Kevin Lynch (emphasis added):

Adobe supports HTML and its evolution and we look forward to adding more capabilities to our software around HTML as it evolves. If HTML could reliably do everything Flash does that would certainly save us a lot of effort, but that does not appear to be coming to pass. Even in the case of video, where Flash is enabling over 75% of video on the Web today, the coming HTML video implementations cannot agree on a common format across browsers, so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues.

C’mon, that’s not fair! Everyone following this story knows that Mozilla won’t include the H.264 codec because of licensing fees. There’d be no “disagreement” if it were an open standard but patent holders wanna get paid.

With Flash Player 10.1, we are optimizing video rendering further on the Mac and expect to reduce CPU usage by half…

Well! That’s exciting news. I’m looking forward to a better Hulu experience.

via John Nack on Adobe

The company’s chief executive, Steve Ballmer, has continued to deliver huge profits. They totaled well over $100 billion in the past 10 years alone and help sustain the economies of Seattle, Washington State and the nation as a whole. Its founder, Bill Gates, is not only the most generous philanthropist in history, but has also inspired thousands of his employees to give generously themselves. No one in his right mind should wish Microsoft failure.

via The New York Times

Another common error occurs when including a URL which contains an ampersand (“&”):

<a href="foo.cgi?chapter=1&section=2&copy=3&lang=en">...</a>

This example generates an error for “unknown entity section” because the “&” is assumed to begin an entity reference. Browsers often recover safely from this kind of error, but real problems do occur in some cases. In this example, many browsers correctly convert &copy=3 to ©=3, which may cause the link to fail. Since ⟨ is the HTML entity for the left-pointing angle bracket, some browsers also convert &lang=en to 〈=en. And one old browser even finds the entity §, converting &section=2 to §ion=2.

To avoid problems with both validators and browsers, always use & in place of & when writing URLs in HTML:

<a href="foo.cgi?chapter=1&amp;section=2&amp;copy=3&amp;lang=en">...</a>

Note that replacing & with &amp; is only done when writing the URL in HTML, where “&” is a special character (along with “<” and “>”). When writing the same URL in a plain text email message or in the location bar of your browser, you would use “&” and not “&amp;”. With HTML, the browser translates “&amp;” to “&” so the Web server would only see “&” and not “&amp;” in the query string of the request.

via htmlhelp.com

Most blogs aren’t very good.
Bloggers can’t write.

The writing isn’t the only thing that makes blogs bad; the lack of consistency isn’t helping either.

And I am a victim of this too. Blogs are kinda of a chore when you know that no body is going to read them. Maybe if there were more appreciation for the work put into blogs then the writers would care enough to put more time into them. Or maybe it’s the other way around. If writers put in more time, then people might care to read them.

Just a thought … (and a personal note to myself).

1999 – Build it and they will come. (a.k.a. field of dreams syndrome)

2004 – Build it for users, not search engines, and they will come.

2009 – Build it for users, optimize it for search engines, create content for link bait, promote it through social media, reoptimize it for conversions and they will come and convert.

The advice hasn’t changed. There are just a few more pieces.

via SEOmoz