text-transform:

I wish I could say this was a surprise: of the security issues that Apple patched in Mac OS X 10.6.5, 42% were to deal with Adobe Flash.

The security issues related to Flash are in fact the stated reason why Apple is backing away from bundling the plugin with its new computers. Apple began shipping the MacBook Air without Flash installed, noting that customers could install the plugin on their own to ensure they had the latest, most secure version.

However, testing indicates that in normal operation, Flash can also consume dramatic amounts of battery life just to animate web ads in the background, resulting in as much as two hours of lost productivity on a single charge.

From the HTML5 spec (emphasis added):

The hgroup element represents the heading of a section.

The header element represents a group of introductory or navigational aids.

That’s right, “hgroup” means the heading, and “header” means a group of stuff. Yeah, I’m sure that won’t be confusing at all.

Newsweek columnist Daniel Lyons, writing as Fake Steve Jobs, brings this rant (NSFW) about how AT&T is doing everything exactly wrong when it comes to their 3G network, by comparing the iPhone to Meet the Beatles:

Sales were crazy. I mean nuts. The thing was a huge smash hit. By April, twelve weeks after that album came out, the Beatles had the top five spots on the Billboard chart.

Now there was a lot of demand for that record — so much that the plant that printed the records could not keep up. Now here’s the lesson. Do you think the guys who were running Capitol Records said, Gee whiz, the kids are buying up this record at such a crazy pace that our printing plant can’t keep up — we’d better find a way to slow things down. Maybe we can create an incentive that would discourage people from buying the record. Do you think they said that? No, they did not. What they did was, they went out and found another printing plant. And another one and another one, until they could make as many records as people wanted.

…and he’s right.

After looking at the Scripty 2 demo, I wondered how hard it would be to generate CSS to draw playing cards, instead of relying on images.

The fruits of my experiment are now up, so you can see my Deck of CSS Cards. The cards are all just empty <div><span></span></div> tags with the appropriate classes on the div; CSS does the rest.

Note also that there are no images here, only Unicode, and you need only adjust the font size of the “card” class to scale up the card evenly.

Of course, it only works if you have proper CSS support for :before, :after and content, so IE7 and below get nada, but that’s the price of progress.

And then, because why not, I took it one step further and made a CSS/Unicode Tarot deck. I had to, um, take some liberties with a few of the glyphs, since Unicode has its limits, but it’ll do. I think perhaps next I’ll combine this with some JavaScript and make a DHTML fortune teller.

At Ajax Experience in 2007, I was talking with Stuart Halloway about the Prototype library, and he said if I found any good test suites for it, I should blog about it. “Blog about it?” I thought. “I don’t put tech-geek stuff on my blog.” My friends and family have about as much interest in reading about CSS3 support as Web professionals do in reading about what I had for dinner and what I did last weekend. Besides, I hide my personal blog from search engines to keep out the spammers and other unwanteds. Over the last year and a half, though, I’ve found myself increasingly wanting to engage in public conversations about tech topics.

The solution, obviously: a tech-only blog. You’re reading it.

For those who don’t know me, my name is Jeff Yaus, and I’m a front-end Web developer by trade. I started writing HTML professionally thirteen years ago, and began working full-time as a Web developer a year later. Herein, find my thoughts, questions and grumblings about Web development affairs.