The Past, the Present and the Future
It's hard to imagine an office computer without a spreadsheet. 25 years ago Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston, and Dan Fylstra created VisiCalc, and forever changed businesses' relation to computers. Check out PC World's interviews with the creators of VisiCalc. Good stuff, via Slashdot
The Present
A while ago I noticed that the Opera browser had trouble with an XHTML document I was working on. Opera decided to disregard CSS style sheet information encountering an empty span tag written like this: <span />. Writing <span></span> instead worked fine (and it means the same thing, <span /> is just shorter,) so I thought nothing of it and pretty much forgot about it.
Today there was a bit of discussion about CSS in relation to invalid HTML on W3C's www-style mailing list. I posted a message describing my earlier findings with Opera. Around fifteen minutes later I got a mail from a person at Opera Software asking me if I could provide an example of the bug, which I did.
I must say I'm impressed with Opera Software's actions. Following public fora and showing genuine interest in fixing even obscure bugs like this one is just right. I just recieved a mail from Opera Software, and it turns out the MIME type of my document was inappropriate. Changing it from text/html to application/xhtml+xml should apparently fix the problem. Have to check that out later...
The Future
Jeff Reifman's editorial in the Seattle Weekly: Microsoft's Sacred Cash Cow is a very worthwhile read. I don't agree with all of Jeff's views, but as an ex-employee of Microsoft he sure has more insight into the future of the Vole
than most of us. Much of it applies to all of the proprietary software business... Yet again, via Slashdot.