David Baron is a Mozilla engineer who writes about CSS, browser internals, web standards, and browser privacy.
HN commenters link his posts on faster timeouts, the CSS :visited privacy fix, and user style sheets. One says the timeout post solved an animation problem.
> I learned HTML quite late, when HTML 5 was already all the rage, and I never understood why the more strict rules of XML for HTML never took off. They seem so much saner than whatever soup of special rules and exceptions we currently have.
XHTML came out at a time when Internet Explorer, the most popular browser, was essentially frozen apart from security fixes because Microsoft knew that if the web took off as a viable application platform it would threaten Windows' dominance. XHTML 1.1 Transitional was essentially HTML 4.01 except that if it wasn't also valid XML, the spec required the browser to display a yellow "parsing error" page rather than display the content. This meant that any "working" XHTML site might not display because the page author didn't test in your browser. It also meant that any XHTML site might break at any time because a content writer used a noncompliant browser like IE 6 to write an article, or because the developers missed an edge case that causes invalid syntax.
XHTML 2.0 was a far more radical design. Because IE 6 was frozen, XHTML 2.0 was written with the expectation that no current web browser would implement it, and instead was a ground-up redesign of the web written "the right way" that would eventually entirely replace all existing web browsers. For example, forms were gone, frames were gone, and all presentational elements like <b> and <i> were gone in favor of semantic elements like <strong> and <samp> that made it possible for a page…
I'm actually a dual citizen, so I can go up anytime, I believe.
You don't even need to be a dual citizen -- if you're a citizen of the US or Canada, have a job offer, and have reasonable qualifications (a Bachelor's degree in most fields is enough) you can drive up to the border, mention NAFTA, and get a visa on the spot.
are there good reasons for me to go from the bay area to Vancouver
I haven't lived in the bay area, and I don't know your circumstances, so it's hard for me to give a good answer here. I know when Google offered me a job in Mt.View, one of the factors which led me to not accept was that between Vancouver and what I had seen of the bay area, I much preferred Vancouver -- but I grew up in Vancouver, and my tastes have probably been molded by that. If you grew up in a dry, polluted, urban sprawl, you might prefer the bay area.
I imagine I would just be paying more in taxes...
Don't be so certain. Canada has publicly-funded health care, which tends to raise taxes, but it also has much lower per-capita military spending than the US. I can't make much sense out of US income tax forms, but Google found me http://dbaron.org/views/taxes-2007.html; comparing it to an analysis I did last year http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2007-05.html it looks like a single California taxpayer typically pays a marginal tax rate of about 40% of income while a single BC taxpayer typically pays a marginal rate of about 26% of income -- of course, in BC we have provincial and…
The space of invertible linear transformations is actually a Riemannian manifold, and in particular a Lie group. Because Lie groups are differentiable, you can defining a geodesic path between two points by minimizing a path integral. That would be the "canonical" [0] path to choose, but there are three problems.
The shortest path depends on your metric. There are straightforward choices for translation (uniform L2 norm) and even scaling (log) and rotation (the amount you rotate by), but when all three are combined in one matrix, units come into play, and things like skew and perspective make them more complicated.
This path is not guaranteed to be unique. Uniqueness fails exactly where two or more geodesics cross. The set of places where this happens is called the "cut locus". The example given elsewhere of a 180 degree rotation is a good illustration of a point in a cut locus.
The set of invertible linear transformations is also not connected. It is partitioned into two components: those with positive determinant and those with negative determinant, and there is no continuously differentiable path from one to the other that does not cross through a matrix with det=0 (i.e., that is not invertible). http://dbaron.org/css/test/2010/transition-negative-determinant has some examples of animations between 2D transformations where the sign of the determinant differs.
As for intent... this is the reason for the rule pornel gives in another comment: if all of your transforms…
It should be up to both.
https://dbaron.org/css/user/
I never used them, but Opera had a few preset user stylesheets right there in the "view" menu at the top of the window, that was neat. One was "C64" IIRC. Silly, but neat ^^
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Alternative_style_sheets
If styleesheets could have placeholders for some system colors (maybe even fonts?), that could be something.. turn nightmode on/off, or just generally change colors, and all programs and all websites fade! I would actually love "having to" make 3 stylesheets, one super fancy one, a print stylesheet, and a "system colors" one. Or don't even stop with colors, do it like Magic User Interface on the Amiga, let the user configure how they want all sorts of input and information fields to be formatted and behave... some people want material design (they're wrong of course, but if they must be wrong, I want them to at least be wrong and happy, rather than wrong and unhappy), others want gradients and bevels and shadows everywhere, let everybody set it how they want. Some people want lots of padding, others want tight padding and negative linespacing and tiny fonts, etc.
Awww, now I'm super excited about something that doesn't exist... I can taste it, it would be so awesome! This is the wrong timeline :/
We are working on multiprocess tabs (again). We paused our effort a couple of years ago for Firefox Desktop. Some other things were more important (we fixed most of our memory issues and improved the global responsiveness of Firefox). And some work was needed before getting multiprocess tabs ready in Firefox Desktop:
- we managed to get multiprocess tabs working for Firefox on Android and for Firefox OS. The inner architecture is now here. Basically, it was easier to start with mobile.
- we worked hard on an even-more threaded architecture in Gecko ("Off-Main-Thread everything"). This makes Firefox much more snappier these days, and this will make things easier for a full multiprocess browser.
So now, with all that done, we are restarting our work on multiprocess tabs on Firefox Desktop.
A multiprocess architecture will probably improve the responsiveness of Firefox, but keep in mind that this is not a magic bullet. Improvements can be made in other areas. Firefox 24 is much more responsive than before and will get more and more snappier in the months to come.
Also - on a related note: "we need a more parallel browser" http://dbaron.org/log/20120827-specification-style
“Lots of people don't fill out all the choices” is an important downside. We’ve had Instant Runoff Voting in San Francisco since 2004, and people still don’t fill out all the choices, so their votes are discarded whereas the voters probably would have voted among the final two choices had there been a runoff election. For example, in June 2018 London Breed won the mayoral election against two candidates who were closer aligned politically (Jane Kim and Mark Leno, who were further left) https://dbaron.org/sf-elections-rcv/#%7B%22election%22%3A%2220180627%22%2C%22filters%22%3A%5B%5D%7D and in Nov 2019 Chesa Boudin won the District Attorney race against 3 candidates who were more moderate https://dbaron.org/sf-elections-rcv/#%7B%22election%22%3A%22CVR_Export_20191125163446%22%2C%22filters%22%3A%5B%5D%2C%22contest%22%3A%22339%22%7D . In both cases, the margin of victory was far more narrow than the number of votes that were exhausted in the final round of voting, so due to insufficient voter education I would consider vote splitting still a significant problem even with IRV. (Another possibility is that the ballots are exhausted by the 3 candidate limit in San Francisco.)