13 March

Morning cup o’ links

Perhaps it would have been better to make a sausage analogy for these links, rather than a coffee-and-sausage one. But since one of the links is to a post written by Marco Arment, coffee seems appropriate. (Then again, a Google search reveals that I am far from the first person to use the phrase “morning cup o’ links” so maybe I should spend less time worrying about it being a non sequitir and instead worry that I am horribly unoriginal.)

Each morning I start the day by perusing the latest on Twitter and my RSS feeds, and I almost always find something interesting to read. But today was more interesting than most, and simply retweeting the links didn’t seem adequate. Also, some of these links may become topics for discussion on this week’s episode of The Undisciplined Room, so this is your homework.

First up, we have a post on The Verge discussing homeless hotspots at SXSW. This is a topic I’ve been reading about for the past few days, but this post was the first that made me think beyond my gut reaction that this was shameless exploitation.

Next, with a HT to Daring Fireball, and via Marco Arment, we have a look at Curator’s Code and why it’s a bad idea. The evidence has been mounting for me that Maria Popova’s 15 minutes of (borrowed) fame are almost over (especially when I’m reminded of her love of Ayn Rand and Malcolm Gladwell), and Marco helps solidify that thought.

Then we have type designer Mark Simonson (who designed the Proxima Nova font that I use in the Room 34 logo and branding materials) discussing font anachronisms in The Artist. As much as I enjoyed The Artist, issues with the fonts it used (especially straight quotes, and the fact that it used fonts in a lot of places where hand lettering would have been more appropriate) even distracted me, so I can’t imagine what it must be like for someone like Mark Simonson or Chank Diesel. (Full disclosure: I did development work on Chank’s mobile website.)

And finally… Chicago musician and multi-talent Joshua Wentz has just announced the release of the Side 2 EP by Absinthe and the Dirty Floors, one of the many musical projects with which he’s involved. He’s also made a video for each song on the EP, like this:

Bring down IE 6!

IE6, R.I.P. I wish.Here’s a far more detailed, reasoned explanation of why Internet Explorer 6 is just plain bad than I could ever muster in the midst of one of my Microsoft-fueled rages. (OK, maybe that overstates it a bit and gives Redmond too much credit for my anger issues.)

Here it is, plain and simple: Internet Explorer 6 has been around as long as Windows XP, and it’s even longer in the tooth. A lot has happened to the Web in the last 8 years, and IE6 is simply not equipped to handle what 2009 websites throw at it. It’s a security nightmare, and it’s woefully lacking in support of even relatively modest features that all other browsers out there today support, and that we in the web design and development community desperately want to take advantage of in building functional, aesthetically pleasing, just plain cool websites.

But we can’t. Or, we can, but then we have to spend a substantial chunk of the total time and budget of a project (often a third or more) hacking our own (standards-compliant) work to try to make it even just passably functional in IE6. This has to end. IE6 is not just a pain in the butt of web geeks like me. Because it is wasting the valuable time and financial resources of anyone involved in the creation of websites (and by extension, any business or organization that has a website), it is a drain on our economy in the same way as old, gas guzzling cars or any other outmoded, grossly inefficient system.

It’s time. IE6 is dead. Lay it to rest.