[N]ext time you wonder why your toolkit of choice is built the way it is or why it’s even necessary, just remember that in many cases they are protecting you from a decade or more of bad decision making.
Alex Russell
Wow — when did Pidgin get such an awesome logo? Most companies don’t have a wordmark this artful. And most open‐source software projects have either a dreadful logo or none at all. (Then again, the Disney‐cartoonish detail on the pigeon clashes horribly with the wordmark.)
It is not our intent to eliminate debate or disagreement, but rather to programmatically enforce a certain quality of expression. Put another way: The StupidFilter will cheerfully approve an eloquent, properly‐capitalized defense of mandatory, state‐subsidized rocket‐launcher ownership for all schoolchildren.
StupidFilter
There is a meme beginning to go around that he is vague and empty. If you do not know what Obama is proposing in many areas, it’s only because you don’t know how to use Google.
Andrew Sullivan
I’ve been working hard on RKelly lately. RKelly is a Ruby implementation of Kelly. Kelly is a fictional project that I made up so that I could name my project RKelly.
Aaron Patterson
For a while I’ve been thinking about writing a Greasemonkey script to hide any del.icio.us/popular links that begin with a number, but I think this is the last meta‐straw: 7 Types of Blog Posts Which Always Seem to Get Links and Traffic. Blog will eat itself.
What [the Iowa Caucus] does is give the whip hand to the moneyed political professionals, to the full‐time party hacks and manipulators, to the shady pollsters and the cynical media boosters, and to the supporters of fringe and crackpot candidates… It is an absolutely terrible way in which to select candidates for the presidency, and it makes the United States look and feel like a banana republic both at home and overseas.
Christopher Hitchens
Justin looks at what YUI gets right in fostering third‐party scripts. In particular he enjoys the inline documentation, which gets converted to an API reference using JsDoc Toolkit. I’ve long been interested in inline docs, but have not found a system that would not require more effort than writing the docs separately as we do now. (Relatedly: Prototype UI seems to be using Natural Docs.)
We would like to return to work with our writers. If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence.
Jon Stewart & Stephen Colbert
You heard it somewhere else first: IE8 reportedly passes the Acid2 test. I’ve seen many reports of this, but none of them have read between the lines and translated it into an implicit set of new features for IE8’s HTML and CSS support: proper object support with content fallback, min- and max-height and width, CSS tables, and generated content. It also implies bug fixes for collapsing margins. These are the things tested by Acid2 which would’ve failed in IE7. If we get as much on the JavaScript side as we’ve apparently received on the HTML/CSS side, this will be the largest step forward the web has seen in a decade.