It does, however, support parts of the Shadow DOM. That means we can style this element, and give our users a visible control.

The image below shows a rather garish green-and-orange version of the range user interface widget. This is after adding some styling, as it appears in the stock Android browser.

And below is the CSS that gives us the above image.

input[type='range']{
    background: #0c0;
    height:10px;
}

input[type='range']::-webkit-slider-thumb{
    background:#f60;
    height:30px;
    width:30px;
    border-radius: 30px;
}

To date, this does not affect Chrome or Safari for the Desktop. ::-webkit-slider-thumb does partially affect iOS Safari. I’ve included an image of what it looks like below (not to scale). Notice that the thumb color changes, but the slider background does not.

This may also affect other browsers that use Webkit such as the Web Browser for S60 Nokia and Samsung’s Dolfin. I haven’t tested it yet, but if you have, please let us know in the comments.

Also keep in mind that this element has a pretty poor user interaction in Android browser. It’s not very responsive, and doesn’t operate all that intuitively. This is true of most mobile browsers, but in my opinion (and based on limited experience), Android is worst of all.

Much of what we see is that developers rely on a specific browser (e.g., Webkit) and they forget about other engines on various devices, including Opera, Firefox, and others. The problem seems most persistent on mobile, perhaps because of Webkit’s market share. Things break and developers don’t understand why; or they don’t notice the problem, of if they do they do browser sniffing to avoid the problem.

That’s Andreas Bovens of Opera from Interview: Opera on the Web of Devices. Also featured in the interview is Divya Manian, also of Opera.

WebKit’s dominance in the U.S. mobile space is pretty strong. That doesn’t mean, however, that it will stay this way forever. And it doesn’t mean that an alternative browser won’t ever reach a significant market share.

We’ve already seen that happen on desktop. You would think we’ve learned the lessons. And yet the amount of user-agent sniffing, and experimental mono-browser CSS we see in production is pretty mind-blowing. And I mean “mind-blowing” as in, Opera has a person dedicated to mobile developer education and outreach in the U.S. market to combat the problem (me).

I’m not sure how to solve the problem, except to ask that (mobile) developers show some restraint when using the new shiny in production. The vendor-prefix means that the property is in flux, and the syntax of functionality may change radically once it’s finalized and implemented.

Don’t believe me? Look at the history of gradients. Its syntax as introduced changed a few years later. And if the current draft of the specification is any indication, it may change again. Also see: “flexbox.” It’s specification changed completely and then changed mostly back to what it was just in the last 12 months.

I know we all want to be cutting edge and ahead of the curve. But my fear is that we’re creating a climate much like the one that existed in the IE6 heyday.

Back then, developers built Internet Explorer-only sites which broke in Netscape. User perception was “Netscape doesn’t work” or “IE is just better.” So they switched. IE6′s market share was something on the order of 85% at one point. And then it stagnated for five full years until Internet Explorer 7 was released.

Developers paid for this with our frustration costs. Users paid for it time by waiting for extra, IE6 friendly code to download, and in having less awesome web experiences. And Microsoft paid because Firefox ate a big chunk of its market share lunch.

Let’s learn the lessons this time, and be forward-thinking with our mobile development as well.

The Hispanic population grew in almost every corner of the United States over the past decade, roughly equally in predominantly black and predominantly white neighborhoods. The typical African-American resides in a neighborhood that is 14 percent Hispanic, only slightly higher than the figure for the population as a whole. … Instead, the dominant trend in predominantly black neighborhoods nationwide has been population loss. Particularly in the formerly hyper-segregated cities of the Northeast and Midwest, ghetto neighborhoods have witnessed profound population declines, as former residents decamp for the suburbs or for the rapidly growing cities of the Sun Belt—where segregation is generally very low.

So desegregation is not caused by whites and Latinos moving into predominantly black neighborhoods. It’s due to black folks having access to jobs and credit and moving to predominantly non-black neighborhoods.

At least that’s my understanding of the Manhattan Institute’s report THE END OF THE SEGREGATED CENTURY: Racial Separation in America’s Neighborhoods, 1890-2010. [Via Ebony Magazine, which has been unexpectedly awesome lately.

I focus as a director on the moment in front of me. I focus on this scene and making it the best it can be. I’m working with a community of artists—a cinematographer, art director, the editor, lighting crew and the actors. So in that moment, nothing else matters except let’s make this scene the best scene possible. You focus on the scene in front of you and don’t worry about the end or what people are going to say or think because you’ll never escape the “gaze,“ and you’ll never get to your true self.

