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For reasons that will soon become obvious, I’m shutting the doors on this website. Everything will remain online for now, but I don’t plan on returning to write anything new here. Not that I’ve added any content in almost two years anyway. I still have a passion for making observations, telling stories and recording my thoughts as they happen. I’ll just be doing it elsewhere. Thank you for reading.
Safari and WebKit aren’t teenagers anymore. I just want to make note of that. To quote a previous post: On June 25, 2001, I arrived at Apple Computer to lead the effort in building a new Web browser. It was also Ken Kocienda’s first day on the job, both at Apple and on that same project with me. For that reason, Ken and I have always considered our start date to be when Safari and WebKit were born. Not any other position on the calendar. Only June 25, 2001. We were there. We should know. That was 20 years ago today. Twenty years! Of course, it’s been over nine years since I retired from Apple. Obviously, I’m not a teenager anymore either. But I still remember that first day clearly. So, happy birthday to Safari and WebKit and the team now tasked with their adult supervision.
America is sick. And I don’t just mean with COVID-19. The bad news is that removing the ugly, orange tumor in the White House next week will not be enough to affect a cure. The malignancy has spread. It didn’t even start with the presidency. We’ve been brewing and self-dosing a toxic carcinogen for centuries. White supremacy is, of course, the not-so-secret ingredient. While responsibility for this has changed hands over the years, the modern Republican Party is obviously ensuring racism persists and even flourishes here in America. And for nothing more than electoral advantage. The GOP cannot maintain power if everyone is allowed to vote. We all know this. But even disenfranchising non-white, non-native and otherwise different people is not enough for them now. And their new strategy only starts by overturning election results they don’t like, achieved by lying to their lesser number of voters that they’ve been cheated. The violent insurrectionists at the Capitol last week weren’t really interested in elections, fair or otherwise. They wanted to install a dictator. And many in the GOP—federal, state and local officials as well as their voters—were encouraging that. It’s clear that Republicanism is no longer compatible with democracy. So we have a big problem. The reason so many of our fellow citizens are angry and demanding autocracy is more complicated than simple political disagreements. There’s something elemental going on here. An embrace of conspiracy theories, ignorance and grievance. And on a scale I’ve never seen. I’ll be honest that I have no idea how to cure this disease. I’m not even sure where to begin. But our nation needs some powerful medicine. Or the body will die.
More in programming
The Ware for September 2026 is a tire pressure monitor from a late 80’s to early 90’s model Porsche, made by Bosch. According to the submitter: Kind of a crazy piece of hardware for the late 80’s – this would be pretty cutting edge for the time. Nobody quite got what the part was – […]
I’ve been taking a break from Mastodon as my social home on the web for about six weeks. It has been more difficult than I’d usually admit. I have an amazing local community in my town that I love and am deeply involved in. But nobody here is a programmer, or even a computer nerd, so it doesn’t serve my need for a tech community. I work alone, for myself, in my house. It’s a fortunate lifestyle with many upsides, but it means I don’t get that form of community at work, either. I’ve had this feeling before… as a teenager in the 1990s. It’s profoundly lonely. But when I got internet access, that started to change. I found my people. First in the Total Annihilation community (RIP, Annihilated), then the HardOCP Forum, then the Something Awful Forums, then Tumblr, then Twitter and our community of Apple bloggers, and then Mastodon. Communities form, change, and dissolve over time. None of those are, today, anything like what they were when I most enjoyed them. We change, too. I didn’t move on from most of those solely because they changed — it was usually because we both changed, and it was no longer a good fit. My break from Mastodon has been a relief in some ways, as I’ve felt increasing divergence between what I wanted and what I was getting from it, but I didn’t know where else to go. Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are all more video-broadcast platforms than communities. All I’ve found on Bluesky is even more anger and politics, the last things I need or want. Threads hasn’t yet stuck for me, and it’s owned by an asshole. Twitter was an amazing product and community that was previously owned by assholes, and now it’s X, which has a strong but different tech community, and is owned by different assholes. So I’ve just been… nowhere, for the first time since the 1990s. It has been, once again, quite lonely. Sure, it’s been relaxing, too, but in the way a vacation is relaxing. It’s great to take breaks, but after a long vacation, I’m ready to turn my brain back on. Without participating in a large, broad tech community, I’m exposed to fewer new ideas, both of my main jobs (app development and podcasting) are much harder, the quality and reach of my work have suffered, my skills aren’t improving as much, my mind is less stimulated, and I feel disconnected from my professions and passions. My world has gotten smaller. I could keep going like this to prove a stubborn victory or purity test, but I’d mostly just be hurting myself. Communities change, conditions change, and we change. We’re all better off if we’re willing to change our minds, and if our communities let us, no matter how strongly our younger selves declared a previous position. So I’m going to wade back in and see how it goes, trying to find a better balance to hopefully have better results, including on Mastodon. My people are spread across multiple services, and I’m going to explore them all, despite most of them being owned by assholes. I’d love to participate in communities without any assholes benefiting from it, but in the modern world, that simply isn’t possible. The only alternative is to isolate myself and not have a community at all (or a job, or a smartphone, or a computer, or internet access, or a car, or most of my food, or my country). That’s neither a price I’m willing to pay nor a condition I’d try to impose on anyone else. I’d love to have your support, forgiveness, and grace as I try to find my people again, and I strive to offer the same to all of you. Everyone deserves to be part of a community. And as I grow, I’m learning to declare fewer absolutes in a complex, imperfect, and constantly changing world.
My now-traditional “summary” of the conference along with my own commentary and thoughts.
Every year, browser vendors collaborate via the Interop project to synchronize their efforts on new HTML/CSS/JS features. This year, there’s a ton of super exciting features being considered! In this blog post, we’ll explore the CSS of the future, to get a glimpse of what we’ll soon be able to do.
