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Personal Homepage of Matthew Wilcox

Matt is an English web designer based in Great Britain.

Those of you who don’t know me allow me to say hi, shake your hand (gents), give you a welcoming hug (ladies) and guide you to the about section.

Most recent enteries

EU plans longer maternity leave, employers give warnings

Exerpt / Summary

The fear is that Employers will think twice about hiring women of childbearing age. There's a simple solution. Give men equal rights to women; make paternity leave the same as maternity leave. This removes the ability to discriminate from the employer (there will be nothing to discriminate over), and it stops penalising men from enjoying the same family rights as women purely on the basis of gender. It's sexism, it's wrong.continue reading

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Posted:
Sat, 4th Oct 2008 at 21:29 UTC
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HTML5 to be released in 2022. W3C are officially a joke.

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The news that HTML5 is targeted to be released in 2022 came as the final nail in the coffin of the W3C and the current "Web Standards" movement for me. The W3C is dead, long live the W3C.continue reading

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Posted:
Thu, 11th Sep 2008 at 19:05 UTC
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Not-so-brief catch up

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It's been a while since I last jotted down what I've been up to, and as I've got a few photo's and some video I ought to do that really. Here we go:continue reading

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Posted:
Mon, 8th Sep 2008 at 17:28 UTC
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jQuery.com gets a redesign

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And it's brilliant. There are some complaints in the discussion that it looks unprofessional, but I think such criticism misses the mark. jQuery's mission statement isn't "technically brilliant framework" (though it is exactly that), jQuery was described as making JavaScript easier for "Designers, Developers, Hobbyists, Businesses". The entire point of jQuery is to remove the technical considerations and academic dryness of using standard JavaScript, and offer a far simpler method of getting the job done, that's accessible to non-tech-heads. So the design should appeal to that crowd, not to the big-headed boffins that like nothing more than data tables and pages of dry specification.continue reading

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Posted:
Fri, 29th Aug 2008 at 09:37 UTC
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IE8 Beta 2 is out, vast improvement, but misses the mark with standards compliance yet again

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175 days after Internet Explorer Beta 1 was released, the new Beta 2 is out and 'ready for everyone' as opposed to just developers. While there are some solid improvements (e.g., implementations of Firefox's "Awesome Bar", and Ubiquity like "Accelerators") it yet again misses the mark on standards compliance. The same trouble with Generated Content I reported from Beta 1 is actually worse in Beta 2, causing the tab to completely crash when you mouse over the thumbnail images. I can only assume IE8 hates CSS Generated Content. It first fails to generate it, and then it crashes the tab completely. Try it yourself by hovering your mouse over the thumbnails on this page (or any other thumbnails on this site).continue reading

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Posted:
Thu, 28th Aug 2008 at 11:37 UTC
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Apple, we just don't work together anymore. It's not me, it's you.

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Remember when Apple were the plucky alternative? Remember when they were cool and did things nice? Remember when they bitched about Microsoft abusing it's monopoly? Well I'm getting more than sick of Apple behaving in utterly putrid turgid ways, and I'm calling them out on it. iTunes at this point is simply a trojan-horse.continue reading

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Posted:
Sun, 24th Aug 2008 at 21:59 UTC
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A celebration of the internet pt.5

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Every now and then I like to string together a series of interesting video's I've found on the internet to share with you. The last one was "A celebration of the internet pt.4". As usual, this one starts off with a little music.continue reading

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Posted:
Sun, 17th Aug 2008 at 14:20 UTC
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The fundamental problem with CSS is it's reliance on the DOM

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I've already argued that CSS needs to borrow from programming languages, and I wonder if the arguments designers and developers are getting into over the future of CSS have a more fundamental cause than the one's debated so far. To my mind the crux of the issues is this: CSS currently operates on top of the Document Object Model - a base that is ill suited for the job CSS is asked to perform, namely, the visual presentation of a webpage. We need to stop using the DOM as the basis for visual tasks. Sounds odd, but please hear me out.continue reading

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Posted:
Wed, 13th Aug 2008 at 10:11 UTC
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Mozilla Labs: Aurora browser concept

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Adaptive Path are working with Mozilla to produce concept video's for far-future internet browsers. While this is interesting, I can't help but feel that the first showcase of Aurora misses the mark by a country mile.continue reading

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Posted:
Tue, 5th Aug 2008 at 21:10 UTC
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e-readers and the future of books

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I sparked off something of a discussion on one of the forums I frequent when I wrote about Amazon's Kindle e-reader, my post was this:continue reading

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Posted:
Tue, 5th Aug 2008 at 18:19 UTC
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External links

Of The Moment

A selection of noteworthy links I've recently discovered…

PHP5.3 alpha is out, PHP4 is now officially dead

PHP 4.4.9 was rolled out today, and marks the end of development for PHP4. So everyone jump to PHP5, now. PHP5.3 alpha was released today and includes namespaces; a feature planned for PHP6, but apparently pulled forward.

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Cuil, the new Google contender

Cuil is a new search engine with a larger index than Google, built by former Google employees. It’s very interesting. Here are my first impressions:

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37 Signals, makers of Basecamp, begin phasing out IE6 support

I’d love to see the numbers behind this, considering their market sector. At last, IE6 is starting to die!

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Showing web visuals to clients

This goes one step further than my usual approach. Normally I include the browser chrome in the graphic, so the design has context. This idea is even better and I can’t believe I’ve not thought of it myself.

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The botched launch of Firefox 3

The much anticipated release of the third version of the best browser in the world didn’t go particularly smoothly.

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PlainView, a full screen browser based on Webkit

I bet they wished they had heard of pressing F11 in Firefox. And then Ctrl+Tab to switch tabs. Would have saved them a whole lot of time.

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I am in love with Julia Nunes

Just discovered Julia Nunes, who plays great songs on her ukulele, and has a personality I would kill for. I just hope that Brigitte Dale doesn’t find out that I’m two timing my crushes on her.

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IE Tester - test websites in IE6, IE7 and IE8 at once

Very handy for web developers. Just choose the engine and see how IEx renders it. A lot less hassel than a Virtual Machine.

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Serve JavaScript frameworks faster

Rather than hosting your own copy of jQuery (or any other popular framework) simply use Google’s hosted copy instead. Their network is faster than yours, and if enough sites do it then visitors are likely to have it cached already.

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Socialising for the freelancer

Jonathon Snook talks about the social difficulties in going freelance, and how to avoid going days on end without any real human interaction.

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