Friday, March 19, 1999

No surprise, Microsoft swarmed. That's what I wanted. They want to know where I want to go. My first response was to fix the bugs in textareas, and I would get my thoughts together for the next step. So here's a message that's headed in that direction. I sent it via email to Julian Jiggins, a program manager on the MSIE team and Michael Winser, a MSIE programmer, and a frequent contributor on our DG.

WebEdit for Frontier 6 is available. We're going to let people who are serious WebEdit users have it now, and we'll release it thru the updates process after the remainder of Frontier 6 ships. People may need time to plan for this part of the upgrade, because it involves upgrading groups of team members.

InfoWorld: IBM Will 'Wait and See' on Desktop Linux. "No one runs large, million-hits-per-day Web sites on Linux," Occleshaw said.

Stanley Wong at Yahoo says: FreeBSD is good enough to handle one of the largest sites on the Net. We still run FreeBSD on a overwhelming majority of our servers/services.

Jason Domina has a Regedit hack that allows you to hook any text editor into MSIE5's Edit With command. I bet it would work with Frontier?

InfoWorld: XML to play bigger role in development.

News.com: Does MSIE5 Undermine Microsoft's Case? Is it part of the OS or a separate app?

Tim Bray: XML in XML. Requires MSIE5

HTML version of Bray's story, readable in any browser.

Charlie Wood at Vignette says RSS is too low-tech, we should syndicate with their ICE protocol. Instead, let's go with something truly low-tech and open. RSS is a good beginning.

NY Times: John Markoff looks at Sony's Playstation II.

InfoWorld: Tcl community drafts extensions standard.

Scriptics: TEA Summit.

Wired: MacWEEK returns to Print, Kinda.

2/9/99: Paul Howson on rendering to PDF from Frontier.

HTMLDOC generates PostScript and PDF from HTML.

iSyndicate's RAPID technology provides a "highly scalable means to aggregate, package, integrate and deliver volumes of varied and relevant Internet content to sites of all sizes. This content includes headlines, full-text articles, and images/photos."

Dan Shafer: The multiple-page web content dilemma.

The neatest new feature in MSIE5 is the radio bar. I've not been able to listen to the radio while I work because my computers interfere with reception. Last night I was able to listen to Larry King interviewing Monica Lewinsky's father and stepmother while I read the fascinating email that came in response to yesterday's piece. It helps to be at the end of a T1 line.

My least favorite MSIE5 bug. The Back button goes dim at inopportune random times. It forgets how you got here. It's happened five times today. Thankfully the Home button works.

Interesting side-effect of the MSIE5 shipment. It's been hard to get thru to our California servers because our ISP is Conxion. 999 days out of a 1000 this is a good deal, our pipe is extra-wide because we share that pipe with Microsoft's US download site, which is also hosted by Conxion. But when a new version of MSIE is released our sites get slow.

CNN: Mattel buys Purple Moon.

MacWEEK: iMac wows game developers.