I pointed to Daring Fireball’s Trackback critique, but I didn’t comment. On the Internet, if I don’t do it, someone else will, and this article did. It’s a very well thought-out response.

To summarize: John Gruber’s criticisms of TrackBack are valid, but his referrer system has its own problems. It trades increased ease on the sending side for lower quality on the receiving side.

To improve TrackBack, it should be made easier. I don’t see why all comment forms on sites with TrackBack couldn’t be changed into combined comment/TrackBack forms. TrackBack would almost disappear to the web surfer; it would just be Remote Comments.

I hope to find a way on my own site to integrate comments with static main pages. (I have a few ideas.)

No one has been covering the Internet Explorer from a web author's perspective as well as Zeldman.

2005? Are they kidding?: “Scoble says Longhorn will be available in 2005. Which is another way of saying IE/Win won't change for at least two years. It is not good enough to stay as it is. ...Can anyone tell us how two more years of flawed standards support is supposed to be a good thing?”

RIP:

...Our friends there [at Microsoft], we knew, were working on improvements, particularly in the areas of CSS and DOM support. Yet no significantly new browser version ever came of their activity. IE6/Win still had trouble with parts of CSS1, still did not support true native PNG transparency, and still did not incorporate Text Zoom...

Over the past weeks, the stories we and others have been covering (including the unavailability of an improved version of IE5/Mac outside the subscription-based MSN pay service, and the news that IE/Win was dead as a standalone product) painted a picture of a product on its way out. And now we know that that is the case.

We know that, after spending billions of dollars to defeat all competitors and to absolutely, positively own the desktop browsing space, Microsoft as a corporation is no longer interested in web browsers...

From here, as it has for several weeks now, it looks like a period of technological stasis and dormancy yawns ahead. Undoubtedly the less popular browsers will continue to improve. But few of us will be able to take advantage of their sophisticated standards support if 85% of the market continues to use an unchanged year 2000 browser.

OK, enough quoting. Go read the articles. It‘s getting late, but I’ll comment on one thing. I’ll do it even though it requires another quote.

IE5/Mac, with its Tasman rendering engine, was the first browser to deliver meaningful standards compliance to the market, arriving in March, 2000, a few months ahead of Mozilla 1.0 and Netscape 6... IE5/Mac introduced innovations like DOCTYPE switching and Text Zoom that soon found their way into comparably compliant browsers like Navigator, Konqueror, and Safari. And all but Text Zoom eventually made it into IE6/Win...

Add to that feature list the printer equivalent of Text Zoom: interactive fit-to-page controls in the print preview window. A very useful solution for a problem I saw users on other browsers and platforms (including IE/Win) struggle with frequently.

The reason IE 5/Mac was good was because it had to be. It was fighting against a large installed base of Netscape 4 on its merits, and Microsoft couldn’t fall back on their Windows franchise to push it. It was designed to be better than Netscape 4, and it succeeded at that. (Also helping its market share was Microsoft’s public threat to pull Office for Mac, which resulted in Apple shipping IE as their default browser.) Still, the competition made Microsoft produce some of its best work.

Soon after, with the game won (or at least, with everyone but Microsoft having lost sufficiently) Microsoft has gone home. They may have even done that years ago, quietly.

IE 6/Win wasn’t much of an upgrade. (A CNET review: “Just about the only reason we can figure that IE 6 even deserves the full 6 version number is its release in conjunction with Windows XP. For those of you not upgrading to Windows XP, whether you run IE 5.x or Netscape 6.x, there's no need to rush for this download.”)

Which brings up a question: when was this decision made? It was made public only recently, but could have been in the air in the Microsoft executive suite for much longer. They have the money to keep the development teams going regardless of the outcome. (According to a Think Secret article, IE 6/Mac was largely finished last year, but according to a former developer “We were told by upper management to hold it back until they gave it the green light.”) Aside from a 2001 update just to keep up with the release of Mac OS X, there haven't been any real feature upgrades to Internet Explorer for either Mac or Windows for the past three years. Both of them might as well have been cancelled then.

We’ve been using a dead product all this time and didn’t even know it!

Daring Fireball: The problems with Movable Type's TrackBack protocol.

BBC News writes: “The most sought after object in particle physics, the Higgs boson, may not even exist.”

Jon Udell writes: “Let's review what's happening in this screen shot. I'm running Mozilla Firebird on my Mac. The application is a structured search of my OSCOM slides. There's no search engine beyond the browser itself, which provides the JavaScript UI, the XPath-based search, and the XSLT-driven results display.”

