Brave Tech World

    Certain sites like Bloglines, Technorati and Google don’t really need JavaScript to work, but if you have it enabled, you can get a better experience. On the other hand, it is pretty hard to have a rich web app, like Writely or Sampa without scripting enabled; however, you only need during authoring, but not on a “viewing” mode. On Sampa, if the user has scripting enabled to view the content, he/she might have a neater experience, for example, with a rich photo album viewer.

    The Administrative/Authoring part of a service, sometimes, must have JavaScript enabled, and that is a decision that each product must make on the beginning of the project. But on the public or the “viewing” part of the service you should make a tremendous effort to not make it mandatory to use JavaScript. That is not only a matter of saying “all browser today support JavaScript”, or “most user have it enabled”. Three things that you should consider:

• Some users disable JavaScript for security reasons (5-10% of users);
• It is likely that newer browsers might be more sophisticated on deciding if they will allow JS or not from a page, based on black/white lists of safe sites;
• A lot of devices like Mobile Phones and PDAs don’t support JavaScript.

    The most basic thing that you can to guarantee a nice down-level support for browsers that don’t have Javascript (or have it disabled) is to deliver the content from the server as it should be seen by the HTML-only browser, then, at the bottom of your page, you add a script like:
    <script>make_it_neat();</script>
    Where “make_it_neat” is a function that will re-arrange the DOM, bind the dynamic controls, and do all the work necessary to make your page dynamic and rich.

    Most Web-developers don’t do that, because it’s almost twice as much work, but if you’re going to not support non-JS browsers, at least it should be a deliberate decision, rather than out of ignorance.

    Now, both IE and Firefox have extensions that make it really easy to disable/enable JavaScript while you are testing your pages. For IE, is the DevToolBar and for Firefox the Web Developer extension. Those are must have add-ons if you are working on developing a website/web-service.

   Here is a great article why HD-DVD and Blu-Ray have already failed by Clint DeBoer.

    I'm very passionate about video technology. I even have a HDV camera (Sony HDR-FX1). I think the article is a great read, but Clint missing a big, big point IMHO, #11.

11. I don't want discs anymore.

    Last year I decided that I'd not buy any DVD movies anymore. My aggressive estimates is that by 2015 all video content will be bought and downloaded throught the Internet (if the idiots at the movie studios don't screw up).

    Seagate has a 750GB hard-disk for a very reasonable price (today). With that amount of space I can put about 35h of HD video (or about 18 full-length HD movies).

    Imagine that in five years we will have 2TB Hard-disks (about 50 full-length HD movies). If you build your own "video server", you can put 4 of those babies and have 8TB of data, enough for 400 hours of High-definition video. That should be enough for all Disney, Hawaii and European trips that you'll make on the next 10 years. So, that is that for your home video.

    For "hollywood" movies, I'm hoping that by 2015 (if US congress doesn't screw up and give Comcast/Verizon a duopoly over high-speed Internet), you should be getting anywhere between 25-50 Mbps DSL/Cable speeds (or more). That speed, paired with Codec improvements, should give you enough for 1-2 HD videos being streamed over the Internet.

     So, if you are itching to buy an HD-DVD or Blu-ray, just remember the stack of virgin CDs that you bought 3 years ago, and you can't get rid of them because every music now is on MP3 players and transmitted over the Internet.