Jack Baty - the archives

Years of jackbaty.com - archived

Web Standards Zealotry

The Man in Blue, responding to a long thread triggered by D. Keith Robinson, writes about the overzealous way some web developers cling to a validate-or-die mentality.

“I also don’t freak out when I find that someone else’s site doesn’t validate because they accidentally posted a URL on their site which has an unencoded ampersand in it. Why? Because I don’t know why they have that ampersand there. It might be because in order to change that ampersand they have to reconfigure their entire CMS, which would entail a change to their quality system, requiring the re-training of over 200 staff, which would affect their inventory output for the month of October, causing them to lose their biggest client and sending the company into financial collapse. And what for? An ampersand that has no effect whatsoever.”

It’s good to keep one’s head about these things.

Say “no” by Default

When dealing with software development, the urge to add every feature asked for is almost impossible to resist…

“Can it do such-and-such?”

“Sure, I’ll add that this week”

“Cool, thanks!”

Bad idea. With that attitude comes bloat, incoherent interfaces and other nasties.

Steve Jobs, speaking about innovation in a recent interview said “…but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.”

I like that.

Productivity and Email

I was going to write a long rant about the negative impact that email has on productivity, but this post pretty much nails it.

What this means is that if you need something by the end of today, a phone call would probably be better. I’ve stopped checking my email every 30 seconds. You should too.

Laszlo vs Flex vs ???

Laszlo is cool. I’ve been playing with it a bit and for me, the idea of using my text editor of choice to develop Flash apps, ehem, Rich Internet Applications™ is pretty compelling. The main competitor in this space seems to be Macromedia’s Flex. Both look like decent products. I see that Macromedia released a free non-commercial licens for Flex, perhaps in response to the recent decision by Laszlo to open-source their product and make it free.

The consensus seems to be that for enterprise-level deployment, Flex is currently the way to go, both from a workflow perspective as well as pricing models. Currently Flex costs $12,000 for a 2 CPU system. That’s too much for many projects to justify. The free non-commercial license may help build mindshare, but is meaningless to anyone but those just tinkering with no intention to deploy commercially.

For the moment, I’ll be focusing my effort on Laszlo. I have a hunch that the open source community may just latch on to it and run. When that happens, we’ll start to see rapid improvements and integration with other open source products. Also, the Laszlo server is able to compile to client-side environments other than Flash. Perhaps SVG or some sort of XUL connection will work out better.

Once a product like Laszlo gets under the skin of the open source community it can be next to impossible for the proprietary competitors to keep up.

Either way, it will be fun to watch.

Audioblogging

I just want to go on record saying (er, writing) that audioblogging is stupid. Reading most blogs can be painful enough without actually having to hear them. Not only that, but there are no links in an audioblog entry. Oh, and I can’t skim them either. I’ll stick with tiny, impossible to read medium-grey on light grey text, thanks.

Laszlo Open Sourced

Laszlo has always looked like a good idea, but I wasn’t interested in lockin to yet another vendor by buying into an expensive, proprietary system. Apparently this was a common feeling. In response, and wisely, Laszlo Systems has released what looks like the entire platform under the CPL open source license. This means it’s free (as in beer and speech). Somehow, I’ll bet that turns out to be a very important detail.