This article is for people who are passionate about the web.

If you haven't been living under a rock you've probably heard about the whole -webkit- scandal that's going about. I won't link to anything because I really don't know where to start, but here's my take on how this will play out.

Browser vendors will have to weigh "backwards compatibility" against standards. How this might end is badly. Remember the first browser to reach version 10? It was not Chrome, it was Opera.

When Opera changed their UserAgent string to Opera/10.00 half the internet started breaking becuase of a bad sniffing technique. The developers only had to make a few keystrokes' worth of changes to their codebase to adjust the new version 10.

What happened in reality was Opera had to change its UserAgent string to Opera/9.80 and add a separate Version/10.00 pair at the end. This is still in there today, and will probably remain there for quite a while.

Think this is a horrible hack? Now imagine -webkit-transform being interpreted by Firefox.

I hope it won't come to that, but I really think it might.

I am sometimesfrequently required to use my Facebook User ID. To get this, I navigate to graph.facebook.com/hdragomir and just copy it from there. I do pretty much the same when I need someone else's fbuid.

Basically, I go to graph.facebook.com/<your-vanity-name-here>

Are you doing something else? 

I really enjoy having them, but they need a bit of work.
Let me paint you a picture:

You've lined up 8 videos and start watching them. You go to fullscreen and watch a couple of videos.
Youtube gets points here for the smooth transition between videos while in fullscreen.
Now, you need to exit fullscreen. In the middle of the video. With the video still running because it's a standup, say.

Youtube does a full refresh after exiting fullscreen. Why?!

It totally kills the mood. No matter how fast you connection is, you still get a second of pause. 

The funny thing is that the flash player is already playing the correct video. All they need is to repaint the DOM. They could do that on the fly, with Javascript. And they could use pushState to change the URL, as well.

Youtube are already doing a great job with Cosmic Panda, I wonder when they'll give this some attention.

The real revolution is that you get to make waves, not just ride them.

The extraordinary revolution of media choice

This is just support for a talk I'm giving at Berlin.js

A full post is coming soon.

One article on Smashing Magazine really stirred up the internet.
The author, Divya Manian, ambiguously presents a problem most web developers are facing: semantic markup is hard.

While I do employ as many new, semantic elements as I feel confident with, I know and see this is not the case with many, many web development studios. The reason, as Divya pointed out, is that good examples and tutorials are hard to come by.
I also pointed out that when someone sees these new elements put to good use, they feel intimidated. Like looking at Air Jordan play basketball.

So people drop the semantics and stick to their divs and spans, which are not that horrible, but are definitely not the future either.

The problem today really is that people learn by example and they are always in a hurry. If they cannot find something to copy, paste then hack to work, they move on to another solution that provides that comfort.

While Divya was only pointing out that going too deep down the semantic hole gets your users nowhere, people read that as "semantics are for sissies" and just went apeshit in the comments. And all over the internet.

WhatFont is a tool for instant font inspection in webpages.

We recently became acquainted and I think we're in for quite a ride together.
What the Chrome plugin lets you do is discover the used fontface of any element on any page on the web. It comes in handy for debugging as well, if you're into that kind of stuff.

Have a look at the screenshots of WhatFont in action:

(download)

Click here to download:

loving-whatfont-BsnbhJluCEeeCmqrvmHz.zip (72 KB)

First Dart, then Native Client and now Parallel Javascript?

The whole reason Javascript got where it is today is that it was pretty much the same thing for everyone. I sense danger.

This is something for the weekend, featuring @mike_ftw

When middle-clicking a link, I expect it to open in a new tab, not reload the current page.

This is part of my workflow when going through a list of links, or thumbnails, and I want to open several -- or at least keep the list open for when I'm done with each link.
I find it very annoying when websites override this simple browser behavior, via Javascript.

While I too override the default behavior in my applications -- to make room for Ajax, for instance -- I allow users to middle click the link and open the page in a new tab. Because if they middle click, that's what they want and who the hell am I to tell them they're wrong ,eh?

I do this by adding this bit of code to the beginning of my click handlers

$('.some-snazzy-selector').click(function(ev){
    if( ev.which == 2 || ev.metaKey || ev.ctrlKey || ev.shiftKey ){
        return true;
    }
});

This snippet I picked up from Kyle Neath also allows the user to open a new tab by holding down the shift key, or control key, or command key for the Mac users.

Delicious, I'm looking at you! Let me middle click your links, dammit!