Joho the Blog blogs Isenseuss. Here’s the talk David Isenberg gave at O’Reill eTel. It is, rather amazingly, a disquisition about freedom to connect, done in the style of dr. Seuss.’ …”
Here’s the first stanza, to encourage you to read on…
When Ed Whitacre, the head of AT&T, says,
“They’re not going to use my pipes for free”
he’s not talking about Them, he’s talking about Me.
He’s talking about Us, it should be plain to see.
Slashdot post: A Statistical Review of 1 Billion Web Pages. chrisd writes “As part of a recent examination of the most popular html authoring techniques, my colleague Ian Hickson parsed through a billion web pages from the Google repository to find out what are the most popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata. We decided that to publish this would be of significant utility to developers. It’s also a fascinating look into how people create web pages. For instance one thing that surprised me was that the < title > is more popular than …” “The graphs in the report require a browser with SVG and CSS support (like Firefox 1.5!). Enjoy!”
The study by Google has some interesting conclusions, like this one from the page on the body tag:
One conclusion one can draw from the spread of attributes used on the body element is that authors don’t care about what the specifications say. Of these top twenty attributes, nine are completely invalid, and five have been deprecated for nearly eight years, half the lifetime of the Web so far.
Where does all this bad code come from? Are individual authors writing junk in Notepad and vim, or are large commercial sites using bad HTML, augmented with lots of Javascript and CSS tricks to try to render some cross-browser effect they can’t do through the standards? A few answers are on their page on Editors, but this is mostly a survey that indicates there’s need for more study.
Linux-Watch.com asks “What’s up with Novell’s new licensing?” with some interesting numbers on Novell and Red Hats subscription numbers.
New Hampshire House Representatives Sam A. Cataldo and Roy D. Maxfield have sponsored a bill to establish a study committee to determine if state agencies should have to consider Open Source alternatives when obtaining software. Should choice be mandatory? I think so. No business case should be presented claiming that alternatives have been considered if they haven’t.