04.16.08
Posted in History, Life at 3:43 am by Smokey
I’m feeling old tonight. I read (via John Gruber) that Stan Flack, co-founder of MacCentral (and later MacMinute), had died.
As I read the posts from his former co-workers and friends in the Mac community, I began to wonder…had it really been nearly 15 years since I’d started following the Mac web? I remember when MacCentral switched from publishing every-other-day to daily, I remember how MacCentral would always commemorate Remembrance Day (Stan was Canadian; it’s Armistice Day or Veterans Day to the rest of us), and I remember the tiny little icons that MacCentral used in the early days to help differentiate the story type.
In fact, it’s those little icons (part of a bygone era on the web, and perhaps happily so) that are the reason I’m writing this at all. Shortly after a redesign in which they disappeared, I sent a little note to MacCentral’s feedback address politely lamenting their demise. Much to my surprise, I later received a response from none other than Stan Flack, Publisher of MacCentral, himself. The email is lost to the depths of time, but I recall him thanking me for the feedback, explaining why the icons went away, adding that he missed them a bit, too, and he’d look to see if there were other ways to use them (or something to that effect). The top guy responding to inconsequential feedback himself. I can’t claim to have known him, but from reading what others have written, that was the kind of person Stan Flack was.
As for those little icons, maybe it’s just my mind, but I’ve always thought that MacCentral’s post-redesign site logo and, later, its site icon (
) were reminiscent of those little globe-like icons that made reading only the stories I was interested in so easy. Those days seem so long ago and far away now….
And so, feeling older and with a sadness over the untimely passing of one the Mac web’s pioneers and enduring figures, I offer my happy memories of one of the greatest Mac news sites during the golden age of the Mac web, and of the man behind it, and I offer my condolences to the family and friends of Stan Flack.
Posts from some of Stan Flack’s friends and former co-workers:
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01.01.08
Posted in History, Software at 9:57 pm by Smokey
While the rest of the web is marking the ignominious final death of the browser bearing one of the greatest names of the pre-War Internet, I want to lament the death of a very different thing, a remarkable yet unheralded rendering engine.
Today marks the public release of iCab 4.0, which uses WebKit as its rendering engine. The accompanying notice urging anyone using Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher to use iCab 4 is a pretty good sign that the iCab 3 rendering engine has reached the end of the line.
iCab 3 made its semi-public debut (to registered iCab users) towards the end of December 2004, with a completely rewritten engine that boasted of CSS 2.x support second-to-none and rendered the web as it was intended in 2004. Given the hype surrounding Safari’s support of the CSS text-shadow property in those days, iCab went one better and supported the property more correctly and completely.
Other things I remember about iCab 3.0’s HTML/CSS support were the inline-block property (not available in Gecko until the forthcoming Gecko 1.9) and proper rendering of the <q> element per-language, with no additional work required by the author (which neither Gecko nor WebKit could do) beyond actually specifying the language of the element. And, unlike in WebKit or Gecko, text content inserted via CSS pseudo-selectors (like properly localized quote marks, necessary for correct display in WebKit and Gecko) was selectable and copyable, so none of the content, which was unfortunately shoehorned into presentation to work around other bugs in those rendering engines, would be lost.
To be sure, iCab 3 had its fair share of bugs, some of which persisted right to the end. Nevertheless, the belated appearance of iCab 3’s first semi-public preview (some two years, I think, after its first announcement as iCab 2’s forthcoming successor) turned a lot of heads. Beyond saying ”you can no longer write iCab off as a ‘not a modern browser,’” iCab 3 ran on versions of the Mac OS as old as 8.5 (yes, that’s the “classic” Mac OS; 8.5 was released in October of 1998), promising modern browsing to all PPC Macs (the first of which were released in April 1994!).
The other notable feat accomplished by the iCab 3 rendering engine was to become the second rendering engine, and the first to release a semi-public or public build (available to all registered users on May 20, 2005), to pass the Acid2 test of various web standards in May 2005.
Having laid out these feats of strength, it is time to remind everyone of the most shocking fact about iCab: all of this was done by one person, Alexander Clauss.1
In spite of all the obstacles the modern web threw at browser developers, the fact that one man could single-handedly write an entire rendering engine that “kept up with the Jonses” and ran natively on Mac OS 8.5-Mac OS X 10.5 inclusive is nothing short of miraculous.
iCab the browser UI was never a thing of great beauty, but it was functional and included innovative features, many of which, to my knowledge, still have not been copied.
- Most renowned for its powerful if clumsy filter manager, iCab was one of the first to provide configurable ad, script, and pop-up blocking.
- iCab also could detect if a local web page you were working on had changed and would reload it automatically, which shaved hundreds of thousands of keystrokes or clicks off of website development. That, and the built-in HTML checker (behind the famous “smiley”) made iCab an author’s friend.
- iCab also was a pioneer of an “open,” portable web archive format; unlike Gecko, iCab didn’t rewrite pages, forget to include referenced files, or require collecting files and folders before transfer, and unlike Internet Explorer, an iCab web archive was a
.zip file that could be carried to any computer, unzipped, and used effectively.
- iCab’s download manager was homely and complex, but it was one of the first web browsers to support resumable downloads (by contrast, the forthcoming Firefox 3 will finally support this feature). You could also choose to “download” all or part of a site, either as individual pages or as a web archive.
