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ned

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Very exciting project, specially the support for custom document schemas.

If the authors are around, I'd love to hear what was their thinking regarding implementing focus and selection, with regards to the inconvenients outlined by the author of ProseMirror here: http://marijnhaverbeke.nl/blog/prosemirror.html#general-appr...

In a nutshell, ProseMirror chose to keep contentEditable in order to have browser-level support for spell-checking, screen-readers, RTL, etc.

What are the tradeoffs exactly?

Thanks.

When you are full-time employed, remotely, by a european company, and living in another european country, does anyone know :

— do you set yourself up as a freelance consultant, and pay your healthcare and retirement fund yourself?

— …or do you let the company pay that for you in the country they are based in, and somehow benefit from that?

How does it work exactly for these social benefits that are very important in the european welfare model?

  For instance, one day at school he was working with the student theatre.
  All week he had been struggling to produce the right sound effects, 
  but it just wasn’t coming together. Eventually, his boss lost his cool
  and started ripping into him. “My response was that something weird was
  happening with my body,” he says. “I could feel a tension, like my heart
  was racing, but my mind was distracted…
Isn't this an extreme case of repressing emotions, in the most classic sense? The disconnect between bodily reaction and lack of mindfullness seems to indicate it.

I'm not worried about being under surveillance. I'm neither interesting, nor engaged in anything interesting.

That's probably the feeling of most people. Martin Fowler wrote an insightful post about this subject:

Privacy Protects Bothersome People …and isn't about me (or probably you) http://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html

He argues that privacy on the internet is important, not because normal people have something to hide, but because journalists and activists (or other counterpowers in a well-balanced democracy) need a certain level of privacy in order to work.

In the long run yes, when they have revenue. But they mention:

But then, one day when I came back to their website, I saw that they had added a minimum fee of €100 to their plan, and that unfortunately tipped the scale for us, as we pay everything on our own, and we have zero revenue coming in.

So the problem is for the first few months during which you pay everything out of your own pocket. It probably all depends on how confident you are that you'll get revenue.

How simple/hard is it to migrate from system to another?

The really crazy thing is that we had great proposals for much better layout systems, and they were rejected:

- First, the model with "springs and struts", employed by all major native GUIs for decades, and also implemented in Firefox as the first Flexbox model (for XUL, the UI description markup language) since ages.

- Second, the constraints-based layout model, now employed by OSX 10.8 and considered even superior, was proposed in 1999! http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/constraints/web/ccss-u...

The only explanation I can come up with is a giant disconnect between users (web developers) and implementors.

CSS Flexbox Please 14 years ago

Flexbox is the most underrated CSS modules out there. Making flexible layouts based on the size of the viewport without it is either a major pain or flat out impossible without resorting to JS.

I don't understand why all the CSS efforts are being put into elaborate effects (transforms, blend modes, compositing, etc) when we can't yet effectively create UI layouts. Other underrated property is the non-standard "-webkit-line-clamp" (or "-o-ellipsis-lastline" for Opera), that allows you to cut off with an ellipsis a block of text after a given number of lines.

It's such a shame that the idea of constraints-based layout (the UI layout method of OSX 10.8) in CSS was never adopted: http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/constraints/web/ccss-u...

Excellent, really cool. On OSX, this is what AppleScript and Automator should have been.

Would it be possible to tap into GUI applications via OSX UI Scripting, and maybe mirroring the app's menus with Wiki menus?

The idea of compound images is really interesting, although it would require an extra HTTP request to fetch the hight-DPI portion of the image. But maybe less of a problem over SPDY?

The idea truncatable bitstreams is fascinating too. I'm not well versed in networking, but wouldn't the latency of a mobile network kill the benefit of this technique? e.g, by the time the server receives the "connection closed" signal, a large part of the extra data would have been sent, no?

No, the distinction of device pixels vs. CSS pixels predates the first "Retina" iPhone. The distinction existed in all browsers supporting full page zoom, including the Safari on the first iPhone, and in Opera for years before that.

"Retina" is just a marketing term for "pixels so small your eye can't distinguish them at a normal distance anymore".

I'm afraid this boat has long sailed. The "pixel" term is in the CSS 2.1 Spec. It's set in stone.

Personally I've made peace with it. I say either "CSS pixels" or "device pixels", depending on what I want to express.

And although the high resolution screens have only made the difference between the two more visible, it was there since Opera featured full pages zoom many years ago, and when Mobile Safari introduced the "viewport" meta-tag in 2007.

Interesting service, and very well executed.

The one problem that I have with pictograms-as-fonts is anti-aliasing. The designers that I work with spend hours to make their icons absolutely perfect at every pixel size that they'll be displayed at. This is particularly visible when the icon has horizontal or vertical lines. Most of the time you'll want them have a hard edge, and with anti-aliasing you can never be sure you'll get that result.

This will change in a few years when all our screens have high pixel densities, but for the time being I'm sticking with PNG sprites, with hand-tweeked pixels.

It's also disruption by simplicity:

– the Terms and Conditions sheet will only be "one page long" and "understandable by anyone", compared to the multiple pages of legalese of the current operators;

– they only have 2 offers (with a variant for current clients), compared to hundreds from the competition.

We all know the value of simplicity when making purchasing decisions (explained in The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz).

Well done Free.

So it seems like we now have two way of specifying small caps:

  font-feature-settings: "smcp=1”;
and…
  font-variant: small-caps;
The later is the CSS 2.1 syntax, and will force the browser to create small caps on its own if the chosen font doesn't contain small caps glyphs.

The Open Type version is probably better, since it falls back to lower case glyphs if the browser doesn't support them, instead of an emulated version that probably won't be very legible.

I Hate CSS 15 years ago

After doing front-end development for 10 years, I have come to the conclusion that 97.3% of all my annoyances with CSS would disappear if IE and Opera adopted the Flexible Box Model (http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-flexbox/): vertical centering, scaling based on available space, constraints-based scaling, etc.

This is basic layout behaviours that I keep spending hours implementing in JS, which is slow and brittle, because you need fallbacks, etc.

I've had dedicated servers, shared hosts and individual domains with them for a few years. I had a hardware failure on a server once, the HD died, they replaced it in a few hours, it was handled pretty efficiently. The price is really low. The connectivity in Europe is good (although my customers are mostly based in France, so I don't have real benchmarks from elsewhere).

Two caveats:

- They have no taste and are really bad a interface design. Their administration tools are notoriously confusing, even after years of using them I'm still blown away at how they manage to make something simple so complicated. The boss (Octave) will post product announcements in the forums, and not in the official newsletter, encouraging a cult following of enthusiats/amateurs (that can be seen as both good or bad I guess…). Don't expect good documentation either.

- support is sub-par. I only contacted them a couple of times, and my carefully worded questions were met by a standardized reply, as if they had only read half of my email.

tl;dr : if you're a good sysadmin and don't need any hand-holding, they are good.