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» Martin L. de Vore makes a convincing case explaining why XML has not made more significant in roads in the web development community.

Simon St.Laurent brought up the question last week on the XHTML mailing list.

» Slideshow: XML's Impact on Web Development.

» Zoinks. The amount of useful information in A List Apart's 99th issue is astounding. It's all about coding to standards.

Also, don't miss the controversial new browser upgrade campaign from the WaSP. I can hear a zillion web developers right now complaining "we can't do that, we run a commercial site here!" and they are probably right. But I hope that independent content producers will seriously consider the call from the WaSP to hasten the demise of late-version browsers by coding sites for the standards and the browsers that support them, and sending late-version browsers to polite "please upgrade" pages.

Oh, and for related reading, check out Scott Andrew's call to arms from last November: The Browser War: Nobody's fault but yours.

» For those of you wondering why my posts have been so few and far between lately, well I'm going to tell you. Buying a building is stressful. Buying two is doubly so. Selling a house is stressful. Getting a house ready to sell is a pain in the ascot. Long cold winters are depressing. Being sick is draining. Having your 2 year-old daughter also sick, and having her wake up in the middle of the night hallucinating from fever is especially wearying. Elusive, ongoing memory leaks in web servers are frustrating. Failed RAID controllers are maddening. Expensive hardware solutions are worrying.

And man, I'm not even 25!

Oh wait, I'm 30.

» Well, it ain't over until the the fat lady rolls over, but at least common sense has won a minor victory. Wired News reports that yesterday a federal appeals court ruled in Barners & Noble's favor in the ridiculous Amazon one-click patent case:

In its ruling, the court found that "Barnes & Noble has mounted a serious legal challenge to the validity of Amazon's patent." For that reason, the court tossed out a preliminary injunction issued against Barnes & Noble by a lower court last year, which prevented the company from using a one-stop shopping feature called Express Lane.

» The online sample chapter from Wrox's Professional XML Databases is on creating XML Structures for existing databases.

» From the W3C: Common User Agent Problems.

This document explains some common mistakes in user agents due to incorrect or incomplete implementation of specifications, and suggests remedies. It also suggests some "good behavior" where specifications themselves do not specify any particular behavior (e.g., in the face of error conditions).