- iCab got “don’t load images”/“load images” correctly; it was possible to turn off image loading by default and then load individual images if desired, something modern browsers have forgotten. And iCab’s “offline mode” was actually still functional in the mid-2000s.
- One of iCab’s more recent innovations was the ability to visually indicate the target of an anchor when arriving via a link (e.g., the footnote link above that points to the footnote anchor below). Proposed in the iCab mailing list by user Daniel Beardsmore, this was implemented in iCab 3 as a light blue bar that fades out over the location of the anchor on the page.
All of this while keeping up with the ever-changing world of rendering web pages.
Amazingly, it seems most of these browser features have been tacked on to the new WebKit-based iCab 4, and perhaps freed of the job of writing a rendering engine, Mr. Clauss can continue to innovate more quickly—if fighting the quirks and bugs of three versions of WebKit doesn’t eat up this time.
In the end, the waves of browser sniffing that plague “Web 2.0” and a slow and somewhat buggy Javascript/DOM implementation (technologies on which “Web 2.0” is built) likely proved too much for iCab’s home-grown rendering engine.
Still, it is a day of sadness for the three-year life2 of one of the most amazing rendering engines the world has ever seen—and for the end of browser development for the classic Mac OS. Let us raise a glass to the passing of one of the last independent rendering engines, to its successes, and to the good years of browsing it gave us. Adieu….
1 iCab 3 used the external InScript JavaScript engine, written by Thomas Much. ↩
2 The iCab rendering engine is much older, of course, originating in CAB on the Atari (TOS) in the mid-90s and arriving on the Mac in late 1998/early 1999. Similar to how Gecko was an entirely new rendering engine than the engine in Netscape 0.x-4.x, it’s exceedingly likely that the engine in iCab 3 shared nothing with its predecessor, save for the fact it powered the iCab browser. ↩
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06.30.07
Posted in History, Open Source, Software at 2:07 am by Smokey
A long, long time ago, in a galaxy, er, back in the late 80s and early 90s, WordPerfect was the dominant word processor, ubiquitous (try finding commercial software today available on that many platforms) and powerful. The Mac version was Mac-like, a good citizen, easy to use and uncluttered yet still powerful (in fact, in 2007, the last released version, 3.5, dating to 1995—with a small but not insignificant update to 3.5e in 1997—does everything I’ve ever wanted to do with a word processor, save Unicode, and I’ve wanted to do some above-average things).
If you’ve been using computers since the late 80s or early 90s, or perhaps went to school in the mid/late 90s at an institution with a Novell network, chances are you have a collection of old WordPerfect documents. Fortunately (if you have any need of the data in those documents), some fine folks have created a very good file format translator (libwpd) for WordPerfect documents, which is available stand-alone and is also incorporated into open-source programs such as AbiWord, KWord, NeoOffice, and OpenOffice.org, and commercial products such as Nisus Writer Express. Currently libwpd supports most features of most common WordPerfect file formats, but the big missing piece was images. After all, everyone has some sort of images in their documents: logos in company letterhead, figures in reports or papers, clip art in family newsletters.
Last summer, the file format translator (libwpg) for the WordPerfect image format really took off, thanks to Ariya, but there was still no way to get a WordPerfect document with an image to open in any of those other applications and include the image. So close, but so far away….
This week Fridrich has been working on finally bringing libwpd and libwpg together, so that WordPerfect documents with images can be opened by other applications and retain their images—and the result looks good! Things are still rough, and and some images still won’t be converted properly, but you can see it with your own eyes; a new hope for old WordPerfect documents with images.
Thanks, Fridrich, Ariya, and all the other libwpd and libwpg hackers; this is indeed an exciting day!
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05.28.07
Posted in History, Life at 9:06 pm by Smokey
As the sun sets and the flags are lowered, as burgers give way to frozen treats and thoughts of summer, pools, and fireworks, let us remember.
To those of you serving our country today, we salute you; to those of you who have served our country in the past, we honor you; to those of you who are no longer with us, we hold tight to your memory, always.
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11.01.06
Posted in History, Life at 1:20 am by Smokey
If you’re reading this, you must have found me. I’ve had a spot on the web since 1996, but in that decade I’ve had five different URLs (2 at GeoCities, Mac.com, Mindspring, and now ardisson.org) and a mind-bogglingly large number of email addresses.
In the process of consolidating all these URLs and addresses over the past few weeks, I’ve realized just how much junk
I’ve set loose on the internet and how much is still sitting there, decaying. As a historian, it’s comforting to see some bit of permanence on the web, but at the same time it’s a bit like coming upon this library that has been sitting around, uncared for and with a leaking roof, for a decade. Links are broken, pages are gone, and as a consequence, some pages are really only halfway there, not unlike a decaying book 
All that is just a long way of saying I’ve moved, but parts of me are still strewn across ten years worth of the web
—and that all my attempts at a meaningful first post have fizzed out after a paragraph 
Update: It occurred to me today that, aside from a handful of browser testcases, there are likely no pages on ardisson.org that are HTML 4 Strict, nor are there any that even validate (no matter what DOCTYPE they declare). That’s detritus of an entirely different kind; more on that in the future.
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