Mark Pilgrim

You're right, enomar; I've updated the post to reflect Google's recommended placement of the asynchronous snippet (and your other comment regarding the script type attribute only defaulting in HTML5). Perhaps instead of appending to document.body, it would be better to use document.documentElement.firstChild to use the head element instead (this is what is present on http://diveintomark.org).

Hofstadter-inspired writing, with a helping of Knuth served in the comments. Also good in Mark's blog: Ribbon Hero is the future ( http://diveintomark.org/archives/2010/03/03/microgames ) about learning/achievement games. That post included a link to Space Invaders Enterprise Edition ( http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2010/02/space-invaders-enterprise-edition/ ). The title by itself is worthy, but the post is about rule engines. That interesting point was not much discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1131502 .

Thank you, I think I found it: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/03/27/dive-into-history-2009-edi… So, HTML is really the best way to write a book? I mean, as a web developer I can write HTML, but I feel like thinking in markup will break my inspiration a bit. Also, in the comments someone mentioned Pandoc, which looks sweet http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

If you are honestly worried about a closed app store coming to OSX based on what Apple does with phones and devices that they clearly think of as large phones, you are paranoid. Then I'm paranoid. Like Mark Pilgrim (http://diveintomark.org/archives/2010/01/29/tinkerers-sunset), I don't believe Apple will be selling general purpose computers to consumers in 10 years. Remember Steve Jobs's plan for Apple: "milk the Mac for all it's worth and then move on the next big thing". The next big thing is mobile computing, and Apple has made it clear that they want absolute control.

I recommend reading this, incidentally by the same author: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/11/02/why-do-we-have-an-img-elem… It won't answer your question, but it will give you insight into the messy way the web evolves, which is about the closest thing to an answer you'll ever get.

It's 2009, and that article is actually arguing for DRM on all web-delivered fonts (those delivered via @font-face). Amazing. The comments there link to Mark Pilgrim's article expressing the alternative, and much more likely, future: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/04/21/fuck-the-foundries (The same article on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=572730)

Mark Pilgrim wrote an excellent rebuttal in 2004, showing why you are completely, entirely, 100% wrong on this: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/14/thought_experiment

One of the best descriptions of the piracy-has-the-better-experience phenomenon: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/06/26/piracy-lessons

Yes; I think Mark Pilgrim said it best: "I don’t understand this continuing obsession with buying things that you need to break before they do what you want." http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/10/04/if-wishes-were-iphones

Excellent? I much prefer Mark Pilgrim's translation: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2008/03/18/translation-from-ms-speak-…

Copying as the tapping point for revenue redistribution, and correct attribution and sourcing as a side-effect of that. Brilliant formulation. I'd note that the attribution requirement needs to be relaxed sometimes, too. It is a well known problem with the CC-BY family of licenses when applied to art. Mark Pilgrim said it well at http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/03/05/cc-dogs : Now imagine that every time you upgraded your kernel and rebooted your Linux box, you had to scroll through 741 lines of credits. 741 _additional_ lines of credits, cumulatively. Creative Commons is fine for one-generation remixing. But you quickly hit a wall, either from data degradation, or cumulatively onerous license requirements, or some other damn thing.

I got tired of waiting for News.YC to implement the comments links in a format usable by my newsreader. (Yes, I know they're in there, but I don't know of any reader that actually uses the comment tags.) So I made this one. When you hit it, it downloads the feed from News.YC and reformats it into an Atom feed (I like Atom; there's only one standard, not 9 like there are for RSS (see http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss )). The feed is cached for the next five minutes in order to be nice to pg's servers. Total code: approximately ten lines of Python, thanks to some excellent libraries like http://www.feedparser.org/ pg, if you have any technical adjustments you'd like me to make, like adjusting the time between hits to your rss feed, let me know.

