Simon Willison’s Weblog

Twitter: blaming Ruby for their mistakes? The comments on the entry include replies from Twitter employees and the RabbitMQ consultant they brought in, and provide a full rebuttal to the various accusations of NIH that were thrown around recently.

# 11:06 am / nih, rabbitmq, ruby, twitter

Making the HTML5 time element safe for historians. PPK presents a detailed history of dates and calendars and points out that the HTML5 time element is ill prepared to faithfully represent the kind of dates historians are interested in.

# 2:01 pm / calendars, dates, datetime, historians, history, html5, ppk, standards, time

cufon. A promising alternative to sIFR, cufon uses VML on IE and canvas on other browsers to render custom fonts in the browser. You have to convert your font to JavaScript first, either using their free hosted tool or by installing the FontForge based server-side script yourself. The JavaScript encoded font file uses VML primitives to improve IE performance; the JavaScript library converts that to canvas calls for other, faster browsers.

# 10:29 pm / browsers, canvas, cufon, fontforge, fonts, ie, javascript, sifr, typography, vml