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And this, my friends, is the reason why User-Agent strings (well, user-agent detection, at least) suck so much. It's exactly the same problem we're going to run into in a few years with object detection in Javascript, which also sucks. I have a strong dislike for the people currently working on some of the upcoming specifications for the web, because they seem to be encouraging this sort of stupid behavior with their short-sightedness. I grant that Microsoft couldn't have known the mess it was going to create when it first put "Mozilla" in their User-Agent string, but there's no reason we should keep making the same mistakes over and over.

The creators of the DOM specifications even put in feature-detection support right into the DOM precisely to avoid this sort of problem, but nobody seems to realize that that's what it's there for, and insist upon using inferior alternatives simply to save a few characters in code. Sigh

There comes a time in every person's life when they need to move out of their Mom's basement and get a place of their own in order to grow. The same is true of the Web. We need to stop treating it like a kid and coddling it with ugly hack after ugly hack. It's all grown up, and the mess of tag soup parsing and quirks mode layout needs to be thrown out. Sure, the Web wouldn't be where it is now if browsers hadn't allowed developers to be so sloppy with their HTML, but if we continue to allow that sloppy HTML the Web will never realize its true potential. This is true for any serious project - you put in a lot of quick-and-dirty hacks for prototyping and to get something up and running quickly. However, the dirty hacks eventually need to be thrown out or turned into something more solid and well-defined. Some of the W3C contributors seem to think that the Web is somehow special and exempt from this, but it's not. If the HTML5 spec is ever finished, it may well turn out to be the thing that locks the Web in the basement.

Sorry if my metaphors make no sense (really, they made sense when I was thinking about it) but on the bright side, at least I've found something else I can rant about.

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The man has a point.

But this means I need to find something else to rant about. Dangit! Anybody got any good ranting topics?

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The tag cloud I added in my last post actually seems somewhat more useful than I thought. I decided to take it a bit further and generate a tag cloud of all my blog titles, and link them to the blog posts themselves. This should make it easier for me to find old posts that I'm looking for, and also make it easier for random visitors to see the general topics I blog about. There's a link to the cloud on the main blog page. I might end up taking out the little words after all. And maybe tweaking the font size to be non-linear with respect to frequency.

Note that, as usual, the contents of the cloud are based on which posts you have permissions to see, so if you're logged in you'll get a bigger cloud than if you're logged out.

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Ever since Google's Chrome browser was released a few days ago, it seems like every other article in my news feeds related to it some way. It was getting pretty ridiculous, but I figured it would be a good time to experiment a little with something I wanted to try a while ago: tag clouds. So I hacked together a quick-and-dirty cloud generator based on the subject lines of all the articles in my news feeds over the last seven days. As of right now, the word "chrome" (including the "chrome's" variant) appears almost as many times as the word "and" (in fact, it's only short by one). Now that's pretty ridiculous.

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1, 2, 3, let's all talk about melting ice. As usual, we seem to have underestimated the magnitude of our impact on the planet and are now starting to gasp in shock and horror at what we have done. Well, a certain subset of "we", anyway. Unfortunately others still don't care.

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As I mentioned back in the day, if you're logged in to this site and you post a comment, it will have a MicroID attached to it so you can claim ownership of it. Seems like there's a potential privacy issue with MicroIDs, but only if email addresses are used in generating the MicroID. Since this site uses OpenID as an authentication mechanism and the generated MicroIDs are http+http rather than mailto+http, it's not vulnerable to the privacy issue described. Just another reason why OpenID kicks ass. :)

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From the Bluetooth HID spec:

The implementation of L2CAP on the host should meet the default minimum MTU (maximum transmission unit) of 48 bytes, although the default value of 672 is recommended.

The default minimum maximum transmission unit? I can understand maximum transmission unit. I can sort of see the point of a minimum maximum transmission unit. But a default minimum maximum transmission unit makes my brain explode. And that has a default value too. So would that be the default default minimum maximum transmission unit? Or just the default default maximum transmission unit? Or maybe it's the default minimum default transmission unit!

It's like those trucks I see around town from FedEx Express (i.e. Federal Express Express). They should have just gone with FedEx².

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Today the BlackBerry Bold became available here in Canada. It comes with a browser, which I've been working on for the last year or so. Most of that time was spent on a complete rewrite of the rendering engine used in the browser. The new rendering engine (known as "Mango") isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than what we had before, both in terms of rendering fidelity and standards compliance. Beats the pants off Trident, and hopefully is comparable to WebKit, Presto, and Gecko. Given the amount of time we've been working on it, I'm pretty happy with the results. :)

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Nothing is free.

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If I were to title a blog post "The cost of free", what would the post say? The commenter with the closest answer gets 2.718 bajillion points*. Offer void where prohibited by law. Limit of 5 entries per commenter. Skill-testing question may be required in order to claim prize.

* Points are redeemable for chunks of code, parkour skills, hugs, or chocolate.

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