In other huge JavaScript news, FireBug 0.4 is out. This is a huge release, so rather than enumerate the many new features I’ll just tell you to go download it now and find out for yourself. I’ve been beta testing it for a couple weeks and I already can’t imagine going back to 0.3.
Category: Links
Sam Stephenson has a blog, finally. (No, Projectionist doesn’t count.) His first post is monumental: he all but guarantees that Dean Edwards’s Base will be integrated into Prototype, allowing for true inheritance. (I’m guessing this is a 2.0 feature because it’d prompt a rewrite of stuff like the Ajax classes to use the new model. This isn’t something you submit a patch for.)
Brendan Eich: JavaScript 2 and the Future of the Web. In a nutshell: a bunch of new syntax, optional type annotation, more keywords borrowed from Java, and a huge lurch in the direction of Python. “Standard global properties (Date, String, etc.) immutable” is listed on the “Bug Fixes” slide; if that means what I think it means, I’m gonna be angry.
The Del.icio.us Lesson. Yes! I’ve been saying this for months! (Not to other people, mind you. I’ve been saying it inside my own head.) Flickr is another good example: even if nobody else used the site, I’d still find it useful as a photo hosting platform. The network effect doesn’t just happen.
The Bad in Email. For a long time I’ve considered e‐mail a hair’s breadth away from completely broken; I really don’t know why we haven’t started over.
John Dvorak wants Microsoft to give up on IE. I found this on del.icio.us/popular — I really hope that doesn’t mean that people are taking John Dvorak seriously, for once. Internet Explorer isn’t a bad browser because it’s made by Microsoft. They’re capable of making a browser as good as Firefox, or at least one with a rendering engine as good as Gecko. They simply haven’t yet. Dvorak gets paid to daydream, but I don’t have the time; I get paid to make my code work in IE. I can’t make it go away by closing my eyes.
Mark Pilgrim has returned from his blogging sabbatical, which he seemingly spent vacationing off the face of Earth. (Or raising his “child.” Or something.) I’ve missed his rhetoric.
There are exceptions, of course, but the attitude of Ruby on Rails users toward Ruby skeptics or critics has been less than kind. This is a crowd convinced that it has found the ultimate answer to everything, and they are not afraid to let you know. I only have a simple advice for these people: you might be right, but just be humble. It never hurts.
Derek’s tired of “user‐generated content” as a buzzword. In addition to what’s listed here, what pisses me off about this trend is that some startups think that they won’t have to provide any content at all. If your only source of content is the user, then your app’s value is strongly correlated to the size of your userbase. Which means that when you start your application will be worthless. How do you get people to sign up for something that has no worth?
Complexity is slowing Microsoft down. How much of the Windows architecture is dictated by obligations to “compatibility”? (Why do we still use drive letters? “Because that’s how it was in DOS” is an unacceptable answer.) BootCamp makes me think that the next 18 months are going to be really, really good for Apple.