Tag: standards
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Why Appleβs 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?
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Introduction to the new HTML element 'geolocation'
Manuel MatuzoviΔ 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.
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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.
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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.
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!
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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!
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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...
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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'?
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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...
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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 unknownrel="..."at the top of the page and I wanted this one to make sense!) -
RSS > ActivityPub
RSS is better than ActivityPub. Fight me.
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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.








