The “view source” functionality of browsers is near and dear to my heart, as it’s how I learned to code, it’s how I judge who to hire, and it’s how I help trouble shoot bugs and quirks when developers ask me for help.

Here’s the summary from the the interwebs:

View Source Has a Posse - http://my.sxsw.com/events/event/5005

“View source” is a feature of all modern browsers that few people use, and that more probably wouldn’t miss if it disappeared. Still, viewing other people’s source code has played an undeniable role in the Web’s development, spurring a culture of creativity and sharing, and cementing values of openness and transparency in developer practices.

However, as the Web becomes increasingly dedicated to social interaction and applications rather than static documents, the value of viewing machine-generated source code raises a critical question: will view source be relevant to the next generation of Web apps? And what might be lost if new Web applications refuse to include its functionality?

Panelists include  Aza Raskin from Mozilla, Chris Wilson from Microsoft, Michael Lucaccini of Archetype, and Alex Russell of Dojo & Google, and ME!.
Questions addressed will include:

1. what is View Source?
2. how have web developers and designers use View Source?
3. what were the original intentions of the feature?
4. how has view source functionality changed with things like Firebug and Web Inspector?
5. what alternatives exist to support iterative hacking on other people’s code?
6. how might tools and communities like GitHub augment or replace View Source?
7. how important is view source to learning to program complex web applications?
8. UserStyles, UserScripts, JetPacks and similar end-user web customizations - will these kinds of innovations be stifled if View Source goes away?
9. how can view source functionality be added to other “non-web” software? How would it be different than open source software?
10. is there a larger point to be made about the relevance of open source in the social/cloud era of computing?

The panel is 3:30 on Saturday in room 12AB. I hope to see you there. Please do say ‘hi’.

I will continue to maintain this blog, but Standardista.com will hopefully be better organized, and less of an eyesore.

Here are some of the CSS3 articles you’ll find in my new online home:

Below is every most CSS3 Properties, all the possible values for that property, and the support for each property value from grade-A browsers

This grid does not include animation, tranforms, grids, columns, layouts or templates. I have a separate post for CSS3 Background Properties and CSS3 border properties. Those are all coming soon. Sorry for the slow download, but this table is over 8000 lines worth of HTML. I am breaking this out into smaller, related sections. I’ll be posting those at my new site. And, yes, I know this table breaks the layout of the page. This whole blog theme is ugly, but some of the content hopefully makes this eyesore worth it The new site should be ready soon: and way prettier!

body {
    background-color: transparent;
    background-position: 0% 0%;
    background-size: auto auto;
    background-repeat: repeat repeat;
    background-clip: border-box;
    background-origin: padding-box;
    background-attachment: scroll;
    background-image: none; }
                        

Notes

• Level of support for property is based on CSS2.1. So, if a browser supports all of CSS2.1 but not CSS3, they will get be listed as supporting the property, unless it’s a purely CSS3 property. If there is a browser specific prefix to make the CSS3 work, it passes as "almost good."
• Browsers include:
  (if it passed originally in older browser, i did not retest)
  • IE6
  • IE7
  • IE7 compatibility mode
  • IE8
  • Firefox 3, 3.5, 3.6
  • Safari 3.2 and 4 beta
  • Opera 9.64 and 10
• There are a lot of hidden title attributes in this page. When you hover over the deltas and underlined table cells, in standards compliant browsers, informaiton on how the browsers fails to comply with standards should be displayed.
• This is still a work in progress, but it’s pretty far along, so I am posting. It will be updated soon and often until done… then I’ll remove this bullet point.