Henri Sivonen: instead of fixing the original problem PNG gamma “correction” created a new, even worse problem: inconsistent color within a Web page.
Another leaky abstraction that has puzzled me for a while now has an explanation.
I develop on Ubuntu, and have tried to figure out why the colors in the logo don’t match the banner used in the Depot chapters of Agile Web Development with Rails. See this illustration of the differences. You won’t see a difference if you are on a MAC. You will if you are on a PC.
I had drilled down in GIMP and the RGB values matched. The colors looked right on the Mac. I couldn’t blame it on the monitor as the differences were clearly bounded by the image itself.
Also particularly interesting is Henri’s commentary on the situation:
That is, doing something was emphasized over correctness and consistency
The next edition of the book with not use a PNG for this image.
Update: Using ImageMagick to convert the original PNG image to GIF and back results in an image that works portably across Ubuntu/Firefox, Windows/IE, and Mac/Safari. It is 4 bytes bigger than the intermediate GIF, however. I've updated my illustration to show all three images.
Mark Pilgrim: My attempts at compartmentalization have failed. There is only one inbox.
Nearly three decades ago, I had an opportunity to witness the effect of an email sent to a select group being widely forwarded. I no longer remember the details, but I do remember the decision that I made at that time. Ironically, it is not a decision that I widely publicize as I do not condone breaking of netiquette. But it was that decision that leads me to open source, open standards, and blogging.
Sylvain Galineau: As the specification nears Recommendation and browser vendors are working on their final implementations and testcases for submission to the W3C, we recommend that new content always include a border-radius declaration without vendor prefix.
It turns out that I hadn’t consistently done that on this blog. That has now been fixed.
The HTML5 validator will produce
both errors and warnings. I personally believe that many of the so-called
“errors” are at best shoulds and at worst pose no real
interoperability problems and are so frequently violated that the message
produced only serve to obscure real problems.
To help evaluate this thesis, I’ve analyzed a few sites,
categorized each error and warning, and taken a first pass at sorting the
message.
Tim Bray: The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.
Joseph Scott: Today we’ve turned on PuSH support for the more than 10.5 million blogs on WordPress.com. There’s nothing to configure, it’s working right now behind the scenes to help others keep up to date with your posts.
