...more recent posts
In a complete shock that doesn't actually make much difference in my life, Bruce Chizen has stepped down as CEO of Adobe. Wow. A few years ago I was pretty sure Adobe was on a road to no where. And they still might be, but they've made a lot of what seem like good moves to me since then. And now they are poised to really duke it out and be a big force in the future direction of not just the web, but computing itself. Why would anyone step down at this point?
I guess there could be a ton of personal reasons, but it's hard to figure there is a better or more interesting job out there.
htmlSQL : "a PHP class to query the web by an SQL-like language." That is just so wrong. Yet it's perfect. As they say, if you have a hammer every problem looks like a nail. So since I'm comfortable in SQL this seems very useful. Still I know it's just so wrong.
I thought I had blogged about Opera adding support for HTML 5 <audio> and <video> tags which replace the very messy <embed> situation we have now (which is one of the big reasons that embedding video in a web page is mostly done with Flash at the moment.) But I can't find it, so I guess it was one of those many things I almost blogged about but never actually got around to posting. Anyway, yesterday WebKit annouced support as well (WebKit is the rendering engine at the heart of Apple's Safari browser, as well as the open source KHTML - from which Safari was born - plus Nokia's mobile browser and now Google's mobile browser in their new Android mobile OS platform.) And there is some really straightforward javascriptable capabilities:
<script>
function playPause() {
var myVideo = document.getElementsByTagName('video')[0];
if (myVideo.paused)
myVideo.play();
else
myVideo.pause();
}
</script>
<input type=button onclick="playPause()" value="Play/Pause"/>
Nice. I've tried playing around with scripting the embedded quicktime player, and it's a real pain. This seems much better. I've been wondering for a while why Apple has let Flash get such a lead here. I think a lot of developers would rather an HTML / javascript solution, but you basically are forced to use Flash now because it just works.
The premise is that web design is in a polarized state where some people are technicians with skills centering around HTML and CSS (and maybe javascript,) while others are designers with skills in more traditional graphic design like layout, typography, and color selection - and very few "web designers" have feet in both camps. And further, this might be a major reason for poor design on the web - or at least for the dearth of incredible design.
This post walks through a lot of contemporary thinking on both sides of the argument and is packed with links to other great articles and resources. Highly recommended for anyone involved in any way with web design.