?!?! over iPhone 4, and I kind of am too^†, but I gotta tell ya, what’s really making me go ?!?! is Safari 5. Included:

• Safari reader, a feature that works much like Arc90′s popular Readability bookmarklet by detecting when the currently loaded web page has an article, and allowing the user to reformat the page in an easy-to-read, scrollable view that cuts the obnoxious ads out. What’s more, they actually go through every page of multi-page articles and concatenate them together for one seamless, easy reading experience. Say it with me: ?!?!

  Now, you might be thinking, “How are the content providers going to let this stand, when it could wreak havoc with their ad sales?” Well, grasshopper, its at least partly because when Safari is concatenating the pages’ content, it does a full HTTP request on each page, so the innocent kitten publishers who artificially split up short articles into 3 and 4 and more pages just to maximize ad annoyance views don’t have to worry about losing their accustomed number of ad-frame loads.

• A smarter address field, that no longer requires you to remember exact URLs; it searches within (rather than at the beginning of) the URLs and page titles in your history like Firefox has been doing for months (perhaps years) now. I’ve got two things to say to that: hallelujah, and about damn time.

• Never expected this, but sanctioned, easy to install, secure extensions, that can be developed in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. ?!?! Also, ROCK.

• Then, of course, is the improved HTML5 support and the ever more feature-packed web inspector, the icing and the cherry, respectively, on the sundae.

All in all, pretty ?!?! for me.

^† I gotta tell ya something else. Humble pie tastes terrible. Turns out my new cheapie phone doesn’t have much going for it other than its cheapness. I can at least get calls on it more reliably than the iPhone 2G, but text messages don’t work. At all. Seriously. All my friends have stopped sending me text messages, because literally more than half of their messages to me never get there. Not get there late, which sometimes happens too, but never get to me at all.

Then there are the times when I myself am trying to send a text, and the phone (a $*@#!^% Motorola i465) reports that the message was sent, though it actually wasn’t, and I’ll have no idea that the message never got out the door until I happen to reboot my phone days later, and all the recipients are asking me why they’re getting replies to their messages so late.

In fact, if I had an actual piece of crap the size of my phone, it’d be more useful, because then I could use it as fertilizer. This…thing isn’t worth the plastic it’s made of. So, well, iPhone 4. As much as I loathe and detest the idea of giving AT&T my money again, at least I’ll get a nice phone in the bargain.

That’s one way to do it. (hat tip)

In other news, the headline of the day is: “Adobe, You Brought An Advertisement To A Gun Fight.” Ha!

on the XHTML 2 working group; it will stop meeting after the end of this year, when its charter expires. I can’t say I’m happy about this, but I’m hoping the XHTML 2 folks will join the HTML 5 WG and help to work out some of the kinks there.

Update 2009/07/15 18:06—Here’s reaction from Keith and Zeldman.

Sanford emails? Another politician’s career takes a hit because of infidelity? Yeah, whatever. But those emails! Oh, purple prose! His speechwriter has to be cringing.

In all seriousness, though, for all the disgust and schadenfreude being aimed at his head, it appears that Sanford honestly loves this woman, and while infidelity is unforgivable in almost any circumstance, at least this is better than him boinking some intern for the hell of it.

here’s some data about the effect of Michael Jackson’s death on internet traffic:

Keynote Systems reported this evening that its monitoring showed performance problems for the web sites of ABC, AOL, CBS, CNN Money, MSNBC, NBC, SF Chronicle, and Yahoo! News. “Beginning at 5:30pm (EDT), the average speed for downloading news sites doubled from less than four seconds to almost nine seconds,” said Shawn White, Keynote’s director of external operations said. “During the same period, the average availability of sites on the index dropped from almost 100% to 86%. The index returned to normal by 9:15pm (EDT).”

I knew the nerds would come through.

sycophantic love fest that is sure to come the next few days, Lileks offers us some perspective:

But musically? As I said, Terry Lewis and Jimmy Jam had a far greater influence, and Prince a greater talent. Yes, he’s odd – a smaller, more agreeable set of demons, though, and he has an inexhaustible desire to create without freeze-drying every note into a crystalline framework, with every manufactured Yelp and Yip dropped in at the expected perfect moment.

I wouldn’t have felt any of this if the event wasn’t being treated as a near-fatal blow to Western Culture in some quarters. He called himself the King of Pop – after which fame and sales ebbed. Of the many lessons in his life, that may be the oldest.

That said: it’s no shame to have your best work behind you. It’s a pity to die young. It’s a testament to the work you did to be mourned by millions.

Talent of his caliber will be missed. And has been, truth be told, since around 1992.

Since this afternoon, my local mix station has been playing Michael Jackson every hour, on the hour in memoriam. I can only imagine that popular radio stations all over the world are doing something similar. When I went out to dinner this evening, the jukebox at the restaurant played 4 or 5 of his songs in the mere hour and a half I was there.

If there was a way to keep track of these things, I’d be interested to know just how much play, radio and otherwise, Michael Jackson got today. The numbers have got to be insane.

Michael Jackson died this afternoon—he was hospitalized earlier today after going into cardiac arrest.

For as much of a moonbat as he was in his later years, he was responsible for some of the best, most timeless pop songs of our time—I was just listening to Billie Jean on my stereo yesterday and wondering why they don’t make songs like that anymore. Talent of his caliber will be missed.

a well-deserved spanking to the New York Times for their foot-stomping tantrum over getting scooped by the WSJ on the Steve Jobs liver transplant story. Ruthless and brilliant.

(via)

And speaking of poor journalism, here’s a piece from a couple of months ago where PressThink‘s Jay Rosen took the Times to task for more lameness.