• “Admitting you were wrong and a willingness to change course is great example, and far too rare in today’s hard-liner “Stay-The-Course” world” +1. A breath of fresh air from the W3C.
    (tags: w3c html)
  • “We spent a considerable amount of time researching a number of HTML rendering engines for use in Apollo”, “Apollo will be distributed […] with Apollo applications”, “Is Apollo a web browser? No”. Call it what you like, but it’s a browser. Blech.
    (tags: adobe browser)
  • “Working against the web — and treating it just as a back-end to pull data from to fuel proprietary RIA’s — is like marching your armies into a Russian winter: a decision everyone knows is ill-fated, but leaders keep doing over and over again” Nicely s
    (tags: web adobe redmonk)
Via David Wragg, a pointer to a great description of the roles and responsibilities of senior technical staff, written by a former colleague, Mark Kampe. Interestingly, that version was drafted 4 weeks after my tenure began (retroactively) as a Senior Staff Engineer at Sun. I’m surprised I hadn’t seen it until now. The snippet that David quotes is the one that struck a chord with me too;
When the “Emperor has no clothes”, it is the responsibility of the senior technical staff to stand up and say so. Sales people are driven by short term business. A marketing agency work with all manner of vague and ambiguous factors. Executives work with the information that other people have given them. Managers work with the directions they have been given. Engineers are the people who responsible for figuring out how this stuff is all going to work … and if it isn’t going to work they have an obligation to say so.

Just a quick followup on a previous piece, Ajaxian picked up a couple of declarative Javascript stories today;

Any move of the pendulum in this direction is a-ok by me. But to be clear, I am glad it’s a pendulum … meaning that there’ll always be a place for script (the bleeding edge), but we need to consolidate common practice periodically. This also gives us the opportunity to support the functionality natively in the browser.