thisStrangeEngine.com

One of things that make MySpace popular is that people have the ability to customize their profile pages, albeit through less than ideal means. This has created a small crop of programs or something that will generate layouts and such, but given most people fail to have a reasonable sense of design, it’s caused most of MySpace to look like utter tripe. A real web designer took a shot at trying to make a nice looking MySpace profile and came out on top looking like a champ. I wouldn’t want to go through what he went through trying to wade through all that G-awful markup, but now we can all benefit from the fruits of his labor.

It was apparently announed at Mix 06, a web developer conference held by Microsoft which I had never heard of until recently, that the rendering engine in IE7 Beta is complete and frozen, and Microsoft is now only working on security and UI bugs. This means that if you download and install IE7 beta now, you can view your sites in it and know exactly how it will look and what adjustments you will need to make before IE7 goes official. It is supposed to be out during the second half of 2006.

DivX has just releasesd their “Web Player”, which is essentially a browser plug-in to let people play embedded DivX files. I’d like to think this would really help DivX catch on and that it would become as commonplace as Windows Media or Quicktime. I also like how on all of their preview shots they show the embedded player in what is obviously a Firefox browser.

Here’s a short amusing article written by the licensing contact for the Mozilla Foundation. A UK Standards officer gets frustrated over the concept of copyleft and Free Software and the fact that is completely permissible to sell copies of free software (the basic gist of Free Software under a copyleft license is that you can take the software and do whatever you darn well please with it…as long as you make the source code freely available). The reasoning:

“…it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted.”

Well, it’s not that extreme, but a web firm in California has recently acquired a patent for rich-media over the Internet. That basically means anything from Flash to Java to AJAX that is put on the Internet that is accessed from any kind of client whatsoever. What’s interesting is the company doesn’t plan to enforce it. Instead, they plan on selling it to the highest bidder, which could involve some very big dogs.

Article Here

Hat tip to Jeffry Zeldman’s site, who tactfully and succinctly put in words what I’m sure a lot of people are thinking:

What happens next is anyone’s guess, but I suspect it will involve lawyers.