Monday, 6th January 2003
XHTML is just fine
In Who dropped the deat cat into the well? (via Mark Pilgrim), Brian Donovan argues that keeping web site content in (X)HTML is a fundamentally bad idea. I thoroughly disagree. When I started this weblog, I realised I needed a format for storing my entries that would keep my content “free” to be reused in multiple different ways. I thought about a simple UBB style markup language, with [url="http://www.example.com/"]links like this[/url], automatic line breaks and a few other simple structures such as lists and headings. I also considered Wiki markup of some sort, again looking for a reasonable expressive but controlled markup vocabulary for storing my blog entries in a reusable way.
Perl made less ugly
It seems Perl OOP doesn’t have to be that ugly after all. Tony Bowden disects the code from the recent Evolt article and shows how it can be made much neater using Perl’s Class::Accessor module. Much nicer—I should have guessed that there would be More Than One Way To Do It.
A great year for Mozilla
The MozillaZine Review of the Year 2002 shows just how far the Mozilla project progressed in 2002. From a 0.9.8 milestone in January, the open source browser bounded on past version 1.0 and span off popular sub projects in Chimera and Phoenix (soon to be renamed).