Aaron Swartz might not be the best writer in the world, but he’s very passionate about his writings, and I find that his views on life are often interesting and thought-provoking.

I must certainly attempt to get more offline; it sure would be good for me.

HTML5 is backwards-compatible with what’s already on the Web, but – despite their best efforts – there’s a lot of new stuff in it, and the WHATWG blog tries lists some helpful tools to make sure you produce good mark-up.

I don’t do much that could be labelled ‘design’, but there’s some general advice that makes sense in most industries.

Choosy labels itself ‘a smarter default browser’, and is a neat little tool if you sometimes need to launch links in other browsers than what you’d normally use.

Because I was a beta tester, I also got a discount code to give away: EPXCA (15% off $[[12 USD]]). It’s not clear from the email, but I think it’s only valid for one person, so the first person to use it will be in luck.

I should get this one linked before I forget it. Natalie Downe shows how to style buttons to look like links, which can be very useful in situations where, for instance, a “show” link and “delete” button (remember, GET shouldn’t be used for unsafe operations) would be confusing.

The Technology Review is great, showcasing some of the recent scientific discoveries; this one is about ideal conditions for a revolution.

Almost four years ago, I linked to a list of HTML 4.01 character entities. At the time I noted that it was, A (somewhat quirky) list of the entity references.

Entity Code is an actually useful alternative to reading the DTD, and one I would heartily recommend. It even has categories.

Joe Clark‘s new project is about copyright — and he doesn’t agree with Lawrence Lessig.

Joe is a very opinionated fellow, and I look very much forward to seeing what this latest endeavour of his will lead to. I will follow it with interest, and I encourage everyone to donate a little to his cause.

For the record, I don’t believe I will agree with much of what he’s saying, but Joe usually makes an effort in whatever he writes about, and whether I agree or not, I believe he will make a great case for his arguments.

How wide is a space character? Obviously the answer varies from font to font, and this resources lists some of the common fonts available on the web, with different space characters.

I’m not a big fan of JavaScript performing the tasks of CSS, but that doesn’t make the experiment less interesting.

(Via For a Beautiful Web.)