears to be desperate move, and I can only assume they have something up their sleeves.

At one point, the Visual Studio code base had about a dozen implementations of a C++ String class, most of them hacked out of MFC. That’s a vast improvement over passing the buffers around, but hey… these library writers are paid to work on these things full time! Why aren’t you using STL or ATL yet? – ex-MS employee

Scoble hits the nail on the head talking about Moguls, the serverless internet company:

How did Microsoft screw this up so badly? Let’s get this straight. Amazon used to be a book store. Now they are hosting virtualized servers for Internet companies. So much for having billions of dollars in the bank like Microsoft does, some of the smartest people in the world working in your research arms and having “monopoly” market share in operating systems.

Dr. Alan Kay talks about the Meaning of “Object-Oriented Programming”. His summary:

OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I’m not aware of them.

Frankly, Windows Mobile 6 is a mess. Common features require an infinitude of taps and clicks, and the ones you need most are buried in menus. Apparently the Windows Mobile 6 team learned absolutely nothing from Windows Mobile 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. – NYTimes

Which is better, XML or Python for Python templates? I like the Php approach myself (intermixed language/template), as it matches the natural state of each language. The linked debate is interesting, but what I really like is the side-by-side format¹.

1. The “log in to vote” overlay is a bit confusing/noisy, however ↩

Fog Creek’s new sites slide into the painful state of design by “a committee of tasteless slobs,” a condition to be aware of, and run screaming from when encountered. The Fog Creek guys started over again, gaining sanity and a cleaner, honest design.