Archive for 2009

Wuh Working Group

Friday, October 16th, 2009
cying: how is WHATWG pronounced?
cying: “what working group” ?
tantek: or “what double you gee”
Hixie: i pronounce it “whatwuhjee”
cying: Hixie: interesting… wuhjee?
tantek: Hixie, makes sense, like “wuh wuh wuh dot …”
Hixie: yeah
Hixie: or wuhwuhstyle for www-style
gavin: weird!
AryehGregor: “www” is remarkable, as an abbreviation that takes like twice as long to say as the thing it ostensibly abbreviates.
Hixie: it’s an abbreviation for writing
Hixie: not talking
Philip: AryehGregor: How do you get “twice”?
Philip: given that “w” is three syllables
AryehGregor: “like”
AryehGregor: Closer to three times, it’s true.
Philip: Two is not much like three
TabAtkins: I pronounce WHATWG as “what”+”wig”.
TabAtkins: And when pronouncing “www” I say “dub dub dub”.
TabAtkins: (A shortening of “dubya”, the texan way to pronounce that letter.)
• Philip pronounces WHATWG as “what”+mumble, because he never actually says it out loud and in his own brain he doesn’t need to pronounce the entire word to know what he’s thinking of
TabAtkins: I pronounce all of my acronyms as words. HTML is “heh teh mul”, CSS is “sess es”, etc.
Philip: TabAtkins: You’re weird
Philip: I thought everyone said “HTML” as four letters
TabAtkins: Philip: I save a syllable, and the leftover syllables are easier to say quickly too.
Philip: TabAtkins: If the primary requirement is saving syllables, you could just grunt
TabAtkins: But then other people don’t have a chance of understanding me. Plus my language organ isn’t trained to recognize or produce meaningfully grunting beyond the existing near-primal sounds we all make.

Google Chrome Frame

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

Google Chrome Frame is huge.

Revisiting my post on Google Chrome Lite from February:

In 2009, Google should embed Google Chrome into Google Toolbar, which has a HUGE install base. This would be a huge driver to accelerate Google’s web platform, convert more folks over to a modern browser experience. Imagine a Chrome “Lite” running inside Toolbar inside IE, billed as a “web accelerator”.

(Insert humorous smug remark here. Okay, it’s out of my system.)

This is the right strategy for Google to use against Microsoft in the browser wars. Google’s 2009 playbook probably looks similar to this:

  1. Let Google Chrome Frame mature in open source into a completely awesome (and hopefully secure) web plugin. Web developers get excited and really start using HTML5 instead of talking about it. Security issues are vetted and addressed.
  2. Bundle Chrome Frame 1.0 into Google Toolbar (hell, Google everything), with huge established (and unpublicized to date) distribution.
  3. Launch both as part of a multi-prong “death by a thousand cuts” attack (Chrome standalone, OEM, Chrome OS, Chrome Mobile, YouTube HTML5 video, etc.) on Internet Explorer.
  4. ???
  5. Profit!

What should Microsoft do? Get busy. Find a differentiator (graphics, JavaScript, sync, hardware port, XBOX, etc.), stop looking at WebKit and start shipping it already.

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Does iTunes 9 use WebKit?

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

So, was John Gruber right? This is what I found while browsing the new iTunes Store (cool stuff, btw!):

User-Agent: iTunes/9.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.5.8) AppleWebKit/531.9

Survey says: Yes.

It’s important to understand that iTunes is only using WebKit to render the iTunes Store and iTunes LP. The rest of the iTunes UI still remains native in Carbon.

Previous versions of iTunes had a custom native UI for viewing the iTunes Store and were definitely not WebKit based prior to iTunes 9.

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