Compare Joel Spolsky reiterating his Fire and Motion riff, with John Robb on Boyd's OodaLoop

Read Joel on IE8, standards and the mother of all flame-wars.

He thinks it will "break the web".

Update : he's wrong (sort of) about Postel. The point is that Postel wasn't trying to make a reference implementation. There's be nothing to stop the W3 making a reference implementation of the spec. and just telling M$ etc. to conform or be non-standard. That's not Postel's job though. His law is designed to get a flawed communication system off the ground, not to ensure standards. (As Spolsky kind of admits)

Joel on the new CueCat.

Hmmmm ... ok, except that at some point taking photos with a phone is going to be easier than typing in a URL ... if not today, then sometime t in the future. And at that moment, this kind of thing starts to make sense. And actually I´m pretty sure I read about these things already being used in Japan.

Also, bar-codes (2D or otherwise) are still ways of giving ids to things, whose importance is only increasing, even if we eventually move on to RFIDs.

Joel on Excel VBA and on how MS losing it's "backward compatibility" religion is totally screwing itself.