Month: June 2004

Un clone de Firefox vient d’apparaître, il s’agit de smartfox. Aucune différence avec Firefox 0.8 à part le changement de nom et un njouveau logo, mais c’est le premier navigateur dérivé de Firefox, l’initiative est intéressante

Wow, incredible! I think what I don’t get is why they’re bundling under a different name instead of lending their time and effort to promoting Firefox. Actually, I do get it – it’s one guy who’s bought a domain and thinks he’s innovative and cool and will gain kudos for releasing his own build of the browser. You know, to do that, he probably should have changed more than the name and shortcut icon.

XHTML – Why? basically says the only reason is so that HTML becomes valid XML.

I understand, of course, that this is an old argument, but in the intervening years all I’ve seen is that people have realised they can now use XPath on their web pages. Well, that’s just great.

This is a big turnaround for me, I was convinced that XHTML was going to help us smooth the transition between making websites completely User-Agent and device agnostic, as well as opening up HTML to manipulation by all the existing XML tools, but you know what? There are already a plethora of existing (and good) HTML parsers out there, so the “well-formed XML” argument falls on my deaf ears, and apart from the comparatively esoteric usage of XPath, no-one’s yet found a good use for these XML tools in manipulating XHTML (not in the least because most XML tools will pretty-print by default, and break your page in IE).

And far from XHTML being the panacea of cross-device websites, developers have discovered that properly separated content and presentation will allow their plain old HTML sites to be rendered just fine on mobile devices (not that most PDA apps, like Plucker don’t just scrape the content into their own format anyway). So where are the XHTML torch-bearers? What do they have to offer me? Why is my HTML site no longer good enough? Where is the next generation of browsers that will be able to make use of all this X-technology? XHTML – Why?

According to Stephen Horlander, the new default theme for Firefox is ‘a 0.1 release at best’ (via djst’s nest)

It’s also well worth reading djst’s previous post on the subject, where he goes into more detail about how the Winstripe theme doesn’t work on Windows XP. There are also a good selection of comments on that post, mainly about how when Qute was made the default, lots of people complained about it making Firefox look too much like a Windows app. Frankly, in my mind this is the audience Firefox should be after, and making it look like either less of one, or one with a lame skin is just asking for trouble.

New Default Theme Coming to Firefox 0.9 (Acts of Volition).

And guess what? I don’t like it. I like Qute. I’d never seen Qute before it became the default theme in Firefox, but as soon as I saw it, I loved it – the navigation icons are very similar to IE, but better (in my opinion). The ones in Winstripe don’t do this, they’re simpler, but this reflects poorly, making Firefox look basic and just like so many other open source applications as if thought hasn’t been put in to the graphics. User’s don’t appreciate shadows. They don’t appreciate gradient fills. They appreciate things which look like the things they’re used to, but nicer.

I’ve started to dream about aggregators. Someone help me.

Singstar, the home mass audience PS2 game by Sony this the shops a few weeks ago (it’s basically Karaoke for your PS2 but a bit cleverer – it’s ace fun, at any rate), and just got a review on the BBC news website, except that that’s exactly what it reads like – one bloke’s quick, incomplete and superficial review, not that of a professional media organisation. The BBC has a place for this kind of review, the Collective games section.