Month: April 2003

Paul Graham, The Hundred-Year Language

Somehow the idea of reusability got attached to object-oriented programming in the 1980s, and no amount of evidence to the contrary seems to be able to shake it free. But although some object-oriented software is reusable, what makes it reusable is its bottom-upness, not its object-orientedness. Consider libraries: they’re reusable because they’re language, whether they’re written in an object-oriented style or not.

I think that comment jibes with my experience; objects are useful for particular problem-domains, but divide-and-conquer, building up a set of tools (functions) that each handles a little bit of the problem and putting them together in a much simpler framework – this is useful anywhere.

Accessify.com – why you should use the acronym tag to increase accessibility. The page also explains the difference between an acronym and an abbreviation:
So, to decide whether you should use an <acronym> or <abbr> tag, use the test above – “Can I say the abbreviation as a word in its own right?”. If yes, use an <acronym>.

Personally, I find the difference pretty pointless in mark-up. Couldn’t (X)HTML have just had an <annotation> tag </annotation> for footnotes, tooltips, etc?

Informal user survey of Salon/Radio blog users. (link through Blogging Roller). A good list of hurdles that need to be crossed before you’ll feel comfortable getting your mom to write a webblog (as in the metaphorical “your mom”. I’d substitute “Suzie”, myself).