waffle

Welcome, one and all, to Waffle 2.0. Walls are still torn apart, pipes are dripping, boxes from our old apartment is still around. But from the messy move shall, one by one, all your favorite sections arise again, newer and better than ever.

But aside from the new, scalable layout (just try changing the font size), there’s something else. One man’s limited view of the world is sometimes - in fact, quite often - not enough. So your host has taken the liberty to invite a few guests that in the following weeks will start to write here.

• Sam from Pennsylvania
• Jesse from San Francisco
• StevenRoy - yes, that is his real name - of Kaysville, Utah
• Colin from Quebec, Canada
• “Rydain” from Philly
• Britta from Los Angeles
• Shawn from Philly
• Me, your humble author, from the whereabouts of Stockholm, Sweden

While not by any meaning of the word a geographical spread, we all come from different backgrounds. Some of us have jobs, some don’t. Some are night owls, some are early birds. Some post to their web site every day, some once a year, if you’re lucky. We hope to be able to post our seperate, highly personal views on what’s going on both globally and locally.

Welcome back.

Almost four years ago, I started learning about this thing they call “web standards“. For way too long, I had been building my stuff in tag soup, in tables. During the course of a few years, I learned how CSS could be used for page layout, not just ridding your links of underlines, or making your Arial paragraphs 7 points big, not 8 or 6. This was an epiphany. Imagine yourself realizing that, hey, what if I could build the walls to my house of this fancy ‘tree’ thing they make furniture of instead of just hay and straw. That was how I felt.

A lot has happened over the course of those four years. I’ve interviewed a few of the people whose work I looked up to (and still do). I’ve learned to design my own pages this way. I’ve seen commercial pages redesign with standards in mind.

Although a certain browser, whose owners in 1997 said “screw it, let’s build everything on top of our browser” (followed in 2000 by “screw it, let’s build everything with Windows Forms and .NET” and in 2003 by “screw it, let’s build everything with XAML”), does hold up the market with its not outright poor - considering its date of release and tremendous amount of applications built on top of it not to break in any kind - but at least outdated standards support, there is hope.

The team at The Mozilla Foundation have for six years brought us browsers. They spent four years piling on features, and two years after that blending them in, making it easy to use. Right about nine months ago, I switched. After several false starts, I pulled the plug on IE and took my browsing business elsewhere. Begone! ActiveX dialers, spyware and rendering from the last century. Welcome, tabbed browsing, security and plugins that are actually useful. The product I switched to - and still use to this day - is of course called Firefox.

Three days ago, Firefox’s 1.0 Preview Release was released, along with a campaign called Spread Firefox. The campaign aimed to, in ten days, ramp up 1,000,000 downloads of Firefox. In three days, they have gotten just below 800,000 downloads. Eight hundred thousand downloads. Of a browser. A beta browser. In three days.

Things are moving. This is not the end. This isn’t even the beginning of the end. This is the end of the beginning.