log

Now we have two brows­er-spe­cif­ic ways to style scroll­bars and man­gle acces­si­bil­i­ty. No doubt the imple­men­ta­tion of this was meant to rein in devel­op­ers using JavaScript to build fake scroll­bars using DIVs. My opin­ion: before it was rel­a­tive­ly dif­fi­cult to build cus­tom scroll­bars that ignore user pref­er­ences for size and colour, and now it’s eas­i­er. Here’s look­ing for­ward to pages with ::-webkit-scrollbar { width: 2px } .

The ram­i­fi­ca­tions of sep­a­rat­ing of con­tent and pre­sen­ta­tion still haven’t quite sunk in yet to this devel­op­er group. Do what­ev­er you want in the con­tent area of the page (obvi­ous­ly pay­ing atten­tion to usability/accessibility), but stay away from over­rid­ing OS-lev­el con­cepts. Scroll­bars are not in your domain, nor are modal dia­log box­es or right-click menus.

Aside:

For me this bleeds into appli­ca­tions-in-the-brows­er, of which I have an opin­ion as well: in the ear­ly days it was like push­ing a cart with square wheels; now the cart’s a Fer­rari and the wheels are pen­tagons. The brows­er isn’t suit­ed to what you’re doing, and the only rea­son you want to run there is thin-client ubiq­ui­ty and ease of dis­cov­ery. Fea­tures that don’t belong in a brows­er (Web Sock­ets, Serv­er-side events, Per­sis­tent Work­ers omg wtf need more tray icons) are being shoe­horned in to sat­is­fy require­ments already ful­filled by the OS when real­ly you should be pimp­ing your grander wish­es for OS-lev­el vir­tu­alised thin-client tech to the OS com­pa­nies instead.

Browsers should not need a task man­ag­er, per­sis­tent threads, local data­base stor­age or the abil­i­ty to open arbi­trary ports.

In some ways I empathise with the intent of the XHTML2 WG to recre­ate the lan­guage as a doc­u­ment for­mat, not some bas­tardised ‘this does­n’t fit our appli­ca­tion par­a­digm so let’s rede­fine its semat­ics’ approach that app-in-brows­er devel­op­ers have cap­i­talised on. Maybe we should­n’t have intro­duced DIV but made CSS capa­ble of group­ing arbi­trary sequen­tial ele­ments instead (that’d still be nice btw; ‘ul#blah ~ ul#argh { background:blue }’ anyone?).

Edit: updat­ed incor­rect word, added empha­sis, clar­i­fied statement.

Hor­rif­i­cal­ly vio­lent, emo­tion­al­ly detached, over con­densed and ulti­mate­ly unful­fill­ing. For­get­table Woman and Bird­man are pret­ty unen­gag­ing char­ac­ters. I was attract­ed to the con­cept of a super­hero set­ting with all the warts of real­i­ty — some­thing that the reboot­ed Bat­man films attempt in part but gloss over — but then it veers into out­landish non­sense any­way. I was half expect­ing Max Payne to be on Rorschach’s dia­log writ­ing team.

But then I sup­pose that’s why it’s a com­ic. For some rea­son sto­ries like this are inher­ent­ly more suit­able in com­ic format.

I was very impressed with the intro.

From Bri­an Chen’s hilar­i­ous review of the new Street Fight­er movie:

Kreuk looks like a gawky, stiff ostrich when she attempts to bust out kung-fu moves. She’s nar­rat­ing the major­i­ty of the time, and her intel­lec­tu­al­ly bank­rupt sen­tences accom­pa­nied by her soul­less dic­ta­tion should spur the legal­iza­tion of guns in movie the­aters so you can shoot your­self with them.

Some­times I for­get how great Everything2 can be.

SwedishCampGround.com has a funky list of Safari 4’s hid­den prefs such as restor­ing the old tab posi­tion. Haven’t tried them yet.

• Why does Adobe Read­er 9 come with AIR? Mmm, pro­lif­er­a­tion. Unin­stalled immediately.
• Why do so many installers assume I’m will­ing to grant them net access? What exact­ly are you doing? BTW, I love VLC’s approach to this: a mes­sage from the devs say­ing they hate apps con­nect­ing to the net auto­mat­i­cal­ly too.
• Why do apps ignore my pref­er­ence for stan­dard antialias­ing? This includes IE8 (which has an ‘always use Cleartype for HTML’ option buried in Advanced options), Acro­bat Adobe Read­er and the MS Live installer.
• Sil­verlight install requests. I hate monop­o­lies too, but I’m not encour­ag­ing anoth­er pro­pri­etary plu­g­in just to break it.
• Google Update’s strange install loca­tion + check­ing for updates every 10 min­utes. At least it uses the task sched­uler, but the apps seems to run two copies at once at 7MB RAM a pop.
• c:\documents and settings\<username>\my documents\updater . What is this dir? Why is it always recre­at­ed empty?

Begin­ning to sound like the old guys from the Mup­pets…