PUBLIC MARKS with search measure

While preparing my HTML workshop, I’ve been re-reading W3C specs in far further detail than I ever would’ve imagined. The reading experience is far from delightful. Not only is the text the entire browser width in measure, but it’s dense and laborious to read. No wonder browser vendors have traditionally missed subtle details.

The big challenge is to objectively measure both positive and negative consequences of such projects and to ensure all affected parties have an equal say in decision-making processes.

There are some things that the benchmark can't measure. Opera for instance has a very steady timing and never misses a frame. On my machine however, the benchmark still looks choppy - probably because the benchmark's timer isn't synchronized with the refresh rate of the display. Opera essentially renders frames that it never displays. The new requestAnimationFrame() could fix this, but it hasn't arrived in all browsers yet.

SQLite is very careful about measuring its memory usage and provides an API to access those measurements.  But in order to measure its own memory usage accurately, it adds 8 bytes to every allocation request in order to store the requested size at the start of the resulting heap block.  In doing so, it converts a lot of 1,024 byte requests into 1,032 byte requests.  Ironically enough, the slop caused by storing the requested size rendered the stored size inaccurate. 

A publisher can't depend on anything being broadly implemented just because some spec says a browser MUST do something. A MUST in a specification isn't a law; it provides no push. The only role a MUST in standard actually has is to provide a check-box for implementations; if the vendor of the implementation says "I implement standard X", they mean, among other things, "I follow every MUST in the spec, and I also follow every SHOULD except when I have a good reason not to, which I can explain". That's it. That's all the standard really does, is give you something to measure against.

On Tuesday, the Icelandic parliament is expected to introduce a measure aimed at making the country an international center for investigative journalism publishing, by passing the strongest combination of source protection, freedom of speech, and libel-tourism prevention laws in the world.

A very wise systems programmer once told me: “Don’t guess. Measure.”

Trees Near You helps you learn about more than 500,000 trees that live on New York City sidewalks. For any area of the city, from block to borough, you can see the different species that live there, and measure the environmental (and monetary!) benefits that these trees provide.

National Geographic sent Nichols to spend an entire year in California's redwood forest. His mission was to capture the majesty of some of the tallest trees on Earth, some of which date back before Christ. And if you've ever photographed in a forest, you'll understand the challenge this presented. There's no capturing the awe one feels before these monoliths that measure, in some cases, upward of 300 feet.