Simon Willison's Weblog: hixie

Quoting Ian Hickson

2010-02-15T19:38:29+00:00

At this point all I could honestly tell you from the point of view of the editor of several of the HTML5 documents being held up is that the W3C have said they're won't publish without the objections being resolved, and that the objection is from Adobe. I can't even tell what I could do to resolve the objection. It seems to be entirely a process-based objection.

— Ian Hickson

Tags: adobe, canvas, hixie, html5, ian-hickson, process, w3c

Quoting Ian Hickson

2009-04-14T16:34:42+00:00

We did some studies and found that the attribute was almost never used, and most of the time, when it was used, it was a typo where someone meant to write rel="" but wrote rev="". To be precise, the most commonly used value was rev="made", which is equivalent to rel="author" and thus was not a convincing use case. The second most common value was rev="stylesheet", which is meaningless and obviously meant to be rel="stylesheet".

— Ian Hickson

Tags: hixie, html5, ian-hickson, markup, rev, revcanonical

James Bennett: Why HTML

2008-06-18T12:27:09+00:00

James Bennett: Why HTML

Finally, somewhere to point people when they ask why I avoid XHTML that’s a bit more up to date than Hixie’s rant from 2002.

Tags: hixie, html, ian-hickson, james-bennett, web-standards, xhtml

Quoting Ian Hickson

2008-01-23T10:07:40+00:00

If Web authors actually use this feature, and if IE doesn't keep losing market share, then eventually this will cause serious problems for IE's competitors — instead of just having to contend with reverse-engineering IE's quirks mode and making the specs compatible with IE's standards mode, the other browser vendors are going to have to reverse engineer every major IE browser version, and end up implementing these same bug modes themselves.

— Ian Hickson

Tags: browsers, hixie, ian-hickson, ie8, internet-explorer, web-standards, xuacompatible

Quoting Ian Hickson

2007-09-04T12:27:33+00:00

I've actually been using the latest version of JAWS recently, as part of my work on HTML5. From a usability point of view it is possibly the worst software I have ever used. I'm still horrified at how bad the accessibility situation is. All this time I've been hearing people worried about whether or not Web pages have longdesc attributes specified or whatnot, when in fact the biggest problems facing blind users are so much more fundamental as to make image-related issues seem almost trivial in comparison.

— Ian Hickson

Tags: accessibility, hixie, ian-hickson, jaws, screen-readers, usability

The CSS working group is irrelevant

2007-06-06T10:10:13+00:00

The CSS working group is irrelevant

“Someone really needs to do to CSS what the WHATWG has been doing to HTML”.

Tags: css, hixie, ian-hickson, stardands, w3c, whatwg

Pingback and Trackback

2002-09-30T13:16:54+00:00

Hixie has written a whitepaper comparing Pingback to Trackback, and answering pretty much every question that has been asked about Pingback in the past week.

Tags: hixie, pingback, trackback

Pingback coverage

2002-09-25T12:54:44+00:00

The Pingback 1.0 specification is getting some serious attention. Mark Pilgrim and Dave Winer have linked to it. Ben Trott (co-author of Moveable Type and creator of TrackBack, the system that inspired Pingback) has objected to Hixie's suggestion that Pingback is more transparent than TrackBack, claiming that TrackBack could be made just as transparent by the right blog tools. Ben blogged some further thoughts which lead to the following comment by Phil Ringnalda:

I've avoided saying anything about PingBack until now, since I like and respect the people who've developed it, but it is *not* TrackBack. When you send a TrackBack ping, you are saying "I responded to this, and I think that your readers would also like to read what I said." You are leaving a remote comment. When you send a PingBack ping, you are saying "I linked to you", nothing more. It's a "show referrers" script that filters out non-weblog referrers, a way to avoid having to click your own links to be sure you send a referrer. It is *not* TrackBack.

This is an interesting perspective, but I can't agree with it completely. Firstly, Pingbacks are meant to be sent by blogging tools. If you have blogged a link to someone else's entry you are linking to them for a purpose (which is almost certainly some form of comment on their entry) - this is why my Pingback implementation grabs an extract of their page from the text surrounding the link.

michel v has some further thoughts on the differences between Pingback and TrackBack.

Tags: ben-trott, dave-winer, hixie, mark-pilgrim, phil-ringnalda, pingback

Pingback 1.0

2002-09-24T14:04:50+00:00

Hixie has published the specification for Pingback 1.0. In general the specification is an excellent document, but I'm not entirely happy with the following statement:

HTML and XHTML documents MAY include a <link> element in addition to an HTTP header, although this is discouraged.

Some Pingback clients (in particular bookmarklets, although to my knowledge none have been written yet) are expected to be unable to parse headers - which is the primary reason for including the link element method of auto discovery. I would therefore suggest that anyone wishing to pingback-enable their HTML or XHTML documents should include a Pingback link element in addition to the HTTP header.

Tags: hixie, pingback, specification

Testing Pingback client

2002-09-11T01:17:33+00:00

This post exists partly to list the blogs I know of that support PingBack, but mostly to help test my new PingBack client implementation.

Hixie welcomes feedback on his text/html document.
Aquarion links to the above.
Stuart is having problems getting Mozilla gestures to work on Linux.
Mort has a b2 PingBack client.
Michel tries it out.

Fingers crossed... here goes!

Tags: aquarion, hixie, pingback, stuart-langridge

Pingback spec

2002-09-10T20:44:18+00:00

I just realised I haven't linked to the Pingback specification yet, so here it is. The spec has been carefully assembled by Ian Hickson and, although it is still a working draught, should be the first stop for anyone who wishes to create a Pingback implementation.

Tags: hixie, pingback, specification