"threw up in my mouth a little." "Gee, let me get this straight." "Bullshit." "Seriously?" I have to say that one of my regrets about growing up in programmer circles is seeing stuff like this held up as an acceptable example of how adults communicate with other adults. It took me a long time to realize that this style of communication is not necessary, is not effective, and reflects poorly on the speaker. C'mon, this guy appears to be in his 30s or 40s and has written books, so why does he write like he's an angsty teen? (I know Linus does it. I think it's lame when he does it too.) There's still room for humor and snark, here are three of my favorite blog postings/articles ever, all very snarky, but not embarrassingly juvenile: http://wanderingbarque.com/nonintersecting/2006/11/15/the-s-stands-for… http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/14/thought_experiment http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html

Here are my top ten, mostly web-related in some way because of my interests. These are the "loud alpha geeks" - the ones who broadcast their interests via regularly-updated blogs or curated links. (There are plenty of "quiet alpha geeks" who are just as "alpha" but not as easy to follow online.) Brad Fitzpatrick (http://brad.livejournal.com/) - creator of LiveJournal and Danga, now at Google working on PubSubHubbub, the Social Graph API, etc. John Resig (http://ejohn.org/, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jeresig) - jQuery, Mozilla, lots of other JavaScript and browser stuff. Paul Bucheit (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=paul) - creator of GMail and FriendFeed, now at Facebook. Ryan Tomayko (http://tomayko.com) - Ruby, Sinatra, now working at GitHub, has an excellent linkblog. Simon Willison (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonw) - Django, Python, also has an excellent linkblog. Leslie Orchard (http://decafbad.com/) - Previously at Delicious/Yahoo, wrote books on JavaScript, Dojo, RSS, now at Mozilla. Follow his bookmarks at: http://delicious.com/deusx Mark Pilgrim (http://diveintomark.org/) - Atom, HTML5, Linux, Python, Greasemonkey, formerly at IBM, now at Google. Bookmarks at: http://delicious.com/wearehugh John Gruber (http://daringfireball.net/) - Apple news and punditry, linkblog. Sam Ruby (http://intertwingly.net/blog/) - Atom, Python, Ruby, Rails, XML, HTML5, SVG. Read what he reads at: http://planet.intertwingly.net/ Kevin Kelly…

I care a lot about having the source of programs available (freedoms 0 and 1), but there's one thing that's always concerned me. Everyone says that "you can still charge for free software, as long as the source is GPLed", and hence the model is a drop-in replacement for the standard software-vendor model. As long as you trust the goodwill of people, you believe that those who want to use your work will pay full price for it. But when you give everyone the right to redistribute, for any cost they choose, I feel that might jeopardize potential sales. For example, a friend of mine wrote an image processing application with a very niche and important application. He wanted to sell it for $200 a copy, lower than what most commercial tools for the same functionality cost. He also wanted to release it as open source/free software. However, if anyone bought a copy of his software, that person could legally redistribute for free or for a very low cost, say $10. If this person's publicity is better, he/she'll get more sales for a tool he didn't even write. And someone who isn't endowed with a large enough budget would love to get the software from a legally clean channel. And yes, it even results in atrocities like this - http://cgi.ebay.com/Audacity-1-2-6-audio-editor-computer-software_W0QQ… . Mark Pilgrim's book got re-distributed on the Kindle for a nonzero charge (…

Obviously this is a matter of taste (and I'm starting to pile up down votes, so I may very well be in the minority). I can't give you a date, but consider for example the ongoing discussion in the Perl community about the look of PerlMonks, the new Perl blogs site and the updates to the online Perldoc site and the main Perl site. Again, I want to stress that I'm not talking about decorative fonts or elaborate colorschemes. A webpage with no margins and very tight line-spacing is not in my mind anywhere near perfectly readable. As far as the hackers thing goes, I've rarely seen a hacker without a preference for a carefully-crafted PS1 (colors and all) or a good Vim/Emacs/TextMate theme. So it's not the case that hackers don't care at all about appearance in all circumstances. Edit: Here's a good comparison site: http://diveintomark.org/ The layout is dead simple, but the margins, font choice and line spacing make a huge difference.

