John Gruber:

[Asking for type of feed would] be like asking web site visitors what flavor of HTML they wanted: “No XHTML 1.0 Strict for me. HTML 4.01 Transitional, please.”

Um, this is actually the theoretical situation of content negotiation, although in practice it is much more transparent. Still, what John describes is what actually goes on.

I am lost for words. This is embarrassing. (So not completely lost for words, it seems.)

(Via The Macalope)

Very interesting, and probably a useful addition to CSS.

I see, however, a problem with section 3.2, which states:

The definition of variables crosses @import boundaries. That means that the definition of a variable contained in a stylesheet B imported from a stylesheet A applies to all rules directly contained or imported into stylesheet A.

This would potentially create a problem in which variables are overwritten. Given the structure of CSS, though, and @import in particular (it must come before any style declarations), this might be acceptable.

It’s tempting to ascribe this to the “cult of no-pay”, programmers and users who simply won’t pay for software no matter how good it is, or how inexpensive it may be. These people used to be called pirates. Now they’re open source enthusiasts.

But there’s something else going on here, too: the free software alternatives keep getting better every year.

And that is the power and greatness of open source. Collaborative efforts to improve software.

Although I do not have such an… impressive beard at this time, I get a lot of complaints for it still.

Always try to learn whatever you can about your language of choice.

Obvious, yet wonderful idea by Leonard Richardson.

David Heinemeier Hansson:

That platform has really received an unfair reputation.

I remember seeing a video of DHH some years ago, where he gave a presentation at Roskilde University. In that, he spent quite a large portion of his time mocking PHP, contributing to this exact reputation it has got.

I personally use PHP a bit at work, but as rarely as possible in my spare time. But I will give it this: it gets the job done. Whenever I do something that I actually need to deploy, I resort to PHP, because it works for the platforms I would deploy it to. Mostly, this is due to Django being difficult to deploy, thus PHP being an easier option.

But I do not agree on it having an unfair reputation. It is well-known, and appropriately admired, for being deployable, but that really is one of the only good things I can say about it. And I maintain a site called php hacker — I am not a hater.

More great Python documentation.

We think the Captioning Sucks homepage may be the only viable usage of Comic Sans on the entire Web.

I agree. And I believe Captioning Sucks is an important project.