Entries for October 2013

October 9, 2013

Interview with me on the “Unprofessional” podcast

I’m the guest on this week’s episode of Unprofessional, the podcast where Dave Wiskus and Lex Friedman have conversations with people about anything other than their profession.

Okay, we talk about my profession a little bit. But we also talk about ideas, hotel service (perhaps a little too much), and John Turturro’s daily routine, so if any of these things sound remotely interesting, give a listen below or check out their website where you can also hear previous episodes.

Thanks for having me on!

October 8, 2013

I wrote it, you made it: A Spoiler Tag

Well that was fast. On Thursday I proposed a new standard HTML tag for redacting spoilers. It could be customized with an expiration date (for things that don’t need to be redacted long term) and had some other features I’d like to see.

Well, it’s not an HTML standard yet, but Google Engineer Michael Ashbridge did come up with a way for people to add this feature to their own websites using Google’s Polymer library.

Check out his demo to see what his implementation looks like and how you can use it.

Awesome. Now do any of my readers have a contact at the W3C?

October 3, 2013

Idea: A Spoiler Tag

I think HTML needs a <spoiler> tag. Compliant browsers would automatically redact anything contained within it.

For further granularity, you could have support for <spoiler kind=”XXX”> where XXX might be “Breaking Bad” or “US Open” or “Cheers Final Episode” or whatever. Then when you visit a page, your browser would note at the top: “Warning: This page contains spoilers for Breaking Bad, US Open, and Cheers Final Episode” with an option to redact some or all of those things.

Your browser could remember your preferences across websites, so if you chose to redact spoilers where kind=”Breaking Bad” on one site, that will be the default behavior on other sites until you turn it off in the spoilers preferences, which keep a running list of spoiler kinds you’ve encountered.