In the middle of writing a blog post about generating placeholder text (think lipsum..coming soon) I started wondering why there is no HTML-native way to load arbitrary content into an element. API’s and RESTful services are all over the web these days, but we continue to have to jump through hoops to access them. Either [...]

On the 19th March I’m going to be attending “State of the Browser“. It’s an event hosted by the London Web Standards group for “web creators” to get the low down on up-and-coming features of the 4 modern browsers.

Tickets for the event are £10 and are still available on Eventbrite. You can follow tweets about the event via the hashtag #lwsbrowser

Yesterday I finally got around to sitting down with the Canvas and Processing.js tutorial in last month’s issue of .Net Magazine (Issue 202, page 82). I’ve been wanting to play with Canvas since the HTML5 special of the ExplicitWeb podcast we did back in March (subtle plug) and this tutorial seemed like a good way of getting started.

Over the weekend I updated my blog to Wordpress 2.8. It’s been a relatively smooth process complete screw-up (see my comment at the bottom) although I lost my archive and recent post widgets as I had hacked them to be multiple instance. As they are now multiple instance anyway (hurrah) I was able to remove the extra code and get everything back working properly.

There has been much talk in the web design and development community of late regarding the demise of Internet Explorer 6. Most web developers and designers have a special place in their hearts for their hatred of IE6, but the strength of their loathing varies from the occasional moaning, to the t-shirt wearing, to those running campaigns of contempt (see IE Death March, Bring Down IE 6 or Stop Living in the Past).

Personally, I strongly disagree with those who say web folk should stop supporting IE6 now, that we should use special stylesheets to make sites look particularly ugly in IE6, or more worryingly that scripts should be used to prevent sites from working in IE6 at all. It is the job of a web developer to support all major browsers (of which IE6 is still one) and punishing unwitting users is not the solution. It is Microsoft’s job to cease support of this ancient and incapable technology not ours.