Posts by Jonathan Powell

W3C 'clarifies' HTML 5 v XHTML

It's not the standards, it's the adoption.

@James Anderson - The XForms standard is a godsend for the forms developer. It's just a pity it's had such a retardedly slow uptake.

As an aside, however, the slow process of developing a standard is nothing in comparison to Microsoft's reticence to implement these standards.

You want a vector drawing standard? Here's SVG. And them Microsoft don't support it and create XAML instead.

You want some standards to work with XML documents? We're on XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0, XQuery 1.0 etc. And then Microsoft don't support anything other than the severely restricted XPath 1.0. spec.

As a developer it's incredibly frustrating when a standard you want to use exists but you are unable to adopt it yourself due to inadequate support. I don't want to be pushed into using proprietary systems, so I'm stuck with the same tools I had in 2001.

The standards body shouldn't make it any more difficult for adoption or implementation, because this is the biggest problem that exists right now for web developers. Bring on XHTML.

Apple applies to light up laptop touchpads, iPod clickwheels

But Apple have already made touchpads obsolete

This patent is redundant.

There is already visual feedback on (almost) all touch screen implementations. By essentially retrofitting this concept to a touchpad - that is, giving it some form of 'screen' functionality - Apple are not creating anything new at all. They don't deserve to be granted this patent, but they'll probably get it.

I'll agree with a few other posters that backlighting is useful, though. I love touch-surface technology and Apple do it really well.

Microsoft's Raikes leaves

However

...you'd have loved to say he was placed on garden leave.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_leave)

BBC Trust backs calls for Linux iPlayer

BBC should try harder

I'd like to see the BBC get their content rights in order so they can supply as much as possible (of their in-house productions) to a DRM-free implementation, and let the 3rd party content owners haggle about what they provide on the nobody-wants-to-use-this DRM closed source Microsofty product.

I'm pretty confident that an open source implementation would see way more use than most people assume. I don't know many people who would willingly sit at their desktop PC and watch TV, but I believe there's quite a growing market for media centre systems (apple TV and linux-based systems) as well as the portable market (I'd love iPlayer on my Nokia N800 :)

BBC should be leading the way with all this, not playing catch-up. I'd hope they aren't totally at the mercy of other production companies and Microsoft in this respect.

Google Gears up for offline web apps

Just because you can...

...doesn't mean you should.

It's an interesting concept, I'll grant them that. You /could/ say it's even easier than making a cross-platform offline application that syncs with online data (but that's debatable).

Unfortunately it completely negates the best features of web applications - such as their own Google Maps - which just can't work offline. They're re-inventing the wheel with this one, but perhaps making it slightly more round.

Technorati stung by ad-friendly vibe

I can't wait to see the outcome

This is going to be interesting. I've seen prototype mash-ups of this ilk in the past, but Technorati have the resources to do it far more accurately than anyone who has attempted this so far.

Will we see a Running Man style "popularity index" for celebrities? And how will our A-list celebs feel when years of social climbing amounts to less than some teenager on youtube who got famous by dancing like a tard?

And will they get it working right before google labs churns out something identical?