This is great. It’s a working XPath lab in your browser. At least, if your browser is IE or a recent Mozilla derivative. (Come on, Apple, implement XSLT and the XMLDocument request APIs next in Safari.)

PHP Everywhere: The Ultimate PHP for Windows with Turck MMCache (and FastCGI)

The old problem with running PHP on Windows is that many extensions are not thread safe and can only run safely in CGI mode. Unfortunately CGI is dead slow because the web server creates a new CGI process for each page request.

FastCGI is the solution to this. Instead of creating a new CGI process for each page view, it reuses existing CGI processes. This also improves database scalability because persistent db connections work properly.

...Well there is a lesser known GPL'ed accelerator, Turck MMCache that supports both Windows, Unix and Linux, written by Dmitry Stogov. I tested MMCache and FastCGI against several PHP scripts accessing MySQL, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server. I gave the web-server a good pounding with a 60 minute stress test using fiendish scripts that cause PHP in ISAPI mode to crash. MMCache appears to be made of sterner stuff and passed with flying colours. While the test was running, I modified the source code of the test scripts; MMCache auto-detected the changes and recompiled.

[via PHP Everywhere]

We sent my father off yesterday on the first leg of the 2003 Bermuda 1-2 Yacht Race, on his boat, Nimros. There were a few last-minute things to finish, as always. So he ended up leaving the dock a few minutes before the official start, as we hurried over to a vantage point on Newport’s Goat Island to watch it.

Nimros, in front of a boat with sails

Even from far away, Nimros was easy to identify, because it was the only sailboat in the race with no sails. Making sure they could be raised was one of those last-minute things we hadn’t quite finished.

The starting gun went off, and the other boats that had been jockeying for position finally tacked forward across the starting line, while Nimros alone drifted lazily backward, away from Bermuda, and toward the Newport Bridge.

A minute later, the mainsail started to rise. Almost immediately it stopped, with only a small triangle visible, and stayed that way for several minutes. Nimros appeared to be racing with a sail the size of a picnic blanket.

Then even that small concession to the practice of sailing was taken down, and Nimros drifted further away from the starting line over the next few minutes, toward the rocks at the foot of the Rose Island lighthouse.

Fortunately, Nimros avoided a wreck by raising the jib, which proved powerful enough to get the boat over the starting line about ten minutes later, for a total of about half an hour’s delay. Nimros was still easy to identify, because all the other boats had their larger mainsails raised, in addition to having already left.

We left as Nimros disappeared into the mist at the mouth of Narragansett Bay, headed out into the Atlantic, mainsail still down.

My father contacted us later that day to explain that a winch had failed, forcing him to re-thread the main halyard before he could raise the mainsail. So everything is apparently fine again.

It’s my turn on the boat next week, as the crew for the return trip. Wish me luck.

More coverage from the Bermuda 1-2 web site: [2003 Bermuda 1-2 Start From Newport].

News.Com: Fighting for a new Net copyright deal. Q&A with Lawrence Lessig. We're ready and eager to build a large grassroots organization of people who demand of Congress that it do something to restore some balance here. This petition is a first step toward going to Washington and saying that there's a large number of people who want you to consider this. [via Tomalak's Realm]

AskTog: Multiple Mistakes Drown Interface. “I’m a member of the Building and Grounds committee at our Quaker meeting house. This month, when the group got together to check out problems around the building, someone had posted a hand-written sign on our new ultra-quiet dishwasher: ‘Do not operate the dishwasher unless John or Bettie is here to help!’ ” [via Tomalak's Realm]

A UK activist clade is taking on the insidious digital fruit machine (AKA, “slot machine”). These things are supposed to be random and fair, but by design or by glitch, the pubside gambling systems are anything but.

Fruit machines cheat you on practically every spin of the reels. Almost every spin is entirely predetermined - which symbols are going to drop in, whether you're going to be awarded nudges, which numbers the "random" stop will land on, the lot. Ever had two cherries on the win line, not held them, then watched the third one drop in on the next spin and thought, "Damn, if I'd held them I'd have won"? Well, you wouldn't. If you'd held the two cherries, the machine would have dropped in a different symbol. And now we can prove it.

LinkDiscuss

(via NTK)

[via Boing Boing Blog]

Nice technique for proving program behavior without looking at its code. To summarize: they run the machine’s software inside a program on a regular desktop computer, and save the state of RAM at various points. Then they can “go back in time” at will by restoring RAM, and try making different choices.

By the way, wouldn’t it be interesting if you could do that with the real world? You could try out different things to see how people, or the world, would react, without risk of harm. Physics with “undo”. Heaven for opportunists.