When your au­di­ence is most­ly n00b front-end strug­glers, as a medi­um ex­ist­ing be­cause of pub­li­ca­tions and not so­lu­tions it's per­fect­ly rea­son­able to waste every­one's time adding an­oth­er chap­ter to the cir­cle jerk that do­ing some Bos­ton Globe web­site ap­par­ent­ly was. Other­wise it makes no sense, for the fol­low­ing rea­sons:

There is no re­li­able way to de­ter­mine the amount of band­width a user is will­ing to spend on a sin­gle re­source. Be­cause screen size is all we've got to query in some mo­bile cu­ri­ous way that doesn't mean it's us­able or ef­fi­cient to do so. So it's some Spiel­erei to pre­pare for the mag­ic event when there is an API that we can use to de­ter­mine the band­width on a de­vice? No, be­cause mo­bile means there isn't a sin­gle band­width on a de­vice. Even an API can't pre­dict when con­di­tions sud­den­ly get worse be­cause a de­vice moves from Wifi to Edge. In such a volatile en­vi­ron­ment it's back­ward to keep think­ing in mono­lith­ic bitmapped re­sources ar­riv­ing af­ter craft­ing a sin­gle re­quest for it. There's wavelets, pro­gres­sive schemes and vec­tor based im­ages that are much bet­ter at us­ing band­width flex­i­ble and ef­fi­cient­ly be­cause they can stream un­til some­thing de­ter­mines there is enough res­o­lu­tion, and re­sume when more is need­ed. But if you're look­ing for a markup so­lu­tion - be­cause that is what your au­di­ence is crav­ing for - it's just mov­ing the same old pro­to­col into an­oth­er lay­er, ef­fec­tive­ly of­fer­ing the user no ad­van­tage. Just wast­ing time wait­ing to get some­thing into a stan­dard it shouldn't be in in the first place, but ap­par­ent­ly it's to hard to get de­sign­er-slash-de­vel­op­ers to ask serv­er spe­cial­ists to solve their prob­lems prop­er­ly. That's why hey are called HTML mon­keys.

And even if you've gone through such great lengths to pre­vent suck­ing re­dun­dant data over some­one's pre­cious con­nec­tion, only one click seper­ates that user from go­ing to an­oth­er web­site that didn't and makes the ef­fect of your op­ti­mi­sa­tions seem pret­ty use­less. It's like risk­ing your life to re­move a sin­gle mine from a mine­field and then claim you've made an im­prove­ment in safe­ty for the user. But that user isn't go­ing near your sin­gle safe spot as long as all the oth­er mines are still there. Nice tech demo, but in the real world the whole ecosys­tem the user op­er­ates in has to have some min­i­mal lev­el to make it us­able in he first place. And the core of that ecosys­tem is still the brows­er.

Browsers should do a lot more than just im­ple­ment web stan­dards flaw­less­ly. Ini­tia­tives like Opera Mini show users can be giv­en good tools with­out some stan­dards body first have to make a stan­dard for it, or every web­mas­ter come up with his own rein­ven­tion of what should be brows­er fun­cional­i­ty. But if all HTML mon­keys can do is markup and think in markup they will nev­er un­der­stand how to build a brows­er and solve the real prob­lems. They seem to have enough is­sues grasp­ing why browsers don't func­tion as they would ex­pect them to work from their markup view­point any­way.

For the ben­e­fit of the weak of mind it would have been so much eas­i­er to let Mi­crosoft win the brows­er wars ten years ago. That would have giv­en us for ex­am­ple a nice vec­tor based graph­ics im­ple­men­ta­tion, hard­ware ac­cel­er­at­ed graph­ics ef­fects and web ty­pog­ra­phy. At this point when We­bKit seems to have the same ad­van­tages as In­ter­net Ex­plor­er had ten years ago mon­ger­ing the killing of W3C is like sup­port­ing democ­ra­cy only to get into pow­er and then start sup­port­ing dic­ta­tor­ship. There is of course noth­ing wrong with dic­ta­tor­ship when you're the dic­ta­tor or part of it's clan. So buy some shares of $AAPL or $GOOG and start build­ing We­bKit only sites: there is noth­ing wrong with ven­dor lock-in if you're the ven­dor.

Stan­dards aren't de­signed for the cur­rent MVP de­vel­op­ment men­tal­i­ty of the min­i­mum vi­able de­vel­op­ers that most web de­vel­op­ers seem to be these days. If your only main­te­nance is­sue with web stan­dards would be giv­ing an in­tern the lo­gin to your WordPress site, you shouldn't care about web stan­dards and ven­dor pre­fix­es. And only the de­vel­op­er with a min­i­mal vi­able mind­set would in­ter­pret ven­dor pre­fix­es as be­ing "ex­per­i­men­tal", and pro­pose to pro­mot­ing them to have only -al­pha- or -beta- mean­ing. They are just a mech­a­nism for al­low­ing a name­space with­in the syn­tax of valid CSS so you don't have to split it at the MIME type. Which is nice in case you're work­ing on a closed sys­tem in which you have con­trol over both the ren­der­ing en­gine and the code it's ren­der­ing. And of course Ap­ple and Google con­sid­er the whole in­ter­net their closed sys­tem in which they soon have con­trol, with or with­out W3C. Com­bine that with a myr­i­ad of n00b web de­vel­op­ers who bet on hav­ing moved on to some­thing else when their stan­dards-ig­no­rant code hits the fan in a cou­ple of years, and Flash seems like a good idea.

The real is­sue is that with the pro­pa­gan­da of HTML5 as the set of new HTML and CSS com­bined with JavaScript APIs in a mod­ern brows­er it hard­ly makes sense to de­fine fu­ture HTML and CSS stan­dards from the per­spec­tive of a plat­form that lacks JavaScript. If oth­er brows­er ven­dors don't start sup­port­ing -we­bkit pre­fix­es any JavaScript li­brary provider could do the same thing by au­to­mat­i­cal­ly pro­vid­ing a poly­fill for it. If a site doesn't work with­out JavaScript any­way, the prob­lem that it only uses the -we­bkit ven­dor pre­fix­es is aca­d­e­m­ic.

Spent the week in a snowy Achter­hoek.

Mo­tion is a piece of soft­ware that does some­thing with a we­b­cam, like when you point a we­b­cam - or sev­er­al we­b­cams - at some place it can be con­fig­ured to de­tect a cer­tain amount of mo­tion in a par­tic­u­lar area of the im­age and then cre­ate a movie or send the im­age some­where. All very com­pli­cat­ed so I just in­stalled it and plugged my we­b­cam in and for­got about it. And when I re­turned from a week's hol­i­day some­where in some di­rec­to­ry it had stored a bunch of im­ages like this: