Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

Gartner is warning against early adoption of 802.11n citing the need for more testing, and waiting for the specs to be truly finalized before adoption (likely 2007).

I couldn’t agree with them more. 802.11 gear is only good if the devices are “Certified” (not to be confused with “Compatible”). I’d bet that 90% of problems people have with wireless gear is simply because they choose “Compatible” rather than “Certified”. One meaning the manufacturer feels it’s good enough, the other meaning it’s up to the specifications.

I really don’t believe in “Turbo Mode”, and all these other proprietary addons to WiFi hardware. They can’t even get the basics right (look many still aren’t Certified).

Early on (I think it was 2001) I started playing with some early Linksys hardware, uncertified. A real drag. As soon as I started putting Certified equipment in place, the certified equipment worked flawlessly, while non-certified gear still had occasional problems. Now I’m only buying certified hardware, and everything runs very nicely. You especially see problems with non-certified gear when mixing brands. Right now I have 3 different WiFi Adapters connecting to an Access Point from yet another vendor. Not a problem.

A word of the wise, if you insist on reliability, always get certified. You can lookup your products here to see if they are.

RFC 1918 defines the following IP blocks as designated for private intranets:

10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255 (10/8 prefix)
172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255 (172.16/12 prefix)
192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255 (192.168/16 prefix)

I think it’s about time we have the same thing for DNS, for example:

.dev
.intra

The logic is as follows.

.dev for intranet based development instances of a site. For example this website’s dev instance on my intranet is robert.accettura.dev.

.intra for intranet URL’s such as yourdomain.intra. This can be used for any intranet purpose (internal homepage, email system, blogs, wiki, etc.).

This is a much more logical system than using intranet DNS servers to hijack a domain for internal purposes, or reserving subdomains for the purpose.

Someone should go pester ICANN about such a standard. Btw: .local is stupid, if it’s local, it’s localhost.

Yea, take a look at that source.

Interesting eh?

Adobe today released the specs for a new image format: DNG.

I’m interested. The ideas behind it seem to make sense. JPEG sucks. That’s about all there is to it. It’s what we have, it’s what we use. But it stinks.

I’m curious if Adobe’s going to be able to get DNG actually out there. It’s going to be an uphill battle for sure. JPEG is such a defacto standard, it’s going to be tough. But I’m welcoming the change.

Well, actually it’s well past time. Instant Messaging has all the earmarks to be the communications of the future, and it royally stinks.

Problems today:

• Networks don’t communicate together, hence locking users in (MSN, AIM, Yahoo!)
• Phones don’t Text Message (same as IM essentially) across networks. Barely from net to phone.
• Each has proprietary ‘extras’ (file transfer method, voice chat, web cam, pictures, etc). Far from standardized.

I think it’s time for the IETF to write up an official recommendation for Instant Messaging.

Here’s my wish list:

• UTF8 encoding for all messages
• XML messages. Adds capabilities to easily integrate with other systems (since XML is the way of the future). Stylesheets define how it appears.
• MathML support - for those wanting to get geeky.
• SVG Graphics - why not? Slim, clean, XML. This could be used for multiple things: Emoticons for example could be sent via SVG. Things like whiteboard (which allow you to draw and have the other party see what you draw) could be done in SVG.
• Of course, an open standard, like Email. Cross platform, many clients, no licensing restrictions. So everyone can enjoy it.

With this, there’s a lot of flexibility. Using XML as a message format, rather than HTML, allows for a stylesheet to render it pretty. A person with a vision impairment could have a product read the XML directly. You could honor a stylesheet provided by the person you are talking too, download them online, or create your own. Big text? Small text? Color contrast? All in your control. And with SVG emoticons, they can resize appropriately without losing quality. Phones can resize as necessary thanks to custom stylesheets.

It’s a real shame it hasn’t happened yet. There’s no great IM clients. The protocols all have their limitations (AOL stinks behind firewalls, Yahoo’s got minimal users, MSN is spam ridden). All the current systems stink. Their clients are even worse. AOL’s adware, MSN’s buggy client (and terrible Mac client), Yahoo’s terribly slow development.

Look at all the IRC clients available. So many, each with their own features, toys, ehancements. All working together.

Yes, I do hate IM’s as of today. But imagine what could be done? It could be as universal as email. Secure, fast, flexible framework. But instead, we’ve got garbage to date.

The time for standards in IM is now. It’s only going to get more proprietary from here on out. And lock users into their networks.

Oh… spam prevention built into the protocol would be nice. Lets avoid another Email like spam attack.

Just my $0.02

David Hyatt seems to have generated some waves over his recent posts regarding Safari “bugs”.

I must say he’s 100% right, and I applaud him for taking a stand.

I’m a web developer for several years in one form or another. I’ve had a web presence for several years now. I started out just using Netscape Communicator and Claris Homepage for web site development. Not knowing ANY HTML. Slowly I learned.

Over the past 2 years now, I’ve become almost obsessed with writing “the perfect code”. A website that looks good in all browsers, is small, and works perfectly every time.

What I’ve found is that you can save tons of time by just using valid code. Since I’ve been an addict about validating my pages, I haven’t had rendering issues. I used to have many bugs that would drive me crazy. Fix one thing, and it breaks in another browser. It was a mess. Since I went with good valid HTML (I still prefer HTML 4.01/Trans with sparing use of CSS, since it breaks a little nicer IMHO in older browsers).

And being a Mac lover and Mozilla addict, means I’m also well aware of how webmasters ignore standards, as long as bad code breaks in a desired way in IE. It’s been driving me crazy for years.

I’m going to keep generating valid websites. I have no intent on going back to my ways of the past. Some pages will be invalid for some time until their backend is updated appropriately. But all new systems/pages written will generate valid HTML. And that’s my plan from here on out. Why? Because it’s faster than patching for eternity, it works, and it’s the RIGHT way of doing things. It’s cheaper really. Cleaner code is less bandwidth and more efficient business wise. Read here for more on that. Good companies want valid code as well.

I really hope some other webmasters beside myself start listening to Mr. Hyatt. He’s a wise authority on web development giving his experience in Mozilla and Safari. If there’s a webmaster out there that doesn’t monitor his blog(s), I encourage them to start doing so, and read up in his archive on his past posts (you can skip the POP culture ones if you want… but he’s got good taste in games, and especially TV i.e. HBO)

Perhaps he’s just started a revolution that will change the web? Perhaps he’s only enlightened a handful of webmasters. Either way… Thank you.

Microsoft recently redesigned their website (at least their homepage). As you may know, they aren’t a big backer of standards.

Look how well their page validates.

This concludes this episode of Microsoft-doesn’t-care-about-technology.

Validating as XHTML is even more fun.

Apple isn’t perfect, but isn’t to bad either.

This website is fine though

Go standards!