Articles Posted During February 2003
inflation
Why did Bare Bones drop BBEdit Lite? As John Gruber notes, eleven-year-old BBEdit 2.1 runs fine on OS X, so there's no reason to think BBEdit Lite 6.1 won't be a usable editor for years to come without needing substantial updates. Bare Bones has made it clear that TextWrangler is a completely different beast, so why stop distributing the free version?
I can think of one reason that eliminating BBEdit Lite is beneficial to Bare Bones: It effectively raises the price of BBEdit. For years, Bare Bones has offered the full version of BBEdit at a substantial discount ($60, as of v7.0) to people who own, among other products, BBEdit Lite. As Lite was free, this more or less amounted to an idiot tax levied against anyone who didn't pay attention.
To put this in perspective, factoring in the 'cross-upgrade' meant BBEdit 6.5 could be purchased for $79. In November, when they released 7.0, Bare Bones raised the cross-upgrade price to $119, and now that they've eliminated BBEdit Lite, a new user needs to cough up $179. That's an increase of over 225% in a period of three months.
Good luck, guys.
2003-02-27 12:22:27
conformity
Citing legal concerns, Mike Pinkerton has announced that, beginning with the 0.7 release, browsers from the team responsible for Chimera will be called Camino. Pinkerton declined to give specifics regarding the reasons for the change, but industry insiders speculate that he may be caving in to pressure from the producers of rival products Explorer, Navigator, iCab, and Safari.
2003-02-16 23:45:00
v60
The latest Safari build includes several
notable fixes, but there's been at least one step backward. While it still supports CSS2's
:hover
pseudo-class for most elements, it no longer works for
TRs. Of course, other than links, TR is the only place I've found a use for
:hover. Go figure.
Incidentally, while reading the comments attached to Dave Hyatt's announcement of the v60 update, I ran across this gem:
You freaks should be submitting bug reports to Apple, not on Dave's weblog. Use the damn "Bug Report" button. Nobody here cares about the bugs that do not render your lame-ass web pages correctly.
Just thought I'd pass that along...
2003-02-13 14:53:50
accidental_rss
Uh, folks, looks like I've got an RSS feed (except the entry titles appear to be missing their last characters). Doesn't this mean that anyone can provide RSS feeds for any/all blogs that use valid and semantically rich XHTML? I have to consider the implications of this a bit more.
Isn't this the whole point of using valid, semantically rich markup?
While third party providing an RSS feed for a given site is a bit suspect?just as referencing a URL via [i]frames embedded in a remote document might be, this is the first example I can recall which proves that using valid, semantically rich markup negates the need to provide a special format suited for syndication.
Obviously, the XSLT style sheet used for Tantek's blog wouldn't work for others, but much like an address book does when importing data from a tab-delimited text file, an intelligent aggregator could allow the user to map the appropriate elements from the source document's DOM tree to specific fields within the application's output.
2003-02-10 22:17:51
advertere
From yesterday's AWAD newsletter:
When you see someone sporting a shirt with the manufacturer's name inscribed in bold letters across the chest, it's hard to ignore the irony. Here the apparel wearer is paying the company to promote its name, rather than vice versa. For the privilege of being a walking billboard, one forks over many times what one would normally pay for the same product. So next time you wear a pair of shoes with that logo, or a pair of pants with some large initials stitched on them, or a shirt with a brightly painted name, remember, you're inadvertently advertising the company. The word "advertise" comes to us from Latin advertere meaning "to turn toward" or "to pay attention". The word "inadvertently" derives from the same source. In other words, by not paying attention, we are paying attention.
2003-02-04 22:39:56
the-counterintuitive
As noted in the
CSS2.1 Test Case Authoring Guidelines,
red
indicates a bug, so nothing should ever be red in a test
. Therefore,
I've updated the CSS filters tests
to render all successful rules in green text.
2003-02-03 22:53:09
remembrance
For some reason, I have the strange feeling that somebody out there has taken the plunge & gotten this as a tattoo. Probably on the inner thigh.
2003-02-03 16:06:41
