Day: January 14, 2003

Categories
Weblogging

Competition

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Jonathon Delacour writes about the recent fooflah with Mark Pilgrim, but also brings another topic to the table — Apple’s Safari browser. He has this to say about it, after finding out that it currently renders part of his web site incorrectly:

 

Rather that—just at the point where the Gecko-based browsers are starting to give Internet Explorer some real competition—Apple goes with another rendering engine. How stupid is that? Could someone explain the Byzantine politics that went into the decision? Do you really find it inexplicable that I can’t quite bring myself to buy a Macintosh? Despite all the effort that’s gone into establishing a realistic alternative browser, Apple goes off on yet another ego trip. As someone I know would say:

 

How about some fucking payoff now? How about some fucking compatibility?

One of the concerns about Mozilla has been and continues to be its infrastructure, and the overhead associated with it. This is one of the reasons I like it — it provides a terrific cross-platform UI development system. However, this cross-platform capability has always come with a small cost: Many of Mozilla’s components are not optimized for specific tasks as much as they are optimized for compatibility, interoperability, and extensibility, first.

According to an email from the Safari engineering manager, posted at the kfm-devel forum, this optimization is one of the main reasons why Apple went with KHTML rather than Mozilla’s Gecko:

 

The number one goal for developing Safari was to create the fastest web
browser on Mac OS X. When we were evaluating technologies over a year
ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an
excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also
less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of
development within that code made it a better choice for us than other
open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus.

(Thanks to rc3.org daily for link)

Personally, my preference would have been that the Apple folks work with Mozilla and use the Gecko layout engine, adding their expertise to improve the product, but I am still pleased that they are using open source technology in their curious ‘open-commercial-semi-source’ mix.

Additionally, I think it’s essential to have competing open source browser products even though this ‘looks’ like the open source community is giving browser share to Microsoft and it’s IE. Any product that has monopoly on a specific market, regardless of the altruism of its founders and developers, is not healthy for said market.

Case in point: I may think there can never be another web server as good as Apache, but I hope there always is web servers other than Apache.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Tracking the backing of backtrack on trackback

Say that three times fast…

I’ve made a minor change to the Backtrack code that should allow any weblog that supports a variation of [ping)?__mode=rss to work, and that returns valid RSS. This is implemented by default with Movable Type’s trackback, including the stand alone TB server. And, this also now includes Sam Ruby’s weblog, which was one that wasn’t working previously, as you can see from the following post: http://weblog.burningbird.net/fires/000766.htm, as well as this one.

(Click on the Sticky Strand for Sam’s post to see it in action.)

Sam implemented his own version of Backtrack, but his also allows one to ‘drill through’ to the backtracked items for each level, through the “back” link. In some ways I’ve stolen this functionality because when you backtrack one of Sam’s postings, his implementation of backtrack comes along, so to speak.

I thought about adding this support to my variation of Backtrack. What it would take would be to follow each link that’s returned within Backtrack, and use RDF/RSS auto-discovery to find the trackback link for the posting. For example, following one of Ben Hammersley’s posting, such as this one and looking at the source shows the block of embedded RDF/XML that Trackback uses for AutoDiscovery. I can then pull out the trackback ping and add this to my entry.

I could, but I won’t. I’m not interested in incorporating the expanded processing, and if people are interested in following a thread, they should follow it directly from each level rather than skip around. From the lack of interest shown in this functionality at Sam’s site, I don’t see that this is something people necessarily want.

At this time, Backtrack also does not include support for Pingback because I don’t see that this implementation of sticky strand supports an HTTP GET with parameter “?__mode=rss”, which is what I’m using. However, I may have missed this somewhere, though. because there is a tangle of messy threads about pingback, trackback, and variations thereof.

Categories
Weblogging

Tech stuff is getting boring

Recovered from the Wayback Machine…and a good example of why I most likely will never have comments again.

I don’t want you all to think that this is turning into a technology weblog, because it isn’t. At this time the focus is on technology because that’s where my head is at. Next week the focus will probably be on world peace, religious tolerance, weblogging’s influence in the overthrow of George Bush in the next election, as well as other infinite impossibilities.

Besides, I’m tired of playing these macho bullshit techie games that dominate my particular space in the weblogging kingdom.