waffle

It’s time again to turn in the ballots for MacTech 25: the 25 most influential people in Mac technical community.

I cast my votes as follows:

John Gruber

Wrapping up his first year as full-time proprietor of Daring Fireball, John Gruber has proven that it’s possible to make a living solely based on quality writing about mostly the Mac market. Gruber’s stuff is thought-provoking, well-researched and unabashedly subjective, and often manages to put whole situations in a different light. The last few months of Daring Fireball has been plagued of a little too much witch-hunting for my taste, but based on the last year’s developer camp conflicts, security dramas and lack of really substantial Apple news (outside of NDAs, that is), I suppose it’s only to be expected, and unlike some drama mongers, Gruber does not appear to take pleasure in writing that kind of material.
 

Brent Simmons

NetNewsWire stays the course. Many an application with the initial and defining success in their emerging genre would fall completely into irrelevance. With NNW, not so. Brent Simmons has proven that acquisition by a dark horse company with a platform of their own to push doesn’t necessarily equal depreciation and despair. NNW has kept its focus, never once swaying from its development philosophy. Brent has time and time again made it clear that he’s interested in continuously adapting the product to better fit the wishes of its users without giving up the Mac-like feel of the application or bloating the software.
 

Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch

“Wolf”, as he’s often called, keeps a brief, whimsical weblog at rentzsch.com, runs Red Shed Consulting (whose components - one-off or cornerstone - are often open-sourced in Red Shed’s own SourceForge Subversion repository), started a number of small open source projects, manages the monthly and popular PSIG get-together in Rolling Meadows, IL and always replies emails from inquiring minds, wishing to be educated on most any programming subject.

That he would start the C4 conference at all came as a surprise, but that he - and no one else - would run it seemed completely true to form. The conference invited a small number of speakers to hold a more conventional “sessions”-based conference than many other similar efforts. It combined the structure of a big conference with the tightly-knit ethos of the attending independent developers and kept a single-track schedule that by all accounts was largely successful and appreciated, varying in range from the importance of consistent interfaces to complex and deeply technical discussions about multi-threading approaches.
 

Honorable mentions:

• Amit Singh, Mac Engineering Manager, Google
• The Parallels team
• Allan Odgaard, Macromates (creator of TextMate, which I don’t use, but which impact I am not too dull to recognize)
• Scott Stevenson, proprietor of CocoaDevCentral.com
• Steven Frank and Cabel Sasser, Panic

From this moment on, Waffle is served in HTML5.

Semantically, this is HTML5 with as much HTML4/XHTML1 as needed to get past the current browsers, and I’m a little bitter about that. There were very few markup changes needed, a testament to HTML5’s progress and ultimate idea. Where XHTML2 is going is ditching almost everything in terms of backwards compatibility but not actually including anything useful in the additions. HTML5 has ditched everything terrifyingly deprecated, kept the rest, and introduced new elements that are truly useful and truly usable.

Examples of those items include <section>, <article>, the tag-team tag team <header> and <footer>, <nav> and <dialog>, which utilizes <dt> and <dd> pairs previously seen only in <dl> (definition lists) to finally standardize written dialog.

Many of these elements would have been tremendous boons to the <div> soup that makes up today’s Waffle. However, major browsers consider the new block elements to be self-closing, self-containing, <br>-like void elements, and this wrecks havoc in the document tree, ruining CSS selectors and other things as a result. So for now, the <div>s will have to stay. It’s not invalid, but it’s a suboptimal use of the specification.

HTML5 keeps some older elements but strip them of any actual special rendering. <hr> is intended to embody a thematic break, rather than its eponym, the horizontal rule, and is void of any noshade attribute, for example. <font>, everyone’s favorite, gets to hang around in another release, but this time as a compatibility crutch for WYSIWYG editors only - everything else is deemed deeply non-conformant. Every detail has been cared for - even XHTML-style /> endings of self-contained tags are compatible with the spec.

HTML5 also brings to the table some order in the anything-goes fields. There’s a recommended ‘feed‘ value for the link attribute rel which designates that the element in question is a feed, leaving the previous standard ‘alternate‘ free to flag the link as also being the alternative to this very page. Predefined classes are suggested for the intention of clearly earmarking various elements on a page - a marvelous idea for an attribute popularly only suggested to serve as a CSS selector hook.

Perhaps most amazingly, HTML5 also specifies a whole lot of other stuff: the DOM (Document Object Model; as used in Javascript and other things) representation of most elements; the tokenization and parsing stage that takes the HTML from text to internal structure inside the browser, ready for processing; the painstaking demands of the modern browser’s capabilities as regards getting from one page to the next and providing full access to the metadata that’s hidden inside a well-constructed HTML5 page; the establishment of a communications interface to provide better network capabilities than the variably-implemented XMLHTTPRequest Javascript object can get you; and perhaps most of all, the ubiquitous striving to specify every important detail where the previous W3C specs just provided a few weakly-phrased sentences in guidance.

There is no doubt in my mind that HTML5 is the thinking man’s way forward in HTML development. The W3C would be wise to just move the WHATWG process over to their domain if they want to get a successful new HTML standard rolling.

When converting Waffle to HTML5, I hit a major snag in browser support. In most browsers, new block-level section tags like <section>, <header> and <article>, despite having clearly defined end tags, are all treated as self-closing, self-contained ‘void’ elements, like <img> or <br>. This totally fucks up the document structure and stylesheets.

Due to an untimely kernel panic - my third overall, I believe - I also lost my transition notes. When people say “Jesus saves”, they are referring to Command+S.

I will proceed with the conversion, and I will post notes as promised, but I will be unable to use the true semantic richness of HTML5 that is one of its hallmarks. God damn it.

Specifically:

• Preventing “theft”
• “Preventing” theft