That’s Dee Rees, director of the very excellent coming-of-age / coming-out movie, Pariah, in an interview with Ebony magazine.

It’s true of movie-making and true of life.

We don’t know how to build a general-purpose computer that is capable of running any program except for some program that we don’t like, is prohibited by law, or which loses us money. The closest approximation that we have to this is a computer with spyware: a computer on which remote parties set policies without the computer user’s knowledge, or over the objection of the computer’s owner. Digital rights management always converges on malware.

In an effort to stamp out piracy, we are stamping out legitimate fair-use rights, and accepting invasions of privacy by corporations in a way that also happens to dovetail nicely with the intelligence gathering goals of governments everywhere.

I don’t mean to sound too much like a conspiracy theory-loving whack job here. But the fact is that the same software that enables corporations to manage their intellectual property or make a profit on targeted advertising also makes it easier to spy on citizens. I’ll refer you to Evgeny Morozov’s enlightening, yet sobering book on this very subject, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (of which I have read about half thus far).

[h/t: Ben Ramsey]

Last fall, media critic and writer Douglas Rushkoff asked Are jobs obsolete?. I think he’s on to something.

We now have more human workers than jobs. Much of that is due to off-shoring and globalization. American workers are being replaced by non-American workers and at lower wages.

However, at least as much of this shift is due to dying industries and massive automation. The rise of e-mail means we have less postal mail. The rise of self-checkout and self-serve gadget vending machines means we need fewer cashiers and sales people. Manufacturing in China is cheaper right now but is any country’s manufacturing base really safe from robots?

Machine workers can replace people workers. So what does that mean for people?

I have more questions than answers.

Modifying labor laws to shorten the work week means that companies would have to hire two people to do the work that one person now does in 40 hours. Should we each give up some of our work hours so that others might earn?

While a shorter mandated work week would mean more people would have jobs, it could also mean smaller paychecks for everyone. But what if we also increased minimum wage to $15 or $20 per hour?

If we automate industry, and need fewer people to work, should corporations financially support workers they’ve displaced?

“If you don’t work, you don’t eat,” passes for political discourse in some corners of the United States. But if there is no work to be had, should people be homeless and starving? What responsibility do we collectively have to each other as citizens and people? And I haven’t even touched on healthcare and how it’s structured in the U.S.

Do we need to make fewer people? Probably so, if we lack the political will and moral/ethical center to ensure that the rise of machines does not mean the decline of people. But if we have fewer children as a country, and as a world, what economic and physical infrastructure changes do we need, and can we agree to make them?

Like I said: more questions than answers.

What do you think?

Also see: Are the American people obsolete?, a July, 2010 piece from Salon.com.

HTML5 introduces several additional types for the input element. One goal of these additional types is to offload error checking from the JavaScript layer to the browser. The HTML5 specification includes rules and patterns for data validation, including for URLs with the url attribute value.

According to the HTML5 specification, a URL is valid when it is not an empty string, and is a valid absolute URL. A complete definition of what constitutes a valid URL can be found in RFC 3986 and RFC 3987. The short version is that a valid URL must, at minimum, consist of a scheme (https://, ftp://, gopher://) and a host name. If it does not, validation should fail, and the browser should throw an error.

Now most recent browsers* take the following steps when it encounters an invalid URL such as foo.com or example:80.

1. Fire an invalid event on the element in question.
2. Display an error message to the user.
3. Prevent form submission.

To prevent careless input errors and guarantee validation, Opera will automatically prepend http:// to the value of a URL input field if it is missing when the field loses focus (and if no pattern attribute has been added). This means that the invalid event usually will not be fired.

Of course, “most recent browsers” does not mean “all.” To date, Safari will fire the invalid event, but it will do so silently. No error message will be shown to the user. Form submission will succeed. The value submitted will be the same as what was entered by the user. Android’s WebKit behaves much the same way.

Safari also does something else differently on mobile devices: it shows a keyboard layout that is optimized for typing URLs, complete with a .com virtual button.

Back to my friend’s use case: he wanted the benefit of mobile Safari’s UI sugar, so he was using <input type="url">. He was unconcerned with whether the URL was valid because he was using server-side validation. His primary goal was ease of data entry for domain names on iOS devices.

However: that isn’t really the purpose of <input type="url">. Validation is, and a domain name by itself is not a valid URL.

But since the ship has sailed, the horse has left the barn, and the chickens have flown the coop, let’s talk about how to prevent Opera from automatically prepending http:// to the value of a URL input field.

To do this, we need to do two things:

• Add a novalidate attribute to the form element.
• Add a null pattern attribute to the field element.

