History Politics Silver Screen
I don’t often write about movies on the Urban Mainframe. That’s odd in itself because I watch a lot of them and consider myself to be something of a movie buff. Having said that, my movie collection, I suspect, is that of a typical bloke. There’s lots of war, action, sci-fi and adventure films. There’s not a lot of drama. There’s only one or two “chick flicks” (oh come on, who doesn’t love Ghost?)
My collection is that of someone who doesn’t demand too much, intellectually, from his entertainment. I watch films to escape for an hour and a half — to be James Bond, Neo or Luke Skywalker. I don’t want to have to think too much when I watch a movie, I just want my imagination stimulated and the day-to-day tedium of life to be replaced with beautiful women, fast cars and lots and lots of explosions and gunfire.
You can probably appreciate then that, on being given for Christmas a sub-titled film with a dialogue spoken entirely in German, I wasn’t exactly filled with delight and anticipation. However, and to my great surprise, The Lives of Others turned out to be one of those rarest of films — one that captures the viewer’s attention from the moment it starts and holds it in a vice-like grip until the final credits roll.
Mark Pilgrim offers a fascinating insight into early HTML development and concludes with the interesting, yet arguable, statement, “The ones that win are the ones that ship.”
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.
That’s not to say that all shipping code wins; after all, Andrew and Intermedia and HyTime shipped code too. Code is necessary but not sufficient for success. And I certainly don’t mean to say that shipping code before a standard will produce the best solution. Marc’s <img> element didn’t mandate a common graphics format; it didn’t define how text flowed around it; it didn’t support text alternatives or fallback content for older browsers. And 16, almost 17 years later, we’re still struggling with content sniffing, and it’s still a source of crazy security vulnerabilities. And you can trace that all the way back, 17 years, through the Great Browser Wars, all the way back to February 25, 1993, when Marc Andreessen offhandedly remarked, “MIME, someday, maybe,” and then shipped his code anyway.
Desktop Wallpaper DWotW High Performance History Photography Research Vintage
Desktop Wallpaper of the Week: This week’s desktop wallpaper is this stunning shot by .mushi_king of one of my favourite aeroplanes, the remarkable Lockheed SR-71. The “Blackbird”, as it came to be known, was an advanced, long-range, Mach 3+ strategic reconnaissance platform developed at Lockheed’s famous “Skunk Works”. This amazing aircraft was so fast and flew so high that its standard defence against a missile attack was simply to accelerate!
History Internet Miscellanea Vintage
