links for 2009-11-04

"It had been 20 years since a president was elected with a majority of the popular vote and no serious debate about his Electoral College majority. While Democrats delighted in reminding Republicans that George Bush's 2000 "victory" was imposed by a Republican-dominated U.S. Supreme Court and that his 2004 "victory" relied upon a shaky "mandate" of Ohio's disputed result, Republicans noted that (because of the interventions of Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996) Bill Clinton "victories" were attained with less than 50 percent of the vote. But Obama, always a more cautious man than his campaign suggested, has not governed big." A reminder of just how historical the election was and how much has been accomplished.

"But this is different — here he's charged not only with abusing the powers of his office to go after marginal groups like unauthorized immigrants, but citizens who dare criticize his actions, including political opponents and the media — influential members of the community. As such, this might not end as well for the sheriff as his earlier controversies."

"The Vatican announced Tuesday it was making it easier for Anglicans to convert to Roman Catholicism — a surprise move designed to entice traditionalists opposed to women priests, openly gay clergy and the blessing of same-sex unions. The change means conservative Anglicans from around the world will be able to join the Catholic Church while retaining aspects of their Anglican liturgy and identity, including married priests."

"Let’s be honest, a lot of standards are written for purposes other than promoting interoperability. Some exist to protect legacy advantages or to create an opportunity to profit from proprietary intellectual property. Others seem to take on a life of their own and seem to exist solely to justify the continued existence of the standards body itself or to create an opportunity for the authors to collect on juicy consultant fees explaining how the standard is meant to work to the poor saps who have to implement it. I think we can agree that, whatever they are, those are usually not good standards. Health data interoperability is far too important an issue to let fall victim to such an approach."

"We wanted to make the wedding representative of the institution we'd like marriage to be, and I think we did a good job. Does any of this change the fact that marriage is a historically sexist institution or make it okay that millions of people are denied the right to be married? Of course not. But it made the celebration one that made sense to us, one that re-imagined what marriage as an institution should be about – love, equal partnership and community. (And seriously, to the some of the more conservative relatives at our wedding, hearing these sort of things at a wedding absolutely made an impact.)"

"For 12 days, not bad! The resciding of the Mexico City policy, rejection of torture, naming of the climate change envoy, and closing of Guantanamo all seem like banner moments. Hardly equal to, say, negotiating peace between the Israelis and Palestinians or being willing to give up your life to end apartheid. But, not bad."

"White House officials say Mr. Obama took advantage of a rare political moment to break through one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies and trim more weapons systems than any president had in decades. Mr. Obama has said that he does not intend to reduce military spending while the nation is engaged in two wars. But Mr. Gates also wants to cut more futuristic programs to free money for simpler systems like helicopters and unmanned spy planes that can help the troops now."

"A ton of technologies are ripe for further development in the coming few years. Social media and related apps are definitely going to be at the forefront of the Web for a long time. But plenty of other technologies are on the verge of becoming mainstream, either because of more social acceptance or because of advancements in hardware and applications. Read on for 15 predictions about the future of the Web."

"But none of this answers the original question: why do we have an <img> element? Why not an <icon> element? Or an <include> element? Why not a hyperlink with an include attribute, or some combination of rel values? Why an <img> element? Quite simply, because Marc Andreessen shipped one, and shipping code wins."

"The package includes 30 PNG menu icons plus the additional source files for further customization."

"It’s not so much revenge as it is a smart business move. Intuit doesn’t need two different online financial planning sites for consumers, and it bought Mint because it couldn’t beat it. Combining the two is the obvious move." Good to hear, Mint is so much better.

"Basically, we started out with a year that matched the Great Depression, but have since pulled back a bit from the edge of the abyss."

"So what's the proper amount of risk? A lot of people would say, "Gosh, zero?" OK, that sounds safe and reasonable. You worked hard to build your business; you're counting on it for your retirement and your kids' college and whatever. But if you're not taking any risks, you're pretty much guaranteed to fail. Somewhere, there's someone out there who is taking more risks than you, and that person's business is growing faster than yours, and that person's business may one day come to dominate your industry while yours withers away."

Very amusing.

"PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript. If you’re a web developer who wants to build mobile applications in HTML and JavaScript while still taking advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android and Blackberry SDKs, PhoneGap is for you."

"SimpleModal is a lightweight jQuery Plugin which provides a powerful interface for modal dialog development. Think of it as a modal dialog framework. SimpleModal gives you the flexibility to build whatever you can envision, while shielding you from related cross-browser issues inherent with UI development."

"This page contains the 252 allowed entities in HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0, as outlined in section 24 of the official HTML 4 specifications, published by the W3C."

Neat site that has a ton of ajax spinners available.

"To compete with thousands of iPhone apps in the App Store, having a good app icon is not enough. A nicely designed website for the app is very important. A beautiful website helps to drive traffic in and also makes your app stand out from the crowd. This post showcases a gallery of appealing iPhone app sites and common design trends that I see."