Articles from February 2006
“Tony Long”: Yet More Stupidity from Wired News
Wired News: Worship Not These False Idols
Here’s a guy who just can’t resist wading into an argument he doesn’t understand. His ignorance is pitiful, and it’…
Ajax: Home Was Never Like This!
When I first read about Ajax last summer, it sounded too good to be true. After all, I was a web geek who was raised on Netscape Navigator, and for whom Javascript had always been the holy grail of great web applications. I had delighted with each new release of Navigator, excitedly diving into the new objects, methods, and properties as they were unveiled by Netscape. Indeed, Javascript was one of the major reasons to use Netscape in the mid-1990’s, since no other browser could touch it for providing rich client-side interactivity to web pages and applications.
Then, around the time that Communicator (Netscape 4) was released in June 1997, the storm clouds that had been forming from Microsoft’s threatening posture against Netscape began to be really troubling. When IE 4 was released that fall, it finally caught up to Netscape in Javascript support. Indeed, until then Microsoft had simply been copying Javascript in order to provide Netscape compatibility, as part of their strategy to win the market. But IE 4 was different. Microsoft took Javascript in a different, and incompatible direction. Thus began the great cross-browser incompatibility nightmare for Javascript lovers like me–a dark, stormy decade that lasted until the clouds began to part in 2005 with the emergence of Ajax.
AOL’s I Am Alpha: A Wide Slap At Mac Users on Safari
This is another horrible example of a company with blinders on. Google has been doing this lately, too. What am I talking about? Why, thinking it’s OK to release a new product without support for Safari or other KHTML-based browsers.


