How hard could this be? A six month project if three engineers are doing it in a garage. Five years if you put one hundred programmers on it.

Guy Kawasaki

-m

Like with the element counts, the grain-of-salt alarms are going off with this one. But apparently IE7 passes only 54% of the CSS test suite, up from 52% for IE6. (But even Mozilla only scores 93%). It’s not entirely clear how these numbers derive from the source data, and it certainly isn’t weighted for things like how useful or commonly used various features are.
It’s completely silly to say Microsoft isn’t even trying to implement the standard. Every engineer, product manager, or blogger involved with the project will honestly and sincerely describe the huge amount of effort going into standards compliance. To get to the problem, you need to dig deeper.
I’ll end on that enigmatic note. More later. -m

Lots and lots of blog traffic on Google Spreadsheet, but I haven’t seen anyone make a key point:

The underlying message is: full-blown applications in the browser are now real.

Many smaller players have been doing things like this for years, just as many smaller player were using Ajax before it had a catchy name. But as soon as it had a name and a big player (again, Google) behind it, it left the launch pad in spectacular fashion.

The era of Web Applications has begun. Don’t think that Microsoft Office should be afraid–it’s even bigger. -m

New features in InfoPath 2007 make me smile

• Design once to work on browser and client
• Object model the same across client and server

Both things I worked on extensively for Cardiff LiquidOffice in 2003-2004. ‘Cept we had design once and write out to DHTML, PDF, or InfoPath. :) -m

For better or worse. In no particular order.

1. Affordable unlimited data plans
2. Google getting into the operator business
3. Yahoo! getting into the operator business
4. Affordable phones not tied to carriers
5. The iPod phone
6. Development of strong AI (yes I say this about everything)
7. Development of decent agent software
8. Affordable unlimited voice plans
9. Collapse of network neutrality
10. An active mobile WebStandards task force (ok, not overnight, but still important)

-m

Part of tech reviewing means dusting off a Windows machine again. I haven’t done more than check email or run Quickbooks online on a Windows machine since I was writing my book in 2003. Remarkably, Windows XP is still the latest desktop OS available. But it needs updates.

Checking my update history, I had 37 updates installed, with Windows Update insisting on installing three more things including “Genuine Advantage”. Reboot. Yay, now I’m advantaged. Apparently the main new feature in Windows Update is a five-minute “Checking for the latest updates for your computer…” screen. Next Service Pack 2, which has to be installed separately.

This is taking a while, so I have time to re-appreciate the nuances of the Windows UI. In the system tray, I see room for six icons, but only four present. (Clicking the little arrow, though, causes a wiggle, with six icons showing in the same space; after a second, another wiggle and back to four). All of the icons are blurry, two of them enough that I have no idea what they’re supposed to represent.

I couldn’t make stuff like this up, but it blue-screened 73 minutes into the ordeal. Unbelievable. On the bright side, it did recognize that the whole Service Pack didn’t need to be downloaded again.

As an aside, the crash tool suggested that I run the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool, so it’s possible the blue screen was hardware related. Amusingly, the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool is exactly 640kb. If you don’t get the tragic coincidence, post a comment and I’ll tell you. :)

The second run through installing Service Pack 2…blue screens again, this time with some USB error. Upon rebooting, a Windows Setup screen draws little dots for several minutes while “restoring previous configuration”, and the desktop warns me ominously that the system is in an “unstable state”, and that I need to go to Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs and uninstall SP2. The uninstall program helpfully warns me that lots of programs, including “hearts” and “solitaire” toward the top of the list, might stop working, but I bravely press on.

Reboot again. 640×480 resolution, and all kinds of messages like “found new hardware — disk drive”. On the change resolution screen in Control Panel, the “OK” and “Cancel” buttons are off the screen. And another reboot to get networking set up again. At this point I’m three hours wasted, six reboots, and I have nothing to show but an even more unstable system and Genuine Advantage. Wheeeee! At what point does Microsoft throw the “rewrite from scratch” swich? The saga continues, check comments on this post. -m

Steven Pemberton has done several recent talks on XForms,

XForms tutorial at XTech and WWW

The Power of Declarative Thinking - same slides for the talks at XTech and WWW

I attended at least parts of both of the WWW talks, and I can report that they were well-attended and well-received. -m

Seen on Bill Trippe’s blog.

Gray Knowlton, who indentified himself as a Senior Product Manager for InfoPath 2007 said the next version of SharePoint will “include InfoPath Forms Services, which will render InfoPath forms to browsers and html-enabled mobile devices, and this will not require InfoPath on the form fillers’ desktop, nor will it require any advance download on the part of the person completing the form.”

This is, as far as I know, breaking news. Nice work, Bill!

Now, the big question is, how well will it work outside of IE? -m

The following is a blatant job posting. If you’re not into that kind of thing, feel free to skip.

In Yahoo! Mobile, we’re working on an amazing project which, unfortunately, I can’t say much about just yet. We’re growing, and we need some more talent. All of the following are in Sunnyvale, CA and have the full benefits package. Relocation is always a possibility for the right candidate.

Web Guru/Developer: If you dream in semantic XHTML and prefer command line tools to read and write web pages, this is the job for you.

Release Engineer: On the other hand, if you dream about virtual IPs and consider Apache config files a second language, you’d be happy in this challenging position.
There’s more openings than these; I’m just highlighting a few here. If you’re interested, or just looking for more details, email me. If you’ll be at WWW next week, you could also look me up in person. -m

If you’re like me, you often get email messages with long URLs that wrap, which are a pain to actually get into a browser. Easier on Firefox though:

Go to about:config and change editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines setting to 3 or add: user_pref(”editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines”, 3); to your user.js file.

Excellent! -m

By way of Alan Beaufour and Frank Hecker, more great news. -m

Some semi-random Sunday thoughts. Why is it that a badly-formed web page will probably still work, but a badly-formed software program (say, a browser) will for certain kinds of bugs crash hard?

I think the answer comes down to intent. Even with a missing quote or closing tag, it’s still mostly obvious what should be done with a web page. Different browsers might make different assumptions resulting in different render trees, which ain’t good, but neither is it catastrophically bad.

On the other hand, if a software program attempts to, say, write to memory it doesn’t own, a serious error is hand. Attempting to continue could seriously compound an already-bad situation. Why is the program trying to do this? Here the intentional gap is far wider. For example, trying to save an open document might overwrite the still-good-on-disk version with random garbage. No, in the face of serious bugs, the only reasonable course is to cut the losses and terminate the program on the spot, ideally saving a core dump for later human inspection.

So, what if, someday, the hard-AI problem is solved (though I prefer cultured intelligence or “CI” to “AI”–consult my audio show for details on that). Say you have a future version of the Linux kernel, and an intelligent supervisor program. Now, if a memory access error occurs, the CI can take a look, consult the source code which it has handy, and figure out exactly what’s going on. In the case of minor errors, the stack and variables can be patched up, bugs automatically filed, and life (and the misbehaving program) can continue on. In the case of serious errors, at least things could be more gently shut down.

Far fetched? Perhaps. Things like Amazon mechanical turk make me think that the only thing to be gained by solving hard AI would be ecomomic (including turnaround time) efficiencies. Then again, sometimes making something more efficient enables its use in entire new realms. Imagine taking the same system, and unleashing it on the non-well-formed web… -m