84 posts tagged “mark-pilgrim”
2018
SpatiaLite — Datasette documentation. Datasette’s documentation now includes extensive coverage of the SpatiaLite extension for SQLite: how to install it, how to import latitude/longitude points, shapefiles and GeoJSON data into SpatiaLite tables, and how to run SQL queries against it that take advantage of spatial indexes. I’m learning SpatiaLite at the moment and filling out the documentation with each new trick I learn as I go—as Mark Pilgrim once taught me, the best way to learn a new technology is to write about it.
2010
An implausibly illustrated introduction to HTML5 Web Workers. By Mark Pilgrim.
I’m renaming the book to “Dive Into HTML 5” for better SEO. This is not a joke. The book is the #5 search result for “HTML5” (no space) but #13 for “HTML 5” (with a space). I get 514 visitors a day searching Google for “HTML5” but only 53 visitors a day searching for “HTML 5”.
The All-In-One Almost-Alphabetical No-Bullshit Guide to Detecting Everything. Appendix A of Dive Into HTML5.
Video on the Web—Dive Into HTML5. Everything a web developer needs to know about video containers, video codecs, adio containers, audio codecs, h.264, theora, vorbis, licensing, encoding, batch encoding and the html5 video element.
flashblockdetector. Mark Pilgrim’s JavaScript library for detecting if the user has a Flash blocker enabled, such as FlashBlock for Firefox and Chrome or ClickToFlash for Safari. One good use of this would be to inform users that they need to opt-in to Flash for unobtrusive Flash enhancements (such as invisible audio players) to work on that page.
2009
HTML has always been a conversation between browser makers, authors, standards wonks, and other people who just showed up and liked to talk about angle brackets. Most of the successful versions of HTML have been “retro-specs,” catching up to the world while simultaneously trying to nudge it in the right direction. Anyone who tells you that HTML should be kept “pure” (presumably by ignoring browser makers, or ignoring authors, or both) is simply misinformed. HTML has never been pure, and all attempts to purify it have been spectacular failures, matched only by the attempts to replace it.
You count the "value" that is lost by people who would have made money selling rival goods, but can't now because they can't compete with free. But you don't count the value that is created by people who build upon the freely given goods. [...] In other words, you only look at the first-order effects. It's the same mistake a lot of people make when they accuse open source developers of "dumping" and ruining the market for competing software. That's true, in a very narrow sense, but it ignores all the other people who took that software and used it to create something else of value.
Dive Into HTML 5. Mark Pilgrim’s free online book on HTML 5—currently just one chapter on canvas (which neatly illustrates the coordinate system using a diagram rendered using canvas itself) but certain to become an invaluable resource for anyone looking to take advantage of HTML 5.
Yes, it'd be nice if everyone kept up to date on the progress of the various W3C working groups. They don't. There are a lot of people who asked what professional markup looked like and were told (right or wrong) that XHTML was the future. So they went ahead and learned XHTML, built their websites and chose watching a DVD or spending time with their kids over watching Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby do battle over Postel's Law. Now all of a sudden they're told XHTML is dead. Some wailing and gnashing of teeth is to be expected. What's needed is less "boy aren't I smarter than them" snideness, and more Hey, here's what's up.
Magic properties make Firefox synchronously load the Java plugin. Even defining a function called sun() (or several other symbols) will trigger the Java VM to be loaded, dramatically hurting the performance of your page.
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll quote Jamie Zawinski." Now they have two problems.
Dive into Python 3. Mark Pilgrim’s seminal work taught me Python nearly eight years ago. Now he’s updating it to cover Python 3. It’s just a table of contents at the moment, but the chapter on “Packaging Python libraries” has me very excited.
2008
There. Is. No. Long-Term. Data. Storage. Solution. There is only a series of short-term solutions punctuated by data migration from one medium to the next.
This Week in HTML 5—Episode 7: Clickjacking. Clickjacking is when a third party site is embedded in an iframe with opacity 0 and positioned such that a click on the page actually hits a button on the now invisible third party site. Mark Pilgrim explains how the NoScript site uses this in a non malicious way to for the “install now!” button.
This Week in HTML 5—Episode 1.
It looks like the most controversial aspect of the HTML 5 spec has been addressed - now, instead of omitting the alt attribute for user generated content that has no relevant information available, sites are advised to provide an indication of the kind of image expected surrounded by braces, for example alt="{uploaded photo}".
My Universal Feed Parser was conceived as a weapon against what I considered the gravest error of XML: draconian error handling. Recently, someone asked me to implement a switch that makes it not fall back on lax parsing in the case of an XML wellformedness error. I said no, not because it would be difficult to implement, but because that defeats its entire reason for being.
Microformats and accessibility: the soap opera that never ends. “Be sure to tune in next week, when we’ll drown a leading accessibility expert to see if she’s a witch.”
goog/useragent/iphoto.js. The Goog library includes code to detect the user’s installed version of iPhoto, based on reverse engineering the Mac.com Gallery RSS feeds. This has Mark Pilgrim written all over it.
Google Doctype. So now we know what Mark Pilgrim’s been doing at Google... heading up a project to create an encyclopaedia of web development. The JavaScript UI for browsing it is a bit weird (though you do at least get real pages if you disable JavaScript in your browser).
NOTE TO INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPERS: PLEASE DO NOT MAKE SERIOUS ANNOUNCEMENTS ON INTERNET JACKASS DAY.
For the record, my site is valid HTML 5, except the parts that aren't. My therapist says I shouldn't rely so much on external validation.
2007
Gmail Greasemonkey API (via) The new version of Gmail includes API hooks for Greasemonkey script authors. The documentation is by Mark Pilgrim, author of Greasemonkey Hacks.
I thought the big draw for Apple hardware was that "It Just Works." By breaking it, you must know you’re giving up the "Just Works" factor, so what’s left? Rounded corners?
The longdesc lottery. Mark Pilgrim is now writing for the WHATWG blog. Here he makes the case for replacing the longdesc attribute with a better solution, based on ten years of developer ignorance and misuse. As always with that site, check the comments for a microcosm of the larger debate.
Silly season. Mark expresses exactly what I’ve been thinking. The fawning over Silverlight and Apollo is incredibly short sighted.
Two visions. It looks like Mark Pilgrim is going to be joining Hixie at Google.
IE and 2-letter domain-names (via) IE won’t let you set a cookie on XX.YY, where YY is anything other than .pl or .gr. Other browsers have better exception lists.
Apple doesn't give a damn. Steve Jobs doesn't build platforms, except by accident. He doesn't care about your thriving metropolis. All you independent Mac developers: you're all sharecroppers, and your rent just went up. Way up.
2006
Mark Pilgrim’s definition of User-generated content. “You make all the content, and we keep all the money”. Ouch!