For example:

<form action="../form.php" method="post" novalidate>
    <input type="url" name="uri" id="uri" value="" pattern="">
    <button type="submit">submit</button>
</form>

The novalidate attribute turns off client-side validation for the entire form. The pattern attribute override’s Opera’s native validation checking.

See for yourself. This will still trigger the URL-entry keyboard layout in iOS browsers, while killing Opera’s prepending.

If you use this technique, keep in mind that server-side validation is even more important. Because we are not providing any constraints on this data, we have increased our chances of getting invalid or malicious data. You should be validating anyway, however, since it is not 100% possible to guarantee that the data reaching our form script has actually come from our form.

*And by “recent browsers,” I mean the latest versions of Opera, Chrome, Firefox, and the forthcoming Internet Explorer 10, but not IE9.

Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.

From What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success.

I was raised Christian, I suppose. But we didn’t do things like go to church or read the Bible. There was that one summer where my mother let my great-aunt take me to Vacation Bible School at her (Lutheran) church. I don’t remember much about it other than thinking some vague, “that ain’t what they said on 3-2-1 Contact,” kinds of thoughts.

I’ve told this story before, but according to my mother, around age 5 or 6, I said, “Mommy, I don’t believe in God” or some such. This was in the aftermath of an earthquake, maybe a bombing or something somewhere in the world. She was a little bit horrified, but she couldn’t really argue with my logic: God makes bad things only happen to “bad” people, so explain to me how this school full of innocent kids my age could die like that. I’m sayin’; I watched a lot of PBS.

I’m not sure at what point Christmas started to suck, but I’d guess it was some time between junior high school and high school. My paternal grandparents moved back to their native South Carolina. I experienced my first major depressive episode. I had outgrown toys, so my mother switched to gifts of clothing and jewelry.

I went through six solid years of my Christmas lists looking like this:

• Leather jacket
• Knicks tickets
• Islanders tickets
• Mets tickets
• Big Daddy Kane tape
• B52s tape
• Nailpolish
• A Tribe Called Quest tape
• A camcorder
• An easel and some paints
• A popcorn machine
• A Walkman
• An SLR camera

My mother, on the other hand (she did the Christmas shopping, after all), bought me things like this:

• Black and white houndstooth checked pants
• An argyle sweater vest
• A white shirt with a neck bow
• A gold chain (which I broke)
• Gold earrings (lost)
• Black slacks
• Plaid pants
• Golden yellow turtleneck

The SANTAISAWESOME!!1ONE!! feeling of my childhood had given way to Thanks?. My ungratefulness hurt my mother’s feelings as well. Now this could have been avoided if she had just bought me that leather jacket or the Big Daddy Kane tape, but the damage was done. Disappointment had become the new ritual.

That, I think, is when I started to feel a deep sense of apathy about Christmas. My expectations for it were never met. And I don’t think fun times with family, a good meal, one kick-ass present that I actually wanted, and some hot cocoa or cookie baking was too much to ask. After a while, I just gave up hope.

Now as an adult, I am more comfortable living a secular life and saying, “I am an atheist.” I even happily volunteered to work Christmas Day one year. Between relationships, I didn’t celebrate it at all. I spent it by myself watching whatever non-Christmas-themed entertainment was available.

It wasn’t sad either. I was relieved. It feels particularly odd to celebrate a Christian holiday, even if it’s in a way that isn’t all that Christian. I’m grateful for the downtime, but in terms of significance, Christmas is now like Arbor Day to me, but colder.

This is not, however, the case for just about everyone else I know.

Ever been to dinner with an overbearing grandmother (or uncle, or cousin in my case) who — despite your protests about being full — puts another helping on your plate? If you eat it, you feel resentful for capitulating. If you don’t, grandma is insulted, and you feel a like a jerk.

That’s my Christmas in a nutshell.

Remember the fake boarding pass that was in Schneier’s hand? Actually, it was mine. I had flown to meet Schneier at Reagan National Airport because I wanted to view the security there through his eyes. He landed on a Delta flight in the next terminal over. To reach him, I would have to pass through security. The day before, I had downloaded an image of a boarding pass from the Delta Web site, copied and pasted the letters with Photoshop, and printed the results with a laser printer. I am not a photo-doctoring expert, so the work took me nearly an hour. The T.S.A. agent waved me through without a word. A few minutes later, Schneier deplaned, compact and lithe, in a purple shirt and with a floppy cap drooping over a graying ponytail.

That’s from Vanity Fair‘s wonderful article Smoke Screening.