Dec 05

Opinion: “Worse is Better”

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“The Rise of Worse is Better”[1] is an excerpt from a presentation by Richard P. Gabriel.[2] The entire presentation is about the programming language Lisp.[3] However, a smaller part contains an important observation with broader applications.

Today, the following questions are subject to conversation: why has Google+ plateaued and Facebook continued to rise? Why don’t Microsoft’s search initiatives win big against Google? How can PHP be both infamous and ubiquitous? How did WordPress become a legitimate CMS?

These are complex questions with many different angles. Passionate arguments have been formed for every side. Economics, sociology, and evolution often lend their ideas to the answers. And for all of this discussion, the voices of computer scientists are less often heard.[4]

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Apr 27

Why HTML5? Where Did It Come From?

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There is a W3C presentation that helps frame the historical reasons for HTML5. The slides are available in plain text [1] and Technicolor.[2] At the risk of confusing the facts,* I’ll try to explain why this is important and what is important about it.

For over a decade, XHTML1/1.1, a successor to HTML4, has been the most current version of HTML. XHTML1/1.1 leveraged the strengths of XML to create well-formed Web pages. These pages could be validated against a schema to test for compliance to a standard. Perhaps most importantly, it helped fix the issue of cross-browser incompatibility.

XHTML2 was going to be the successor to XHTML1/1.1; as the name suggests. However, this ended up not being the case. HTML5 is. Here’s why: XHTML2 was actually a different language; a new abstract approach to HTML. In at least the immediate future, making Web pages would’ve been made more difficult. It was a departure from the trajectory of many HTML traditions:

  • IMG elements were being phased out in favor of OBJECT elements.[3]
  • The anchors, A elments, were being phased out because, “all elements may now play the role of a hyperlink.“ [4]

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Sep 25

Search Quality Observation No. 1 (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Google)

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Good computer security strikes a balance between security and usability. For example, a fifty character password might be more secure than one with less characters, but it would also be an impediment to usability. Not having a password could be easy, but it would also be unsecure. Rather than either extreme, a compromise should be made between what is secure and what is practical.

In internet search there is a similar dynamic. It involves usability and usefulness. There is an impetus for usability but there is also a question, will this come at the expense of usefulness? This is an example of where it may: Continue Reading

Feb 09

What is a Twitter, Anyway?

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If you’re a technical neophyte, new to social media, new to the internet as a whole, or a few generations behind in consumer electronics, like myself, then you may have recently found yourself asking some or all of the following questions:

  • Who said that?
  • What are those symbols?
  • How does Twitter work, anyway?
  • And finally, what’s a retweet anyhow?

I’ll attempt to answer some of these questions for you now but in order to find out, we’ll have to hit the streets. But not just any streets, the information superhighway.

Information Superhighway

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Apr 14

PHP Session HTTP Header Optimization

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Let’s make the Web faster. I perceived something that may be of interest in regards to PHP, sessions, and SEO. On at least one installation, the default HTTP headers sent by the function session_start( ) were set to disable cache. In some cases, I think these headers may not be “good for Googlebot.”

As you may know, Google made an algorithm update that takes into account many aspects of site performance, often called Page Speed. Optimizing HTTP headers is one of the checkpoints and enabling browser caching via HTTP headers is a sub-point. If Googlebot respects site performance enhancing HTTP headers then they’ll probably also acknowledge wacky ones like the PHP session_start( ) default HTTP headers that say, “do not store a copy of this page for cache; always check with the server to see if you have the most recent copy of a page immediately before and after you request a page because this content expired back in 1981 and today is April 13, 2010.”

The perceived solution for the installation was to start sessions only on pages that needed them- instead of everywhere. Now, revisiting the topic I’ve also learned that using the session_cache_limiter( ) function to control what headers are sent may also work. Continue Reading

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