It’s these kinds of integration tensions that remind me why I love the Web so much.<\/p>\n
So, apparently, Google went and updated its GMail site<\/a>, which caused a bunch of Greasemonkey<\/a> scripts to fail. Conspiracy theories ensued<\/a>.<\/p>\n Dare Obasanjo takes an extreme position on the issue<\/a>;<\/p>\n \nRepeat after me, a web page is not an API or a platform.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It might be extreme, but I think it’s also a reasonable position, as I expect practically all Web developers would laugh out loud at hearing that somehow the form<\/em> of the HTML they write is supposed to be, in some manner, “consistent” between versions. But I feel it important to note that HTML pages do, in practice, have some<\/em> important “platform” qualities.<\/p>\n Consider CSS style sheets<\/a>, and how they bind to HTML pages through the use of selectors<\/a> and the cascade<\/a>, both of which use information in the HTML; change the HTML in an “inappropriate” way – changing something that the CSS was depending upon – and whammo, broken Web site.<\/p>\n I hear you saying, “That’s different!”. Yes, it is, to a large extent. The HTML and CSS are authored by the same person (or at least are under the control of a single entity), so the interface between them does not constitute a public platform<\/em>, just a private one, providing value in the form of a separation of concerns – and the resulting improvement in reusability – to site authors.<\/p>\n But then again, not all style sheets are created equal! Consider user style sheets<\/a>, created by the end user for their own benefit, and applied by the browser on their behalf without any involvement of the server. For example, a visually impaired user could use them to increase the size of all fonts. As can be seen by some examples<\/a> though, they’re typically very generic, and so commonly use type selectors<\/a>, since they are generic to the HTML language, not specific to any site. And that’s certainly a best practice that I think is worth calling out;<\/p>\n \nFor maximum reuse, depend only on the language, not on the form of any particular instance of that language\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So, as I see it, this is all part of the ongoing battle between the Gods of Literature<\/a>; the writer, and the reader. That relationship is incredibly dynamic<\/em>, at least on a Web-historic time scale, with each side constantly pushing for more control. While I doubt there’s any balance to be found there, in either the short or long term, I would say that it’s interesting to observe that recent initiatives such as Greasemonkey<\/a>, Google Autolink<\/a>, and even microformats<\/a> (by virtue of the information they add to a page making it more reusable for readers) are finally giving the reader their due after years of largely appeasing the writer.<\/p>\n