Status-Q

A Business Week article suggesting that email’s role is… well… if not superseded then at least diminishing rapidly.

I think rumours of its death have been somewhat exaggerated. But as my spam filters, of necessity, become ever more stringent, so I have to spend more time reading the logs to check for unjustified rejections. There may well be scope for wider adoption of an email model where, by default, no messages are allowed, and you have to contact me in person and get a code before I can receive any messages from you…

Still, the gist of this article is that email’s often not a very efficient way to communicate, and they may be right there.

Protopage is really very impressive. With this, and Writely, and GMail, and Google Maps and so forth, the in-browser experience is becoming amazingly rich. There will be a viable Open Source desktop environment after all. And it will be called Firefox.

Interesting question… At present, more than half of the machines sold are laptops, because people are getting more and more mobile and they really want their data with them everywhere. Will we ever see a reversal of this trend, as less and less of our data is stored on our own machines and it becomes accessible from anywhere? Will we see a ‘desktop PC’ renaissance?

OK, so this is a quick test using Xinha Here, a rather neat Firefox add-on which gives you WYSIWYG html editing in any text-edit box.  Quite sweet if you end up creating HTML posts, for example for your blog, and you do it through the browser.  I like it. 

I’m using Firefox more and more now, but it still hasn’t quite replaced Safari as my main browser on the Mac.  There are just too many convenient drag-and-droppy-type things you can do with Safari.  It may only be a matter of time, though. Here are the current stats:

I’ve just been reading a thoroughly enjoyable book on web site design. It comes from the creator of the CSS Zen Garden, a wonderful site which I first mentioned here nearly three years ago.

The idea of the Garden was to promote standards-based web design and, in particular, to show people what could be done with CSS in an age when most people were using tables for all their layout and embedding <font> tags in their HTML. And so the site became a showcase for a single web page – a single page of HTML, that is – but rendered in hundreds of different ways simply by changing the CSS and the associated graphics. The HTML remains unchanged. Have a quick look at
this,
this, and
this, for example. The designs are generally carefully tailored to this particular page, and wouldn’t always work for a whole site, but it’s still a great resource and inspiration for any web designer.

And now David Shea, who created the site, and Molly E. Holzschlag have written The Zen of CSS Design, which looks at 36 of the designs and talks through, in very readable language, what we can learn about design, and what we can learn about CSS, from each of them. This is not a book for CSS beginners, but if you know the basics it comes very highly recommended.

I now want to go and redesign all my web sites. Oh, for some time….

Let’s hope the government isn’t either.
Bill Thompson’s blog entry on the newly-launched ‘Creative and Media Business Alliance’.

A nice post about ambiguous domain names.

It only took me about 4 years to discover this, but ColorMatch is a very handy utility if you’re designing a website. Or redecorating. Thanks to Steven T for the link.

There are some other interesting ones out there, like ColorCombos, which can grab the colors from a web site and then let you play with them.

John’s Observer column about the silly ICANN arguments and the Negroponte laptop, “which looked vaguely like an accessory from a Shrek movie”.

And Bill Thompson’s blog entry from Tunis:

…
Hosting WSIS has not made Tunisia more free or more open. In fact, the endorsement we have provided by being here may even help sustain the government of President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali.

But in the long term, if every time we talk about Tunisia we remind people that it hosted a summit dedicated to free expression, and point out its failure to live up to its international obligation, then it may help those who want to reform Tunisian politics.

This is extreme outsourcing: Artificial Artificial Intelligence from Amazon. In some ways this is rather wonderful – the acknowledgement that there are some things that humans will be able to do better than computers for the foreseeable future, combined with an easy way for people to get paid for doing them.

On the other hand, there’s something spooky about computer programs being able to invoke actions by humans and return a result when the human has completed the task…

Regular readers now know all about AJAX, Django and Rails, so it’s time to mention another piece of Internet jargon that’s doing the rounds at the moment, and that’s REST, which is short for REpresentational State Transfer. It’s a model of how the web works, how it was designed, and why we should try, where possible, to build web-based services in a manner that conforms to that basic design instead of going against its grain.

It originated in Roy Fielding’s PhD thesis, but unless you’re very keen, that’s not the easiest way to learn about it.

The best starting point might be Ryan Tomayko’s piece “How I explained REST to my wife“. If you want a little more technical detail after that, you might try this article and, of course, the entry in the ever-wonderful Wikipedia .