February 2, 2010

Web 2.0 MacGyver

MacGyver
Image via Wikipedia

TV shows like MacGyver and Junk Yard Wars, as well as real world survival and minimalist training [even camping] tell us that it’s cool to take bits of whatever is lying around, and jury-rig it into something useful, and potentially vital to our survival.  Today as I was thinking about the plethora of hacks we need to do something insanely simple…like…embed a flash video and have it work properly in all browsers. This made me realize, anyone who does web development or design is a fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants, certified, Web 2.0 MacGyver.

We use CSS hacks to get things to look right in IE, load extra images or add a wack of useless tags to get rounded corners to work.  And, don’t think HTML5 is going to save our butt, it won’t.  We’ll need to make videos in 2 different formats and nest three different video and embed tags and hacks for it to work (seriously).  Worse, one of those formats we’ll need to license and pay for (or, as is the online way, hope we don’t get caught for not).

So, developers, hold your heads high; we’re holding the world together with duct tape and paperclips, and we make it look easy.

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November 23, 2005

RSS extensions, not really simple

Anyone that’s heard the hype (C|Net, eWeek, BetaNews), or read the sepc on Microsoft’s “Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS and OPML”, aka. SSE, will realize that it also adds lots of complexity to RSS.The real question is, why RSS? Microsoft’s “extension” is more like a whole new XML beast than RSS.

Why? Publicity. RSS is fairly well known, so why say something like XML-SSE, when you can say “extended RSS”, or fib and call it just “RSS”? The fact is, THIS ISN’T RSS, it might somehow be based on it, but it’s not Really Simple Syndication in any way.

This is just marketing hype by Microsoft, and I hope people won’t get sucked into saying “Microsoft is supporting RSS standards now”…JScript…need I say more?