The full stack isn't under your control on Heroku. Oh, so you have the ability, time and motivation to rewrite your firmware, operating system, network stack, database and web server and implement it on a CPU you designed yourself? No? Then the full stack isn't under your control either. Get over it. That's a different path entirely You know what? It's not a different path at all. The convenience of Heroku is no different in principle to using closed source hardware. Look, I'm a freedom-zero[1] type of person. I run Ubuntu - not OSX - and I admin my own servers. BUT the chains of convenience of apt-get are much closer to the chains of convenience of something like Heroku than many would like to admit. [1] http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/14/freedom-0

Score one for this 2007 rant by Mark Pilgrim: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/05/02/silly-season Excerpt: "I used to have the strength to argue against such foolishness. Nowadays I’m reduced to nothing more than Grey’s-Anatomy-esque catchphrases. Seriously? Seriously? Do I really have to explain why this is a bad idea? Again? To a bunch of technological virgins who haven’t been fucked yet?"

Related: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/10/19/the-point

Which RSS 0.91 did you fork? Netscape RSS 0.91 or Userland RSS 0.91? This means, I assume, that there are now ten incompatible versions of RSS, not just nine: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss Who uses RSS for anything any more? Why wouldn't you just use Atom?

I'm just gonna leave this right here... http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/11/11/installing-mysql-on-ubuntu

I agree with Mark Pilgrim: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/01/21/wrongroom Here's the basic problem: you're writing a text editor. Stop doing that. It's 2007. Saying to yourself "I'm gonna build my own text editor" is as silly as saying "I'm gonna build my own build system" or "I'm gonna build my own amusement park."

Damn, before clicking through I actually thought it was a translator translating between "Microsoft" and English. http://diveintomark.org/archives/2011/04/15/nativity-scene

Because the iPad doesn't have a real fucking keyboard[1], or a port to add one. [1] - http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/05/30/bye-apple

There are no exceptions to Postel's Law : http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/08/postels-law

> "In the long run, the utility of all non-Free software approaches zero. All non-Free software is a dead end." -- Mark Pilgrim, "Freedom 0", http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/14/freedom-0

Here's the story about the name: I wrote http://diveintomark.org/archives/2010/01/29/tinkerers-sunset earlier this year, decrying the lack of "tinkerability" of the iPad and similar closed devices. "There won't ever be a MacsBug for the iPad. There won't be a ResEdit, or a Copy ][+ sector editor, or an iPad Peeks & Pokes Chart." One of the common refrains in the comments was that the iPad includes top-of-the-line support for a perfectly open, tinkerable platform: the web. Thus, the "HTML5 Peeks, Pokes and Pointers" chart was born. Also, I just purchased a real live physical original Beagle Bros "Peeks, Pokes and Pointers" chart to hang up in my mancave^Woffice. Next to my Apple //es. Plural. So there's that.

If you need a reason why DF shouldn't have comments (other than Gruber's preference), take a look at the comments in this post on Dive Into Mark back in 2006: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/02/when-the-bough-breaks There is a lot of trash in there as a result of a link from a longer piece on DF. EDIT: language clarification.

That, and I thought link rel="next" already existed… and had a more semantic meaning than pre-fetching. It (and its brother, rel="prev") are meant to inform the browser (which then hopefully informs the user, but that never took off) of what the next or previous page is (in contexts where that makes sense). Maybe it's the next page of an article (evil!), or the next blog post in line. Whatever. Anyway, this has been around for a while, even mentioned in this post from 2008: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2008/06/21/minimalism So it's more accurate to say that Firefox likes to prefetch pages, and will use <link rel="next"> tags to guide it. If you're going to be pre-fetching pages anyway, that seems a reasonable enough way to decide what to fetch, but I agree that I'd prefer pre-fetching to be off.

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/04/21/fuck-the-foundries They could start crawling the web today for PDFs that embed fonts infringingly, but they aren't very sophisticated, and even they aren't that stupid. The situation on the ground isn't going to change from the way its been for the last 25 years -- normal people are going to continue to use whatever fonts, obtained however, and distributed wherever, to whomever, whenever. %90 of font choices made made will continue to be crap.