Damn You, Mark Pilgrim

All this week, I have been making the same mistake. I look at the clock and think "huh, I should go to bed soon. Maybe I'll just read a chapter of Dive Into HTML5 before I go to bed."

It is generally about two hours after this that I pull myself away from whatever fascinating and specific Wikipedia or Quora article or Joel on Software blog post or whatever I am currently reading, because Dive Into HTML5 is the TV Tropes of computer manuals.

Seriously, read the chapter A Quite Biased History of HTML5 and tell me if YOU can drag yourself away from it and its links. Browser wars! Extended quotations of Marc Andreessen's emails! Snarky commentary on the methods of standards bodies!

This thing is BETTER THAN THE DINOSAUR OPERATING SYSTEMS TEXTBOOK. (This is, for the record, the highest praise I can bestow on any book about computers.) But now I've got this fear that it's going to be like it was after that month where I read all the Sarah Vowell books. I went around wanting to tell people Exciting Facts! And the response was always "oh yeah, I think I read something like that in a Sarah Vowell book once." I am totally going to be all "BROWSER WARS!" and people will be like "oh yeah, that was an awesome chapter in Dive Into HTML5."

So far, the people on twitter I've enthused at have linked me to:
This snarky Pilgrim essay on XML
This commentary on the positive things IE did in the world of browser development

Oh also the wikipedia page on BROWSER WARS! Is amazing. But you already know that because you have read the chapter above, which links to it.