Mark Bernstein writes: There’s one question that bothers me about huge programs like Excel, though, a question you don’t quite address. What are they doing with all that space? I actually think that Excel’s “minimum system requirements” come from all the other apps that it installs. For example, if they use a part of Internet [...]

For all you Dreamweaver users, here's a cool FAQ. [scobleizer]

From the Wait A Minute I Just Remembered Something Department. In talking with Keith he told me that he's coordinating, privately off-list with a couple of other developers on the interop process. This is totally unacceptable. All discussions must be public and open to all. I'm fed up with this. There's nothing open about the [...]

Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to HTML, Graphics, and Beyond. Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to HTML, Graphics, and Beyond covers the nuts and bolts of basic HTML, with detailed examples on how to format text, add graphics, make links, create tables and frames, and use color. Previous knowledge about how the Web [...]

[inessential.com] It does feel a bit like spring today. Finally!!

Stop the XML hype, I want to get off. As editor of XML.com, I welcome the massive success XML has had. But things prized by the XML community — openness and interoperability — are getting swallowed up in a blaze of marketing hype. Is this the price of success, or something we can avoid? [Meerkat: [...]

It's going to take a miracle and a lot of compromise for SOAP to coalesce into a single protocol that interops. We've never really gotten a clear picture of how Microsoft is using it, and they have not gotten a clear picture of how we're using it. Now that's not because our respective pieces of [...]

The true curse of bloatware? Maintainability! When reading a Joel Spolsky column, I’m always prepared to be enlightened and entertained. Well his newest is certainly entertaining, but I kept waiting for the explanation of why Excel is 146MB on disk, and he never got there (except to say they ship before optimizing for disk space). [...]

Fast Company: “But Wait, You Promised …”. One of the promises of the new economy was that the customer would finally be in charge. We weren't supposed to need to call customer care — but if we did, then someone would take our call quickly. Everyone believes in delighting the customer. [Tomalak's Realm] I had [...]

MIT Technology Review: Remembrance of Things Past. Simson Garfinkel. And yet more than three decades into the “Information Age,” data is something that we still don't quite understand how to steward. Data is not physical, not something that you can lock away today and hope you'll be able to access in 10 or 20 years. [...]