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Installing software people didn’t request erodes trust. It’s especially repugnant when it hitches a ride with a security or version update. Marshall Kirkpatrick’s right: downloading software has to be opt-in, not opt-out.

As technologists, we want up to date users. Beyond the real user-safety issues, it frustratingly holds us back. The oldest browser is the lowest common denominator and holds us all back. But sneaking new software into the sacred realm of auto-updating flows is unwise. We cannot take advantage of users at the exact moment we want them to trust us blindly and reflexively.

Multiple Apple products are within arm’s reach. My first technology experience several decades ago was on an Apple product. Love ‘em, but they should know better.

I’m glad John wrote his post.

I’ve heard about various services that charge a flat rate to chop Photoshop (etc) files into clean (X)HTML and CSS, generally for a flat fee and quick turnaround. The topic came up today when a freelancing application developer buddy asked me about this type of service.

So this morning I asked my twitter followers (follow me!) which services they knew of. Here’s what came back (in a matter of minutes - gotta love twitter!):

• psd2html.com
• w3-markup.com
• xhtml-slice.com
• slicerus.com
• xhtmlit.com
• xhtmlized.com
• xhtmlgenius.com

Then @jasonw22 pointed out that Jonathan Snook (a hero of mine) has a list of about 20 such services, and just this week posted a review of his experience auditioning the psd2html service.

If you’ve used any of these services, I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments below (and of other services you may know of or recommend).

I’ll report back on my friend’s experience.

(I must mention, in closing, that I’m skeptical of such services. I’ve spent the last several years of my career promoting the professionalism of frontend engineering, and so I have a twang of fear that these services are a step in the wrong direction. Then again, perhaps services such as these — if, in fact, the quality is there — prove that some aspects of “professional grade” web development are now par for the course. Jury’s still out.)

Congratulations to my friend and colleague Stoyan Stefanov for the publication of Yahoo!’s Latest Performance Breakthroughs after presenting them at the PHP Quebec Conference in Montreal last week. The 20 new tips bring to 34 the total performance tips his team at Yahoo! has published in the past two years.

Stoyan (who authors the phpied.com blog) is part of an established tradition of Yahoo! sharing performance research publicly and widely. Stoyan’s teammate Tenni Theurer concluded the official blog post announcing these data and findings by saying, “We share our findings so that others can join us in accelerating the user experience on the web.”

I agree. That’s why I was honored to help disperse their 14 Rules for Faster Web Sites in my presentation at the @Media conference in London last year.

And that’s why it was a special honor to write the foreward to Steve Souders’ High Performance Web Sites book for O’Reilly last year. (Steve used to head up the Performance team at Yahoo!.) In the foreward I tried to express why performance matters to professional frontend engineers:

Here is why it matters. As a frontend engineer, you hold a tremendous amount of power and responsibility. You’re the users’ last line of defense. The decisions you make directly shape their experience. I believe our number one job is to take care of them and to give them what they want—quickly. This book is a toolbox to create happy users (and bosses, too). Best of all, once you put these techniques in place—in most cases, a one-time tweak—you’ll be reaping the rewards far into the future.

Read more about Yahoo!’s Latest Performance Breakthroughs on the Yahoo! Developer Network site.

Douglas Crockford has a plan for Fixing HTML. I think it makes sense. His proposal is a static document, but comments are collected on his related blog post.

In the comments you’ll see a few issues pop up (empties, quotes, get-bys), but after further reflection I think they are without merit.

Alex Russell (of Dojo fame) has an good post up right now called Browser.Next in which he lists 10 key things browsers need to give us poor developers so we can do our jobs without going insane. Here’s the list, but head to his blog to read the details:

1. Event Opacity
2. Long-Lived Connections
3. Expose [DontEnum] To Library Authors
4. Fast LiveCollection -> Array Transforms
5. Provided A Blessed Cache For Ajax Libraries
6. Mutation Events
7. onLayoutComplete
8. HttpOnly cookies
9. Bundle Gears
10. Standardize on the Firebug APIs

I’ve long felt that the balance of power between web developers and browser vendors is out of whack: for every one developer working on the browser itself there are probably 1000 web developers at companies around the world toiling endlessly, struggling to overcome the shortcomings and weaknesses of the browsers. It’s wrong. It’s wasteful. It’s expensive - a drain on the economy, and serious sand in the gears of what should be the world’s most powerful innovation platform.

And so, from that perspective, I’m very happy to see visible developers like Alex telling the world (*cough* browser vendors *cough) what needs to change. He’s got a good list of comments going over on his blog - I hope you’ll join in the rally.

I let the cat out of the bag about the forthcoming YSlow plugin for Firebug during my @media presentation (High Performance Web Sites) last month. But the wait is finally over and I’m happy to let you know that Steve Souders, Yahoo!’s Chief Performance Yahoo! (and the guy who’s data I used in my presentation), made the announcement during his session at OSCon yesterday.

YSlow has three main views: Performance, Stats, and Components. Performance view scores the page against each performance rule, generates an overall YSlow grade for the page, and lists specific recommendations for making the page faster. Stats view summarizes the total page weight, cookie size, and HTTP request count. Components view lists each component (image, stylesheet, script, Flash object, etc.) in the page along with HTTP information relevant to page load times. It also contains several tools including [Douglas Crockford’s] JSLint.

Give YSlow a try, your users will thank you. And for more about performance, check out the Exceptional Performance section on the Yahoo! Developer Network.