With Unicode practically owning the web, A List Apart brings up a good question: What happens when you have a dynamic search (you know, ), and people search for words like “López” or “Lørgensen”? Well, Carlos Bueno has a really, really good answer.
SitePoint brings us all great news from the EU: Microsoft Starts the European Browser Choice Update! This has to do with Microsoft now having to offer all European Internet Explorer users a choice of browsers to install. This is not just for people that install new versions of Windows, it will be part of a standard update for all Windows XP, Vista and 7 users who have IE set as their default browser. My favorite line is: “IE6 and IE7 users will be prompted to upgrade to IE8″… [drool…]
Dion Almaer offers a nice write-up about design and interfaces. He brings up some interesting points, which I think represent all facets of life, regarding how our behaviors, expectations and even preferences morph over time as we be accustomed to different things. For instance, I remember the first time I tried Diet Coke. I thought it was wretched! Now, if I try to drink regular coke, it tastes like cough syrup to me. Same for 2% milk versus whole milk. Dion talks about his switch from Windows to Mac, and from iPhone to webOS, how some features seem weird at first, but after some time, its the old features that seem weird…
Ajaxian writes about an interesting playground for, as the Dion puts it, “the holy trinity of the Web (HTML, CSS, JS)”: jsFiddle. jsFiddle let’s you write/paste HTML, CSS, and JS see the results rendered right on screen, including animation. It’s a really great idea, though I have to say that I will likely continue doing this type of thing in the page I’m building, in Firebug. Additionally, whereas I completely respect what Piotr Zalewa created, I find it really frustrating when sites like this don’t even offer a few short sentences of “how this works”…
An interesting TED Talk from Bill Gates regarding the world’s energy. As a warning, he ends up touting nuclear, but it’s a form of nuclear I had not heard of before: Terrapower. I was familiar with only two types of nuclear energy: fission and fusion. Fission is what we have today, which splits atoms apart to create energy, leaving “left-over stuff”. Fusion pushes stuff together to create energy, but is unfortunately currently not controllable. Here’s where Bill’s talk got interesting. Where today’s nuclear power burns U235 (1% of the uranium fission reactors burn, leaving 99% of the uranium as waste), terrapower burns U238 (which just happens to be the 99% waste from fission energy). So, yes, this means terrapower would burn all of the nuclear waste the world is currently trying to figure out what to do with… Huh…
Could Blackberry be the next big browser? Possibly. Blackberry recently demoed its new Webkit browser which “achieves a 100/100 on ACID3 and supports HTML5 and CSS3. And yes, it supports AJAX.” Even seems to allow you to zoom in and out. Granted, you’re still stuck on a Blackberry, with its smallish screen and “nub” navigation, but that is lot better browsing experience than current Blackberries!
So, CSS3.info just redesigned their site. Which is great, just did a redesign myself recently, but I have to say, I liked the old one better… Not that I’m some big fan of rainbows, clouds and wisps or anything, but I feel like the old design had a touch of personality, a little fun to it. This new design looks too much like the jQuery website… And mostly, what is with the CSS3 website using an image for their logo??? I mean, come on! Would an @font-face and a little CSS3 have been too much to ask??? :-)
For instance, check-out what Nicholas Gallagher was able to do “using nothing more than simple HTML, CSS2.1, and modern browser implementations of a couple of CSS3 properties.” Now, granted, the look does degrade quite a bit as you scroll down through the various browsers (interesting to me that FF3.6 has trouble with the background color), but the I Love Typography logo is a heckuva lot more intricate than the CSS3 logo…
And finally, something about the weather in NYC made me want to share this one… Could it be? An umbrella that Mother Nature cannot bend, mangle, and flip inside-out? According to Wired.com, yes, the Blunt Umbrella is just that… So, keep dry!
Happy reading,
Atg