John Resig: JavaScript as a First Language
At Khan Academy we’ve been investigating teaching Computer Science to students in some new and interesting ways. The most interesting aspect of which is that we’re likely going to be teaching them JavaScript as their first language.
Google's dropping H.264 in Chrome is not a step backward for openness.
The latest news about Opera web browsers, tech trends, internet tips.
Broken Links
I’ve been getting madder and madder about the increasing use of dorky web links; for example, twitter.com/timbray has become twitter.com/#!/timbray . Others have too; see Breaking the Web with hash-bangs and Going Postel . It dawns on me that a word of explanation might be in order for those who normally don’t worry…
Breaking the web with hash-bangs
Update 10 Feb 2011 : Tim Bray has written a much shorter, clearer and less technical explanation of the broken use of hash-bangs URLs . I thoroughly recommend reading and referencing it.
Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation
Last fall, I conducted an experiment: I quietly removed Instapaper Free from the App Store 1 for three days, leaving only the full, $4.99 Instapaper app . Not only did sales increase incrementally, but nobody seemed to notice.
RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
RSS makes it possible for me to check 100s of sites a day. I only actually implicitly go and read two, everything else goes through the RSS reader. If I didn’t have RSS then I wouldn’t bother keeping an eye on that many sites in the first place. Because me and you—dear technical readers—don’t have to suffer that…
There is only one Cloud Icon in the Entire Universe
I recently worked on the update to the ASP.NET site, now in beta at ...
Browser Market Pollution: IE[x] is the new IE6
Feb 2015: 3½ years later, we’re in a better place. The new IE Spartan project has killed off document modes . (Technically, still possible in firewall environments, but… effectively dead for us.) These days, our IE support landscape is IE8 (still), IE11, and IE Mobile. 3 is definitely better than 72.
Skype 5 for Mac
A while back, when Skype's group videochat feature was still free, a friend of mine sent me a Skype message, asking me whether it was possible to do videochat with more than one person in Skype. "Sure," I replied, "you can do that, but you need to install the new Skype 5 beta." I sent her the link. A few minutes…
Why apps are not the future
I heard it first on the cover of Wired Magazine in March 1997 and again in August 2010. I was so impressed I added it to my blogroll , as a reminder to all that you're reading a dead medium.
Who Does Facebook Think You Are Searching For?
UPDATE March 28, 2013: Many people have commented here and emailed me that it no longer works for you. I have made an update to fix the bookmarklet for those with Facebook Graph Search. You can get…
Knyle Style Sheets
Documentation for any flavor of CSS that you’ll love to write.
The Drupal Crisis
There have been many pretty obvious signs in the recent past for what can only be considered as a critical milestone :
Modern Web Applications are Here
Battlefield 3’s Battlelog system is an interesting web application that many of us missed. Here is why it’s amazing and worth a look at.
Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser
Longtime Readers of this blog will be aware that I have been a fan of Mozilla for a long time. There’s nearly ten years of Mozilla advocacy tucked away in the JWM archives. I’ve been on the Mozilla fanboy train since before Firefox even existed — all the way back to the original Mozilla Suite’s Milestone 17 release…
Why the Quick Bar (“dickbar”) is still so offensive
Twitter’s official iPhone app, formerly Loren Brichter’s Tweetie and an otherwise awesome client, got a lot of negative reactions from the recent addition of the Quick Bar, a mandatory trending-topics banner on top of the tweet list. A lot of people really hate it, calling it the “ dickbar ” and often abandoning the…
What's In A GIF
We sill start off by walking though the different parts of a GIF file. (The information on this page is primarily drawn from the W3C GIF89a specification .) A GIF file is made up of a bunch of different "blocks" of data. The following diagram shows all of the different types of blocks and where they belong in the…