#webkit

We’ve been so busy we haven’t had time to do a proper write-up of this yet, but this year we decided to revamp the on-site displays (both overhead projections and LCDs). And given that 2012 is pretty much the year of the Raspberry Pi, we decided to have a go at it using these amazing little boxes – after all, they’re pretty much perfect for the job given that they have an HDMI output, an Ethernet port and more than enough smarts to run a browser and playback H.264 video.

The SAPO Digital Signage Client v2.0

I always called Opera the Douglas Crockford of browsers as it was ruthless in its implementation of standards. If something didn’t work in Opera there is a good chance that you did something wrong. Even better – fixing it in Opera in most cases meant looking at how the W3C standard meant things to work and write your code accordingly, which in most cases meant no change in other browsers, but cleaner code overall. Opera was my linting tool.

I always called Opera the Douglas Crockford of browsers as it was ruthless in its implementation of standards. If something didn’t work in Opera there is a good chance that you did something wrong. Even better – fixing it in Opera in most cases meant looking at how the W3C standard meant things to work and write your code accordingly, which in most cases meant no change in other browsers, but cleaner code overall. Opera was my linting tool.

This is an extended essay on the news out of Norway yesterday. See the closing for encouragement toward Opera and its fans, whatever the open source projects they choose to join, from me on behalf of Mozilla.

This is an extended essay on the news out of Norway yesterday. See the closing for encouragement toward Opera and its fans, whatever the open source projects they choose to join, from me on behalf of Mozilla.

"It's a hefty wave to catch, but our browser has already been Atlas for five years - the IGB is perched atop a custom-written HTML parsing and rendering system. While a noble technical endeavor, this leaves to us the tasks of upgrading and extending the IGB to match the ever-shifting currents of the HTML standard. Hardly the best way for us to serve you, the player! But, like Atlas, we now have two Pillars upon which to rest these burdens. The first, and undoubtedly greatest, is the Heraclidean support provided by Awesomium and its Prince of Code. This library harnesses the raw strength of the Chromium browser toolkit - the muscles, knit from Webkit, that writhe cobra-like beneath the skin of Google's Chrome - and hand-delivers rendered HTML pages to us as nice 3D surfaces, which we can then readily display in our own Trinity engine."

"The iTunes LP experience is accomplished with HTML 4.01, CSS and JS. The interface feels very Flash-like, but there is no trace of it. The CSS animations are elaborate and smooth. ... As a music fan, and as a web developer, I couldn’t be more pleased with the new iTunes LP offering. If your audience is significantly Apple-oriented (e.g. a site about Mac rumors or a popular iPhone app) this proves that you can provide an incredible experience using only JavaScript and some proposed CSS3 properties."

This is very annoying for Palm webOS, where WebKit is basically the top-level OS and not a browser. Might be a problem for ChromeOS too? Apps can't set their own User-Agent headers: "For security reasons, these steps should be terminated if header is an ASCII case-insensitive match for one of the following headers: ... User-Agent"

"Mozilla's Fennec could become a contender to the throne, true, but it's still far from final."

"I've been meaning to blog for a while about Mozilla, and the current trend of abandoning it in favour of WebKit. I'm not against WebKit and there are definitely advantages it has over Mozilla in certain situations, but I'd like to highlight some of the great things in Mozilla and why I think we ought to reassess the whole webkit move."

"Google Reader is ugly, but it works great as an online RSS newsreader. So what if I used Fluid.app to create a standalone Mac app and replace my desktop newsreader."

"No doubt this is an extremely subjective thing... but I really much prefer having a small fixed point and set colors for text and its background when reading websites with large chunks of text."

"Drosera is a JavaScript debugger for WebKit that can be used with any application that uses WebKit. Like the Web Inspector, over 90% of it is written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript."

Seems like a great combo - a single-site browser wrapping that site's UI with greasemonkey-style JS-based customizations.

"WebScripting is an informal protocol that defines methods that classes can implement to expose their interfaces to a WebScript environment such as JavaScript."

"Pyro demonstrates a new breed of applications we call site-specific browsers—apps that are about making a browser-based application better with client-side technology while keeping the user interface intact"

"Think about it this way: if you had a super-fly gaming engine that was wicked easy to set up, to pipe in data and attrack gamers, wouldn't you want to build your own game? Now you can. Except... it's in the form of the core of Apple's Safari web browser.

"Twitter is for staying in touch and keeping up with friends no matter where you are or what you are doing. For some friends you might want instant mobile updates — for others, you can just check the web."

"It’s kind of like Ajax in that way, except that the communication channel is not http and it’s synchronous (which it can be, since it’s right there on your machine)."

"I would like to introduce a new addition to the WebKit open source toolsa JavaScript debugger."

"I've seen plugins for Firefox that do similar things, but this goes miles beyond, both aesthetically and functionally."

"A virgin saying you're the biggest they ever had is, well, a virgin saying you're the biggest they ever had."