mahiwaga

I agree that Microsoft should have to deal with their own backward-compatibility quagmire without burdening web developers. The author brings up the IE-dependent components of Windows and other legacy, propietary software solutions (for example, the emergency department at one of the hospitals I work at uses an IE-dependent computerized physician order entry (CPOE) and charting system) and these are less trivial to upgrade to standards-compliance than a web site would be.

But why bother web developers with having to add kludges to their already standards-compliant code?

What Microsoft will probably need to do is continue to support two modes of operation: (1) legacy-brokenness and (2) standards-compliance. The default will have to be legacy-brokenness because, as the author of the article points out, it may not be trivial to add meta tags to legacy code. IE8 will probably have to continue relying on DOCTYPE declarations to figure out if it needs standards-compliant rendering.

While this may seem to be just as burdensome to web developers, at least it’s already a documented standard. And while it may seem to tacitly acknowledge IE6/IE7 as the de facto web standard, the browser scene is no longer hegemonically dominated by Microsoft, with the emergence of Firefox, Safari, and most importantly, web browsers that run on mobile phones. Anyone today who develops a site or webapp explicitly for IE6/IE7 is asking for a stream of angry phone calls about their site or webapp not rendering properly on the growing number of non-IE platforms.

The MacBook Air is clearly not meant to be a primary machine. Understandably, there are many of us who do use a notebook computer as their only computer, and we are not going to be the target demographic. But there’s something to be said for a computer that only weighs 3 lbs. Face it. Minimalism is beautiful. Why do you think European sports cars sell so well?

Seriously, if you’re only going to be using the Air on-the-go, what the hell do you need all those other ports for? I mean, are there really people who need to be editing their digital movies while they’re sitting on the ground at JFK waiting for their delayed plane? And if you insist on having more ports, then you’re just going to have to get yourself a USB hub. (I’m surprised that Apple isn’t selling those, too.)

As for people who want to use the Air to do Powerpoint/Keynote presentations, all you need is the mini-DVI to VGA connector. And in reality, all the presentations I’ve done have had to be copied onto the machine actually hooked up to the projector because everyone is paranoid about disconnecting the wires, and nobody ever seems to be able to get things running again once they do.

One thing that would be cool, though, is if Apple supported target disk mode through USB like how they support it through Firewire.

In any case, if you have objections about the lack of ports on the MacBook Air, then it’s clearly not for you. You’d do better to wait for Apple to release this machine instead.

It is interesting to note that Apple was the first computer manufacturer to abandon the 3.5” floppy disk. They were extensively ridiculed and derided for it. And yet, who still uses those dusty relics of the 1990s? You can’t even fit an entire mp3 on it. Some of my Excel and Powerpoint documents wouldn’t even fit, even after compression.

Does this mean that it’s only a matter of time before everyone gets rid of their extraneous ports?

Well, maybe. This article from 2005 is remarkably prescient about the prospect of Apple being the first to enter the realm of cloud computing and ubicomp. With nothing but wi-fi, Bluetooth, a solid-state 64Gb drive, and a multi-touch trackpad, you’ve got the entire world at your fingertips.

(For those of you moaning about the lack of dedicated WWAN hardware for the Mac, explain to me how this would be significantly different from connecting through your cel phone to access the net via GPRS or EDGE?)