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.

Still, the twelfth prompt is a good one:

Take today to talk about 12 things you would like to accomplish in 2012. These 12 things can be 12 resolutions, 12 changes in your life, 12 wines you’d like to drink, 12 cities you’d like to visit, or 12 monthly goals. The decision is yours. Good luck and have fun!

So here’s my list of 12 Things I Want to Accomplish in 2012.

1. Get up to speed on the Web Sockets API.
2. Get my feet wet with Node.js.
3. Take a class in kitchen knife work.
4. Go on an overnight, possibly a weekend-long meditation retreat.
5. Set foot on the continents of Australia or South America.
6. Host at least one cocktail party at Casa de Brown-Toney, complete with a bartender to handle the minibar situation. I’m swapping the cocktail party idea for “Improve my home office situation.”
7. Publish two articles in web development magazines.
8. Buy a bicycle. Maybe two.
9. Take drawing classes Done. MinneWebCon. (Please make it happen selection committee!)
10. Make my annual May pilgrimage to New Orleans to celebrate Derrick‘s grad school graduation, and volunteer with the St. Bernard Project.
11. End 2012 debt-free.

So only one-third of the way in, and I’m already behind on my #resound11 posts. Since I’m too lazy to write four separate posts, and you’re probably not interested enough to read them, I present you with this one catch-up post.

December 9: My Best Photos

I couldn’t choose. These two are my favorite, both for their quality and for their meaning. They’re from two of the most significant events of my year: our wedding and our honeymoon.

December 8: My Catch Phrase

I’m so amused. Even when I was bemused or mildly tickled. Overused it. I need a new catch phrase for 2012. I am tired of that one.

December 7: Achievement Unlocked

I made seven resolutions for 2011 — set seven goals. I achieved one: become a better home cook. Cooked a bomb mushroom farro risotto two weeks ago. Learned to sear ahi tuna and sea scallops (with a warm corn-leek salad and cheese grits on the side). My short-rib game is way strong. Pork tenderloin game proper!

That’s not the only thing I’ve achieved of course. The amount of technical knowledge I’ve gained in the last twelve months is mind blowing. But I didn’t set out to do that. It’s a by-product of the job.

December 6: Thelma & Louise

Who is the Thelma to my Louise? My husband. Yeah, I know. That’s such an obvious answer. It’s such a cheesy, hokey, schmaltzy, blindingly obvious answer that I am kind of ashamed of myself. But this trip to Indonesia sealed it. Jason rolled with everything. Food. Strangers. New family. Uncomfortable clothing. Heat and humidity. Crazy dogs. Dead snakes. Mosquitoes. Our forward progress on a sidewalk being thwarted by cows crossing the street. Everything. He is my road dog.

If your life was a television show, what would its theme song be? What music would be cued at the start of the show or when you entered a scene?

For this year, at least, I’d say: “Let’s Go Get ‘Em.”

The version above is actually two songs, performed by the TBC Brass Band. They can be found on the corner of Bourbon and Canal Streets in New Orleans, most often on Sundays.

I chose this song for a few reasons.

• It’s a New Orleans classic, and y’all know how I feel about New Orleans.
• It makes me want to dance my face off in the middle of the street — any street.
• The title, “Let’s Go Get ‘Em,” is, I think, how I’ve approached this year, though not consciously so.

The amount of sheer change that has occurred in my life this last year is pretty astounding. I did so much, that I didn’t even have a chance to stop and freak out over most of it. I just had to STFU and do it.

Y’know, I had to get ‘em. <misterjt>Let’s go!</misterjt>

My virtue: embracing imperfection.

My job with Opera has been so overwhelming that I’ve considered quitting several times. I feel out of my league most days. I can’t say that I’m comfortable with that feeling. But I have reached a point — I think — where I am comfortable with the fact that I don’t know it all.

That’s a pretty big shift for me.

Did you slip back into any old habits that you wish you hadn’t? Did you gain any new habits that you wish you would have walked away from? Did you discover the evils of Nutella? ‘Fess up … we won’t tell.

“Slip back” would be accurate if I had successfully broken any of my bad habits this year. Looking back at my 2011 resolutions, I can safely say that I failed at half (3 and 7 were my successes and I sort of achieved 4).

I am most bothered by resolution #1.

Losing weight is hard, yo. It’s hard to develop an exercise routine, particularly when you travel as much as I’ve done this year. It’s hard to break three decades of eating too much, particularly when you actually like food and eating. It’s doubly hard when one of the side effects of your <tmi>baby prevention system</tmi> is weight gain.

Still, I can admit that I haven’t yet broken the mental pattern that keeps on the sofa instead of at the gym. Nor have I fully broken the portion-control pattern.

I can do better on both fronts.

One Word: What is one word to describe your 2011? Why does that word sum up your year?

Love.

This could easily have been change. After all, I started the year in a new city. I started a new job. I became a ‘we.’ And then we moved in to a house.

Hectic and airport would also be accurate. The only months that didn’t find me on a plane were June — when we moved from Jason’s apartment into a house — and December. But there are 29 days left in this month. That could still change.

My 2011 went a bit like this: start new job. Two weeks later, take a ten-day trip to Oslo, Norway for orientation. Fly to New York City for my bridal shower three weeks after that. Fly to Austin for SXSW one week after that. Fly to San Francisco/San Mateo three weeks after that. Fly to New Orleans for Wedding Week in mid-May. I found out that my dad has cancer one week after that (prognosis is good!). We moved house in mid-June. I turned 35 two weeks later. I spoke at OpenWebCamp in Palo Alto ten days after that. Then my best friend visits from New York during the first week of August. We visit my parents in North Carolina two weeks later. I make a second trip to Oslo one week after that. Triathlete friend visits two weeks later for the L.A. Triathlon. I make a trip to Austin, Texas the first weekend of October for HTML5.tx. At the beginning of November, I make a trip to SF for New Game Conference. A week after that, we’re off to Jakarta, Indonesia for my cousin’s wedding and then we enjoyed a honeymoon in Bali, Indonesia.

Overwhelming was also a candidate.

But I am going to go with love. I felt loved this year. For the first time in a long time, I have friends who regularly call or email and make plans. I have a husband who is attentive and funny and wants nothing more than to see me happy and vice-versa. That’s love.

We had a destination wedding in the city that we love (New Orleans). Our families — his, mine, and our chosen family — met and fell in love. Even the Calcasieu staff loved us like family by the end of the night.

During Wedding Week, we also volunteered for a day with the St. Bernard Project. I fell in love with Sister Judy all over again. And I fell in love with a pit bull puppy named Elle. A woman drove by and thanked us for helping rebuild. Yep. Felt the love there.

One of the hardest parts of getting married was moving west. In Atlanta, I was only a 5 hour drive from my parents. I could visit once a month. With the distance and my new job, however, I can’t visit as often as I used to. But my family and my parents’ neighbors and friends have stepped in to be the emotional and physical support that they need throughout my dad’s illness. That’s love too.

At my cousin’s wedding in Indonesia, we met the bride’s family for the first time. This was HUGE because his parents are both deceased, and my father — now the family elder — couldn’t attend because of his health. So Jason and I represented our family. We dressed up in customary attire . We greeted guests. We ate goo-gobs of Indonesian food. And by the end of the trip, we were all hugs and smiles and vowing to return to see our new Indonesian cousins.

So LOVE is my word for 2011.