Web Posts

• 07.03.09 Career Update, Part ++n (Web, Me, Computers)

  I’ve now ended up working on Chrome, Google’s web browser. The team I’m on is responsible for implementing HTML 5 features, as well as designing and implementing other new features (for standardization) that will help web apps become as powerful as native apps. Much of what we do will go into the WebKit source tree, where it will also directly benefit Safari, Android, the Palm Pre, and other WebKit-based browsers.

  In fact, everything I work on (more or less) is going to be open source. Both the WebKit and Chromium source trees are public. You can view, if you care to, the one patch I’ve contributed so far and the one that’s currently out for review. That’s kind of mind-blowing, in a good way, to me, steeped as I am in the secrecy of Apple.

  I’m pretty excited by this. There are quite a lot of things I’m interested in working on—client-side storage, local apps, drag-and-drop, better font support, menus, even far-out stuff like peer-to-peer networking. Forward in all directions!… MORE

• 02.15.09 What will Web 3.0 be? (Ideas, Social Software, Web, Computers)

  So, Web 2.0’s heyday is over, and somewhere out there, Web 3.0 is slouching toward us waiting to be born. What will it be?

  There’s really no such single thing as “Web x“, of course. And all predictions are really just wishes. That being said, my wish is that Web 3.0 will be about distributed systems. To oversimplify:

  Web 1.0 built up big brand-name websites with their own content—things written by them, or repurposed from the media companies that owned them, or stuff to buy.

  Web 2.0 embraced “user-created content” and interaction between users. The content creation has become less centralized, outsourced to whomever wants to register an account and post stuff, but the sites managing, storing and serving the content are still centralized.

  Web 3.0, I hope, will take the decentralization to the software, and the storage. Monolithic web apps run by huge server farms—Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, Flickr, etc.—will be at least in part supplanted by apps that users run locally (or at least ‘nearby’) and which share data among each other.… MORE

• 12.20.08 Lazyweb: Is there a Ruby template engine like Genshi or Kid? (Web, Languages, Computers)

  Ruby has a wide variety of HTML/XML templating engines, but none of the ones I’ve found work the way I’d like. It’s quite possible I’ve overlooked some, though. If you’ve got a good suggestion, I’ve got a gold star ready to stick on your forehead!… MORE

• 09.03.08 Web Apps Need More UI, Not Less (Web)

  I haven’t used Chrome yet, though I know people who work on it, and it looks like a good browser with some good new ideas. But I’m unsure of the benefits of one of its main talking points: that what web applications really need is to have less browser “chrome” around them. As I put it in an IM to Julian Missig yesterday:

  I think the problem isn’t that the browser chrome has too much [UI], it’s that the apps inside have too little.

  Too little what? What are the web apps lacking? Since you ask:… MORE

• 08.17.08 Career update (Web, Me, Computers)

  FYI, I ended up taking the position at Google. I started two weeks ago, and it’s been quite exciting, despite (or because of) the “drinking from a fire-hose” aspect of learning my way around the big G.

  I’m on the Google Sites team. I’ve been interested in wikis for years, and now I get to actually work on one. (Although Sites, née JotSpot, is not a typical wiki.)

  I could write a lot about my experience of … MORE

• 08.17.08 Re: MobileMe Webmail Security — There Is None (Web, Computers)

  ‘Prince McLean’, writing for AppleInsider:

  Data transaction security in MobileMe’s web apps is based upon authenticated handling of JSON data exchanges between the self contained JavaScript client apps and Apple’s cloud, rather than the SSL web page encryption used by HTTPS. […] If Apple applied SSL encryption in the browser, it would only slow down every data exchange without really improving security, and instead only provide pundits with a false sense of security that distracts from real security threats.

  It’s pretty clear to me from this description that (a) McLean doesn’t know much about data security or HTTP, and (b) the system he’s describing would be patently insecure. And unfortunately, the actual system is just as insecure as I was afraid it was.… MORE

• 08.09.08 Beautiful snej soup, yum (Social Software, Web, Me)

  I’m fooling around with Soup, a newish micro-blogging service I just discovered. I’ve never signed up for tumblr or its other clones, but I’m kind of smitten with Soup, so I set up my own:

  beautiful snej soup, yum

  I’ve got it aggregating stuff from my del.icio.us, flickr and last.fm accounts, as well as this blog. And I’m directly posting some things I’ve run across today, via its very nice bookmarklet.

  Part of the reason I got sucked in is that Soup has the single best new-user experience I’ve ever seen on the web.… MORE

• 06.17.08 JavaScript 2.0, aka ECMAScript 4 (Web, Languages, Computers)

  I just discovered that there is an ECMAScript 4—better known as JavaScript 2.0—in development. As a shameless language slut, I immediately dove into the language overview, and it’s pretty neat.

  This turns JavaScript into a much more useable language, that I could see doing serious development in. I’m well aware that today’s JS isn’t a “toy”, that it’s got an interesting prototype-based object model under the hood; but I’ve found the language so loose as to be difficult to use. This new version adds a full class model, much better support for iteration, a form of generators/coroutines, and more.… MORE

• 05.30.08 Rails Help, Please? (How to create a login/account system) (Web, Computers)

  I hope some of you reading this are Ruby On Rails experts and have a moment to help me out. My problem in a nutshell: What Rails generator/plugin should I use to create a user account / login system, preferably with OpenID, in a new app?… MORE

• 04.19.08 Why They’re Doing This (Social Software, Web)

  I don’t want to make a habit of replying on my blog to posts on other blogs, because (a) it’s dorky in an autistic way, and (b) it only encourages the annoying practice of blogs that don’t allow comments.

  But I’ve seen a couple of references now to Dean Allen’s complaint about sites that offer multiple RSS feed formats, none offering comments, and since it directly relates to my past job monkeying with feeds I feel like I should answer.

  There are two reasons why a web page would advertise multiple feeds.… MORE