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Selling a house is always so much work.  We’ve been painting window sills and ceilings, cleaning windows and putting way more effort into our lawn than usual. 

It’s a shame I can’t just make a backup of the house every couple of years and then restore it.

It should be interesting to see if the Mozilla Foundation can push out a cairo-based Gecko 2.0 engine with SVG and foreignObject support before Microsoft gets XAML out the door with Longhorn.  Having SVG+foreignObject available in every browser would open up a lot of new potential for web development without flash.

From what I’ve read, Robert O’Callahan at X-Tech demoed SVG rotating a Cairo-rendered Google homepage.  Amazingly, you can still interact with rotated page as you would a normal page.  This looks like some of the stuff that has been coming out of the XAML camp over the last little while. 

I tried out the Google Web Accelerator today - it’s an interesting product that likely is helping Google as much as those that install it.  I’ve seen a number of people discussing how Google can use it to silently spider the web.  Interestingly, a packet trace discovers that data flows upward from the user’s computer to Google’s servers - likely sending the data back to Google’s cache.

I wonder if this is similar to the “rsync HTTP cache” idea that was floated a while back.  It used a form of delta compression - possibly what this Google Accelerator product does.

The new <canvas> tag might be useful in building a smoother and more functional Google Maps implementation than Google currently has. 

Instead of pasting images together and scrolling them as necessary, you could blit them to the canvas at the appropriate location using drawImage().  Drawing routes on top of the map would be a simple transparent line drawing operation.

You could also write tile-based games that ran in a web browser without plugins.  Think nethack or Freeciv implementations.

Looks like the <canvas> tag has landed on the Mozilla trunk.  More info available in bug 288714.

Brendan Eich sums it up pretty nicely in the bug comments:

We are turning canvas on – it’s already on by now.  Get over it.  Nothing in a relatively new spec is set in concrete, but that does not prevent useful work from being built on it.  This is how the Internet protocols, and then the web, were built.  Welcome back to incremental innovation.  The lull of six years of monopoly-induced stagnation is over.