JD on EP

WIRED notes how bad interfaces gain constituencies... the state of California mailed out prefilled tax returns for citizens to sign and return (they know all that data already, the paperwork purgatory is just for show)... but tax preparers are pursuing political action to prevent the "ready returns".

13 reasons for and 13 reasons against using Microsoft for "Web 2.0 development".

Simon Wacker shows another way to declare SWF interfaces in XML.

Media College offers "The Pro and Con of Flash Video".

Joe Clark writes "To Hell with WCAG 2" at A List Apart... the accessibility spec is apparently lengthy and difficult for people to implement.

Roger Johansen talks about accessibility (principally text-to-speech screenreaders) in the context of dynamic content via JavaScript. I particularly dislike the nameless commenter who tells screenreader manufacturers to "take their finger out".

Andrew Kirkpatrick discusses accessibility in the larger sense ("no js", etc) in the context of the recent Adobe Spry framework.

Ajax & SEO as a search term is pulling up an increasing number of results these days too.

Andres Zapata wrote "The Guided Wireframe Narrative for Rich Internet Applications" at Boxes & Arrows... lots of comments here as well.

John Battelle describes the "Too Many Passwords" problem... Meebo.com apparently has 11,000 people hit the "forgot your password?" link each day.

The Lion King was a classic trainwreck, watching a high-profile title try to play atop a newly-delivered system capability.

Ryan Stewart points out how blaming the browser does not suffice... you've got to match the task to the capabilities, a tricky piece of judgment. There's a bunch of comments on various angles.

Gabor Cselle essayed on occasional connectivity and synch of local storage, but from a browser-centric position: "First, take a browser you can run on any platform, then add a mechanism to easily create applications that perform three things..." Asking 90% of the potential audience to change their browsing chrome is difficult, I think.

Seattle Times discusses how Google is playing US politics.

A PHP pitch does the standard debatable feature matrix, but I liked this line: "PHP has broad functionality for databases, strings, network connectivity, file system support, Java, COM, XML, CORBA, WDDX, and Macromedia Flash."

Dr. Dobbs discusses Microsoft's proposed new photography format, but says "Then PNG came along, a dollar short and a day late as it turned out. A public domain alternative, PNG avoided most of the acrimonious legal wrangling of GIF and JPEG, but was introduced too near the end of the LZW patent lifecycle to gain much traction." The format actually came together amazingly quickly, much faster than later W3C Recommendations... it was over the end-of-year holiday weeks when the issue arose and most of the work was done.

BitTube has been doing some SWF development for Sony Playstation, and notes that it's similar to how we've had to refactor downwards for smaller devices or more constraints every few years.

I like these maps of language spread over geographic areas.