Simply Jonathan

Almost four years ago, I linked to a list of HTML 4.01 character entities. At the time I noted that it was, A (somewhat quirky) list of the entity references.

Entity Code is an actually useful alternative to reading the DTD, and one I would heartily recommend. It even has categories.

Joe Clark’s new project is about copyright — and he doesn’t agree with Lawrence Lessig.

Joe is a very opinionated fellow, and I look very much forward to seeing what this latest endeavour of his will lead to. I will follow it with interest, and I encourage everyone to donate a little to his cause.

For the record, I don’t believe I will agree with much of what he’s saying, but Joe usually makes an effort in whatever he writes about, and whether I agree or not, I believe he will make a great case for his arguments.

How wide is a space character? Obviously the answer varies from font to font, and this resources lists some of the common fonts available on the web, with different space characters.

I’m not a big fan of JavaScript performing the tasks of CSS, but that doesn’t make the experiment less interesting.

(Via For a Beautiful Web.)

The Zune must really suck goat balls if it can’t compete against a device that costs $10,000.

There’s not any more to it, but that’s condensed wisdom right there.

Krstić, formerly with [One Laptop per Child][olpc], has announced that he’s joining Apple. He doesn’t reveal anything about what he will be doing¹, but he’s a bright mind, and I’m sure Apple have made a catch here.

Search for Flickr images based on the colour of most of the image. Pretty clever.

For kicks, I found the search for the Simply Jonathan colour.

(Via Gensmann.)

[A] good example of a PHP “quirk” is the way PHP handles constants. It was one of the major factors affecting performance. Just removing all the constants allowed us to improve the performance by almost 2x[.]

This is a problem I have a hard time figuring out how to react to. To paraphrase DHH: It’s more important to save developer brain cycles than CPU cycles. (I really couldn’t find the original source.)

While substituting variables with constants is easy, it seems wrong, and things that seem wrong are often illogical, and a bad idea to have in a computer program.

(For the record, I’m not saying PHP is a language that’s any good at saving developer brain cycles, but, as Marco says, you can write bad software in any language. PHP just makes it easy to write web software, period. Thus, much bad software is written in PHP.)

Ah, man. I don’t know; why make a video about a browser so… weird? It’ll be exciting to see what the next ones bring.

(Via the Official Google Blog.)

Oliver Reichenstein reaching the conclusion that blog comments don’t work.

The problem is, I have a hard time seeing exactly how using Twitter is going to fix this. I have eased on my earlier stance on Twitter, and I now actually use it rather passionately; still, however, I do not think brevity of the comment is going to solve it — as I said, I think not getting a proper environment to answer in is the real problem. Hence, trackback is in my opinion the real solution.