This week’s.

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Via John Gruber I stumbled on The Unbearable Inevitability of Being Android, 1995. The article ignores key facts of the mobile market because they don’t fit the point the author wants to make.

People have the right to participate in re-enactments of historical platform wars, but they should not confuse them with reality.

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Ticket sales for Mobilism 2011 continues to exceed our expectations. The 50 early-bird tickets we released initially are now all but sold.

Since it’s going so well, we decided to release 25 extra early-bird tickets as of right now. So if you want an early-bird ticket that saves you €140 on a mobile web conference with John Resig, Jared Spool, Jeremy Keith, Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, and several other top-notch speakers, you shouldn’t wait too long.

When these last tickets are sold out, they will be really sold out. We will not release even more early-bird tickets.

Oh, and if you’re in the US rather than Europe, check out the Breaking Development conference, which is also focused on the mobile web. I’ll speak there, as will tons of other mobile speakers.

See you in May.

A quick Mobilism update before we enter the long dark Christmas time of the soul.

Mobilism 2011 takes place in Amsterdam on 12th and 13th of May. We opened ticket sale eight days ago, and already we found 27 attendees. Not bad for eight days just before the Christmas break.

Anyway, the offshoot is that if you want an early-bird ticket that saves you €140 on a mobile web conference with John Resig, Jared Spool, Jeremy Keith, Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, and several other top-notch speakers, you shouldn’t wait too long. If the 23 remaining early-bird tickets sell out, they’re ... well ... sold out. I even wonder if they’re going to last through the last few days of 2010.

See you in May.

Three news items that have nothing to do with each other, except they caught my eye yesterday and today, and might be of interest to others, too.

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Just now A List Apart published my Smartphone Browser Landscape article. Despite having written for ALA for more than ten years, this is only my fifth or so article. But it’s a nice one.

I started on this article back in July by writing down absolutely everything that web developers had to know about the smartphone market. It was about twice as long as it is now. ALA rejected this draft — and with good reason. It took me from July to October to figure out which bits web developers didn’t have to know right away, and that was a useful process.

Anyway, enjoy the article. No comments here; you’ll have to go to ALA for that.

I already mentioned this a little while ago, but now it’s official: Mobilism 2011, one of the first conferences dedicated entirely to mobile web development, will take place in Amsterdam on the 12th and 13th of May, and ticket sales have started.

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I’m currently seeking to make a complete list of WebKit-based desktop browsers, and I’d like to crowdsource it.

Below is the list I have so far; if you know of any other WebKit-based browsers that run on a desktop OS, please leave a comment and a link. I’m especially looking for Windows browsers. I'd like to hear about Linux browsers, but cannot install them.

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Web developers are quite annoyed that position: fixed doesn’t work on mobile browsers, but mobile browser vendors cannot afford to support it. This dilemma is unsolvable by the means we presently have at our disposal.

To offer a way out, I’m proposing to create a new position: device-fixed declaration better suited to the mobile scenario with its tiny screen and its zoom. The zoom aspect, in particular, is completely ignored by the spec, and so far mobile browsers haven’t found a good solution, either.

With a new value, fixed positioning could be split into a desktop and a mobile variant, and browsers could decide which one to support. That would allow web developers to devise separate solutions for desktop and mobile.

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