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Tag: standards

  • An email in Outlook 365, showing 'DanQ.me' in gold-gradient WordArt with a drop shadow.

    WordArt is still supported... in Microsoft Outlook!

    25 years ago, WordArt was everywhere. Nowadays, it's been quietly expunged from Microsoft Office. Except... Outlook, via a series of complicated hacks, can still render WordArt to this day! And I'm pretty curious exactly how it does so...

    Read more - about 5 minutes (996 words)

    • Article
    • 2 comments
    • posted 16 September, 2026
  • They love RSS

    unstory claims that people who, like, me, announce their love of RSS in footers etc. don't actually love RSS, and couldn't handle operating the protocol 'by hand'. unstory is wrong, at least in my case.

    Read more (337 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • 1 comment
    • posted 8 August, 2026
  • Dan holds a microphone alongside the word 'JPEG'.

    You're Pronouncing JPEG Wrong

    Fighting about the correct way to pronounce GIF is so last decade. Let's fight about how to pronounce JPEG.

    Read more (33 words)

    • Video
    • with an accompanying podcast
    • 7 comments
    • posted 6 August, 2026
  • Screenshot showing a calculator deriving the EU flag emoji from the letters E and U.

    Converting ISO Country Codes to Flag Emojis

    Did you know that there's a simple formula you can use to convert from an ISO two-letter country code to the emoji of the flag of that country. I've made an interactive thingy to demonstrate it, and shared some other fun things I've learned while playing around with ISO 3166 and flag emoji.

    Read more - about 3 minutes (529 words)

    • Article
    • 6 comments
    • posted 31 May, 2026
  • Image representing post: Why Apple’s move to video could endanger podcasting's greatest power

    Why Apple’s move to video could endanger podcasting's greatest power

    Apple's podcast player's new video standard locks-in video hosting to one of a pre-approved list of providers. What the fuck, Apple?

    Read more - about 3 minutes (696 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • 1 comment
    • posted 1 March, 2026
  • "prompt in chrome: cdpn.io wants to know your location. two options: allow while visiting the site and allow this time."

    Introduction to the new HTML element 'geolocation'

    Manuel Matuzović has done a nice write-up on HTML's new 'geolocation' element. It's not exactly what I'd have implemented, but its still an improvement upon the established geolocation API.

    Read more (347 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 5 February, 2026
  • HTTP is not simple

    After discovering it through a Gemini newsgroup, I very much enjoyed Daniel Stenberg's (of cURL fame) explanation that contrary to what you might think, HTTP (even version 1) is not a 'simple' protocol, and is full of weird and knotty underspecified loose ends.

    Read more (414 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 1 December, 2025
  • Last month, my friend Gareth observed that the numbered lists in my blog posts "looked wrong" in his feed reader. I checked, and I decided I was following the standards correctly and it must have been his app that was misbehaving.

    Full image of App Store page for Unread: An RSS Reader by Golden Hill Software. What's New for version 4.5.2 includes a bullet point, highlighted, which reads 'This update improves display of articles from danq.me."
    Alt

    App Store page for Unread: An RSS Reader by Golden Hill Software. What's New for version 4.5.2 includes a bullet point, highlighted, which reads 'This update improves display of articles from danq.me."

    So he contacted the authors of Unread, his feed reader, and they fixed it. Pretty fast, I've got to say. And I was amused to see that I'm clearly now a test case because my name's in their release notes!

    • Note
    • 4 comments
    • posted 25 August, 2025
  • You MUST listen to RFC 2119

    Have you ever wanted to hear a (sarcastic, passive aggressive) dramatic reading of RFC 2119? Eric Bailey - and the actor he found - have got you covered!

    Read more (217 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 1 August, 2025
  • Composite screenshots showing the Chrome performance metrics and Network download sizes for the React and Web Components versions of my traffic lights. LCP - React 0.06s, Web Components 0.04s. INP - React 16ms, Web Components 8ms. Transferred - React 62.3kb (compressed), 202kB (uncompressed), in 37ms, Web Components 5.2kB (compressed), 19.5kB (uncompressed), in 22ms.

    Deprecate React

    Just to reassure myself that I really can do all the things I say on my CV, I've been looking at tech tests that touch on each of them. I can definitely write React, for example... but... I might question the wisdom of a company that's exclusively recruiting for React skills in their front-end developers...

    Read more - about 6 minutes (1406 words)

    • Article
    • 6 comments
    • posted 26 April, 2025
  • Stacked area chart illustrating the evolution of the web platform in terms of number of features in core browsers (2003-2025)

    WebDX: Does More Mean Better?

    I like the work that the WebDX Community Group have been doing, but I find myself asking: are we at risk of implying that giving the Web 'more' features invariably makes it 'better'?

    Read more - about 4 minutes (735 words)

    • Article
    • posted 19 March, 2025
  • Image representing post: What if Emails were Multilingual?

    What if Emails were Multilingual?

    Wouldn't it be nice if there were a standard for multilingual emails? Oh wait, there is! Let's see how it works, and whether it's (ever going to be) ready for mainstream use...

    Read more - about 6 minutes (1366 words)

    • Article
    • posted 28 September, 2024
  • Dave Winer kindly let me know about a proposed standard for linking to OPML blogrolls. Given that I added a page containing my blogroll last year, it was easy enough for me to add a tiny bit of code to the header to add support for automatic detection of my blogroll.

    <link rel="blogroll" type="text/xml" href="/blogroll.xml" title="Dan Q's blogroll">

    Now all we need is some tools that can do such detection!

    (You'll note I've added a title attribute: as I discovered the other day, some browsers including ELinks will show all <link>s of unknown rel="..." at the top of the page and I wanted this one to make sense!)

    • Note
    • 5 comments
    • posted 3 May, 2024
  • Photograph of a boxing match, but with the heads of the competitors replaced with the ActivityPub and RSS logos (and "AP" or "RSS" written on their clothes, respectively). RSS is delivering a powerful uppercut to ActivityPub.

    RSS > ActivityPub

    RSS is better than ActivityPub. Fight me.

    Read more (358 words)

    • Article
    • 6 comments
    • posted 8 March, 2024
  • Screenshot from Netscape Columns: Web Site Stories: the Coming Soon page is now laid out in two columns, but the expected launch date has been removed.

    Netscape's Untold Webstories

    Back in 1996, Netscape promised to publish a series of articles about making the best of the Web. With help from the Wayback Machine, let's see how that turned out for them, and learn a little about late-1990s web design as we go along.

    Read more - about 13 minutes (2934 words)

    • Article
    • posted 2 February, 2024

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