I love a good article on the proper use of various HTML tags. Seriously. Anyway, check out Roger Johansson's post on Quotations and citations:
The available quotation elements aren’t really used a lot outside of web standards blogs. A probable reason, besides people not knowing about them, is less than perfect browser support for some features of the q element. That doesn’t mean it can’t be used though, so let’s take a look at how and when to use what quotation element.
Like most of geekdom, I've been running Firefox since well before version 1.0. But, I need to step back and realize that most of the world isn't like me. For example, here's a list of features I care about when it comes to my browser:
And the rest of the world thinks like this:
As a result, my recent (~3 years) history of "main" browsers looks something like this:
When Firefox 1.0 came out, I gently encouraged my co-workers to switch, mostly due to security concerns. I did get a bit of push-back from one person, for whom switching was just unthinkable. The web = IE for them, and they just didn't get the concept of anything else.
Then, a few days ago, the Firefox v. IE question came up on a mailing list I'm on. This is a list of folks I went to school with. We're all what I'd call "technology professionals" -- we either work in the technology industry, or have jobs relating to technology, but in other industries. I'd say it is a fairly tech-saavy bunch, but not everyone is what I'd call a "geek" (ie, me). When the topic of Firefox came up, I expected the Microsoft guys to rise to the defense of their product, and they did. But others had a different reason for sticking with IE: support for the Outlook web client. Lots of folks access web applications built specifically for IE. Using other browsers means they're served a crippled version of the application. So, they make the quite logical choice of sticking with the browser that serves them to best experience in these applications. I miss that, in that we're not using Outlook at work, and most of the applications I use (Bloglines, Basecamp) are Firefox friendly. But for large parts of the web world, this is an issue.
Of course, if it were me, I'd just keep both browsers around (not like you can zap IE anyway) and use Firefox for most everything but what I absolutely had too. But, that's just me.
Adam Bosworth posted a speech he gave recently. Bosworth quite nicely summarizes the state of the web (services) world, and points out how simple, yet "sloppy" (e.g. HTML) solutions have been successful. I think it is a must-read for anyone in the industry:
I would like to say that we are at a crossroads, but the truth is never so simple. The truth is that people use the tools that work for them. Just as for some programmers the right tool is PHP and for others the right tool is Java so it is true that for some programmers the right tool is RSS and for others it is WS-*. There is no clear “winner” here. What I am sure about is the volumes and the values. The value is in the information and its ability to be effortlessly aggregated, evaluated, filtered, and enhanced.
Update: Good follow-up conversation about Bosworth's post can be found at Sriram Krishnan's site.
I'm reading more and more in the management realm these days. In fact, at some point I'm going to post little summaries of some of the books I've read on the subject lately. But today, I ran across D. Keith Robinson's pointer to some interesting material on Kano methods. Robinson points to Gene Smith's post on the subject. Smith points to a special issue of the Center for Quality of Management Journal on the topic. Looks like a nice addition to my reading list...
Ted Lueng did a much better job describing the concept of a book queue than I did in this post. But we're talking about the same thing. From Ted:
We're not subscribers to Netflix, but I like their notion of an "interest queue". In addition to the queue, there's what I'll call you interest working set, which is 3 DVDs. When you return an item from working set, you get the next item from the queue. I'd love to have a queue like this for books, and I'd also like to be able to specify whether queue requests get satisfied via my local library or via Amazon (or your favorite book retailer)
I think most of the pieces are there for something like this to happen. But, I think it would be tough to make it as automatic as Ted envisions. Making the Amazon purchase should be fairly easy; doing the local library bit would be harder. Probably the best we could do given the lack of exposed library catalog APIs would be to do something similar to Jon Udell's Library Lookup.
Still, it shouldn't be too hard to pull this off.
My new motto (courtesy of Mitchell's blog): "my to-do list is longer than my capacity to execute."