What Do You Want to Know?

Here’s your chance to get involved with this blog a little more. I want to know what you want to read about and what you want me to write about. Is there something you want to learn about, some topic you want to discuss or something you want to share?

I invite you — all of my loyal readers — to ask me a question or send me a comment about absolutely anything. Ask me about web development; ask me about ; ask me what I had for breakfast, or even ask me out. Ask me anything you like and I’ll do my best to answer.

2 thoughts on “What Do You Want to Know?

  1. What is the right approach to IE css handling?
    a – accept the fact that it can’t do much, and stick with a (relatively small) subset of css capabilities, hang with ugly hacks (Tantek Celik box model hack, triggering strict versus quirks rendering by tweaking markup), in the name of cross-browser consistant rendering?
    b – use an emulation library (namely IE7) to unleash selectors et al, at the cost of slowdown, repaint, and potential incompability with future MSIE?
    c – take the slippy road and do serve different stylesheets by UA sniffing
    d – ?

    By constantly hacking around with this (old cow) browser to make it swallow things it’s not supposed to, don’t we do more harm than good (by maintening it in the “works with” category)?
    This is more a theoretical question than a practical one, as “commercial” sites simply can’t afford to render bad in IE, and as do webdeveloppers can’t afford not to be paid… and as web dev who don’t want to die boring have to hack around…

    This one may have to do with the previous question:
    Why should it be wrong to force IE to use a xml parser (the Dean Edwards hack)?
    At least, we may stop relying on some hacks involving UA sniffing when sending content-type, wich is inherently unreliable… [even if application/xml is not the “supposed ideal” for xhtml]

    Any details about what we can / may expect from an hypothetical “totally” new IE that may come with Vista?
    AFAIK, MSIE7 looks like it has a few bugfixes, but nothing really “serious” IMHO…
    Still, XAML seems to be the new MS hot potato; will IE support it (eg: as Moz / XUL)?
    And so:
    How does XAML compare with XUL?
    Is it worth digging for it now?
    Does it stand any chance to take a place in the “real” web?

    What to think about xsl-fo?
    Having spent some time on xslt, I ended up liking it… but I just can’t get the point of xsl-fo in web-development (as far as I can tell – and hell it’s *awkward* – part of it tries to replace css; isn’t it just foolish?). Where am I wrong?

    Is there a point in things like STTS?
    From what I think is the author *actual* point of view, it’s a simple transformation language for xml, with a css like syntax.
    The point should be to allow people already familiar with the (supposed) easy css syntax to perform xml transformations without the overhead of digesting xslt.
    *I* can think of potential use in web development teams, but it looks like there are no tools available.
    Do you think it’s worth the time to develop a server side tool to handle (a small part) of it?
    Are there similar project/notes/rec out there?

    I have some reasonnable knowledge about DTD and XSchema (just what I need to work with), but I’m far from real enlightment.
    I read that RelaxNG is gaining momentum.
    a – are these three *really* mutually exclusive?
    b – if yes, is there a winning horse?

    I’m pretty confused by recent technology evolutions.
    Mainly a “hardcore” php worker, I’m feeling reasonnably at ease with xml / xhtml / css / js, sites global design / organisation, and took my part of the pain in banging my head on the desk with IE.
    So I can’t see a urge to replace technologies which I quite like, and which market penetration is still somewhat in its early phase…

    But I also do agree with what I understood from the WhatWG activity, regarding a lack in the field of rich client applications… [insert correction here]
    Again, I’m no expert…
    But won’t html5 / xhtml2 be massively divergent (including, once implemented by clients, divergent in css rendering), causing more havoc and confusion, and eventually the death of one or the other?
    I mean, we (well: a few “pals” and I) already have bad days struggling to make clients agree that 1990 pratices in web-development are dead… we only begin to see people according credit to security, version control development, accessibility, content / presentation separation, even some clients are now able to spell “CSS” without thinking its some greek yogourt.

    Of course, it’s exciting to see new things happenning, but “unpleasant forking”, (if this is what awaits us), is not an engaging perspective…
    At the very least, I would like to know: “On which horse do I put my money?” 😀

    Are XLink and brothers inherently born-dead?

    “Ajax” (whatever that means) sure has charms.
    Still, I can’t help but think it’s somewhat an “old cow” and a “hype”.
    I never liked iframes (no rational reason): and now we see pages with florishing js xmlhttprequests in every table (small exageration :D).
    I simply can’t think about “Ajax” as a “solid corpus” as long as there don’t exist a de-facto-standard “cross-browser” library…
    Is “Prototype” blessed to be it?
    Or is Ajax doomed to fork into various concurrent js toolkits?
    Are there connections/superpositions between “Ajax” (again, whatever the meaning) and some WhatWG works?
    Opinions?

    May we hope in the near future, a way to do flash on oss platform, or an efficient drop-in replacement for flash?
    I mean, I’ve nothing against flash in itself (well, in fact, I have…), but my wallet has against the licence price of FlashMX, and the fact there’s no Linux version (am I wrong?).

    And… err… what did you had for breakfast? 😀

    I can’t hope you have patience enough to enlighten my stupidity.

    Many thanks anyway.

    – Regards
    dMp

  2. Needless to say, the main and only question is:

    “An exhaustive overview about the present and future in web development, from the right technology to choose, to the right way to gracefully degrade, written for mere mortals who don’t have SGML background”

    The answer is probably more a book than a post 😀

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