“Stumbled upon this on ffffound.com. I wouldn’t mind having it,”

said njcalhoun

“Me neither”

said Denise.

Ditto, says I.

Today, though, the HTML conversation is reborn. Standards development around HTML seems to actually have a chance of influencing user experience in the browser, and Microsoft itself is participating in the HTML 5 conversation despite still holding roughly two-thirds of the browser market. While Microsoft’s market share is only slowly eroding, developer mindshare seems to have shifted decisively to the band of WHATWG upstarts, Microsoft’s competitors.

The reason for this, I think, is that HTML 5 clearly has a bright future in a place that Microsoft can’t presently block: mobile web browsers. When I ask people about the future of computing, the word I keep hearing in their answers is “mobile”. Even if it’s small now, it has a much greater effect on how people evaluate what’s coming.

Microsoft has a mobile presence, certainly, but it’s hard to argue that it has anywhere near the visibility of the iPhone, or even the Android. Mobile web browsing has kept Opera going for years, but the iPhone and Android give Apple and Google much more visibility for their HTML 5 work, and Apple’s decision to keep Flash off the iPhone in particular gave developers further cause to rethink their dependencies. (The WebKit browser engine these share will also be integrated with Blackberry soon, and is also on the Palm Pre.)

What’s especially interesting to me is the amount of mobile systems that are going with WebKit as their rendering engine of choice. It’s not just RIM and Palm, but you now have Symbian and Nokia coming together under the Symbian Foundation as well.

And as final food for thought, a demo of what Webkit is now capable of with just HTML and CSS Transforms (requires a recent Webkit nightly build or you can view a video of the demos at Dailymotion).

One day, when Marco and I were playing against two computer opponents, we forced one of the AI cycles to trap itself between its own walls and the bottom game border. Sensing an impending crash, it fired a missile, just like it always did whenever it was trapped. But this time was different – instead of firing at another trail, it fired at the game border, which looked like any other light cycle trail as far as the computer was concerned. The missile impacted with the border, leaving a cycle-sized hole, and the computer promptly took the exit and left the main playing field. Puzzled, we watched as the cycle drove through the scoring display at the bottom of the screen. It easily avoided the score digits and then drove off the screen altogether.

Shortly after, the system crashed.

Our minds reeled as we tried to understand what we had just seen. The computer had found a way to get out of the game. When a cycle left the game screen, it escaped into computer memory – just like in the movie.

Daniel Wellman reminisces about the day his program went awol and life started imitating art.

Via Nat Torkington on the O’Reilly Radar I find out that Stephen Fry, that most entertaining, erudite, and gorgeous man, blogs. Not only is he blogging, but his first post is a fantastic exploration of the reasons why we love technology so much.

Based around the would-be “iPhone Killers” that the market keeps coming up with (whilst never quite getting what makes some hardware so compelling) he lays out his history not only with Apple, but every other piece of shiny that he has felt compelled to buy:

I have, over the past twenty years been passionately addicted to all manner of digital devices, Mac-friendly or not; I have gorged myself on electronic gismos, computer accessories, toys, gadgets and what-have-yous of all descriptions, but most especially what are now known as SmartPhones. PDAs, Wireless PIMs, call them what you will. My motto is:

I have never seen a SmartPhone I haven’t bought

He then expands on a knowledge of technology that leaves me shocked, awed, and frankly, loving him even more than I already did.

As Nat says:

I recommend getting a cup of tea or coffee and sitting down to enjoy the whole thing. He’s not just good to read, but he hones in on the strengths and weaknesses of each device. Enjoy!

Keep posting Mr Fry.