Dylan and I talked about Blink last night, as well as discussing our experiences at the Squeetup event we had that coincided with AEA’s opening night party.

Here’s Dylan’s recap of the podcast:

Kyle and Dylan talk through the implications of Google’s new Blink browser engine and what it means for the future of web standards. Also, a review of the Squeetup, a Joel Spolsky reference, and Dylan’s exhaustion causing a few too many pregnant pauses.

You can go listen to it now at 3rdaverad.io.

Last night I performed my normal Thursday ritual, carefully keeping the seals that hold the ancient ones in their slumber in the deepest trenches of the sea…

Er, I mean, joining co-host Dylan Wilbanks for another episode of Squirrel and Moose.

I’d like to think we’re hitting our stride at this point. We discuss Donglegate with an enforced 10-minute limit and what I think constitutes a fairly balanced, nuanced view. We then dive into a talk about Google Reader which nicely spins into a discussion about Google’s behaviors in general these days.

Here’s the synopsis, as cleverly put by Dylan:

Kyle and Dylan delve yet again into Yet Another Sexist Incident that ended with (almost) every party looking terrible, and then a long, rambling talk about the end of Google Reader and the Twilight Of The Web. Also, why there will never be another Jeffrey Zeldman, TV stations owned by flour mills, making AR-15 parts with 3D printers, raising girls to be programmers in a brogrammer world, and their inability to properly close out the episode.

Check it out: Squirrel and Moose: Episode 23 - Of Google And Men

Don’t let the big white paws or the limp way he hangs over the couch edge fool you.

He’s a mighty hunter.

Scratching that belly will bring you pain you’ve never imagined.

He will destroy you.

Now… if you you just happened to pet that chin of his… well, that would be ok. He’s not entirely heartless.

I have to deal with this guy every single day.

It’s torture.

I stayed up late Monday night (Tuesday morning) to watch a live feed of the Dragon spacecraft launch.

For the past decade I’ve felt pretty disheartened by the “amazing future” our 21st century is supposed to have been. Instead of cities on the moon and flying cars we’ve had the end of the shuttle program, hyper-partisan politics and rising sea levels.

But that night I was watching a rocket built and launched by a private company send its own spacecraft into space. Space! And it’s on its way to go dock with the ISS. How crazy is that?

At one point I was literally watching a live video feed from the spacecraft as it deployed its solar panels in outer space. I was watching this on my phone.

Suddenly we’re living in a 21st century where private spaceflight means that we’re going to be mining asteroids and possibly even sending men to Mars in my lifetime. Where the idea of spending a weekend in a hotel in space or taking a fancy cruise to Mars might be only pricey, and not prohibitive, options for everyday Joes.

Then my cat threw up all over the carpet.

From the top of a chair.

The splatter pattern of a cat throwing up on the floor from that height is epic.

My child-like wonder for the amazing potential of our era dissipated while I had to get out of bed and clean cat vomit in my boxers before it left a stain.

So we’ve got private spaceflight. Sweet. Somebody make me that robot butler I was promised already.

Still, good job, SpaceX. For me, the future of the human race got interesting again.

Edit: Roughly twenty minutes after I posted this, the W3C took action on the issue, insisting that the <time> element be placed back into the specification. You can read about it here. But please read on. It’s a good primer for the next time something like this happens.

Contrary to what you may have already heard, the <time> element hasn’t disappeared from HTML.

Yes, officially <time> is currently not part of the HTML spec. (Thanks to the muddle that is “HTML Living Specification” I’ll be honest and admit I’m not sure if is no longer part of HTML5 or it’s in some sort of Schrodinger’s Cat quantum-zombie state of existing in HTML5 but missing in the “ongoing HTML” that the WHATWG is proud to keep rolling down the conveyor belt.)

That doesn’t mean it’s not being used by authors (how’s Drupal builds, 2.6 million WordPress installs and the Boston Globe for you?) nor does it mean that is it not being used by user agents (ever-plucky Opera supports it).

What it means is that a single human being has decided that he doesn’t care for time one wit, and that a rather vague element called <data> can replace it instead.

This human is none other than Ian “The Benign Leviathan Dictator For Life” Hixie, editor for the HTML specification.

I could give you an explanation on how this scenario came to exist, but two Brits who are far more informed than I am (and likely slightly smarter) have made their own summaries. If you like knowing what’s going on (and I do) then go read them. These pair of fine gentlemen, Jeremy Keith and Bruce Lawson, both guest star in today’s comic as the good Doctor thanks to a little spot of regeneration, where they’re fighting the good fight against Hixie’s <data>leks.

Virtually every problem I have with a single person wielding so much power over such a fundamentally important pillar of the web as HTML can be summed up in this incident. <Time> is officially out, despite the lack of merit or consensus in that decision. And it took just one man to make that happen. Either through a lack of awareness or a genuine disregard for what authors are already doing, Ian has claimed incorrectly that <time> isn’t seeing adoption, isn’t useful, and should be canned. And because the only balance to his power is a rather tedious process to oust him, there’s no official remedy to bringing <time> back into the HTML fold than trying to convince him that its existence is a good thing.

From what I understand, it’s easier to keep red shirts alive on away missions than it is to change Ian’s opinion on something.

Fortunately, there’s a big difference between having no official remedy and having no remedy whatsoever.

As “authors”, we are the 99% of HTML5. We can follow Jeremy Keith’s sage advice:

We can make a stand and simply carry on using the time element in our web pages. If we do, then we’ll see more parsers and browsers implementing support for the time element. The fact that our documentation has been ripped away makes this trickier but it’s such a demonstrably useful addition to HTML that we cannot afford to throw it away based on the faulty logic of one person.

So as I said, <time> hasn’t disappeared from HTML. It’s still there on millions of sites already. And nothing is stopping us from putting it on millions more. It’s our chance to send those <data>leks packing. As soon as this post is finished I’m going to edit my site’s theme to make use of <time>. Hixie can go stuff it.

Occupy HTML5.