In the spirit of The Tao of Mac, here are some links that have caught my attention recently. None of them, thankfully, have anything to do with politics.
- PHP5 introduces interfaces, iterators, and does something incestuous with its object and array syntax. I’m excited about this. Nevertheless, I get the feeling that this will significantly increase the learning curve for PHP significantly. I can’t say I like that prospect, as one aspect of what made the language so attractive was its utter ease to just pick up and use. While it’s still under debate whether or not this makes the language easier or harder for beginners, it seems that perhaps this evolution is just the nature of the beast.
- Sjoerd Visscher has some intriguing thoughts for the future of the Web. Removing semantics from markup in the same way as removing presentation from it using CSS is interesting, but frightful. Am I going to have to learn another language just to define the semantic meaning of the content I write? I’m not so sure we need this sort of abstraction. Then again, the possible convergence of different markup formats making use of XML and its ability to be extended (which is the whole point of XML anyway) does deserve some thought. I’m glad this is still just a thought though, and that says something about my unwillingness to compartmentalize my data too much.
- Doug Bowman of StopDesign has implemented multiple stylesheets for his site. He beat me to it but I still applaud his work. His is truly world-class design. (Although I’m not quite sure why he doesn’t use cruft-free URLs when they’re so easy to get in MovableType. Of course, they’re even easier with WordPress.)
- Ian Hickson teaches us important life lessons. I love Isaac Asimov, too.
- In a related story, there are more widespread problems with Microsoft Windows XP SP 2. As it turns out, my troubles with the install were negligible compared to some. I officially count my blessings.
- And finally, this Yahoo! News story about making better laptop batteries made me smile. Always a good note to end on.
