"Computer slang is developing pretty fast in Ukraine," she said.

The Mac and Linux communities even have their own word for people who prefer Microsoft Windows - віндузятники (vinduzyatnyky literally means "Windowers" but the "nyky" ending makes it derogatory).

"There are some original words with an unmistakably Ukrainian flavour," said Ms Pyrkalo.

The dreaded force-quit process of pressing 'Control, Alt, Delete' is known as Дуля (dulya).

"A dulya is an old-fashioned Ukrainian gesture using two fingers and a thumb - something similar to giving a finger in Anglo-Saxon cultures," she said.

"And you need three fingers to press the buttons. So it's like telling somebody (a computer in this case) to get lost."

That is ... beautiful.

*snif*

So my proposition is this: :hover as an web interface design tool going forward is going to be less and less important.

As to whether this is a good or bad thing I’m not sure.

When used elegantly it removes visual noise and improves the feel and functionality of the page; only revealing more detailed information when contextually relevant. Twitter does this: reply, retweet, favourite and delete all appear when you hover over an individual tweet. 37signals products also do this to hide drag controls as well as edit and delete links.

However, onmouseover and :hover have often been used as an excuse to temporarily hide complexity in the navigation, often as a compromise. The designer and/or UI team preach simplicity in both structure and visuals but the man holding the money demands an incredible hierarchy of constantly expanding suckerfish-style menus⁶ addressing every page in the site. We’ve all done the navigation-menu-hover-and-exacting-slide only to have the sought for menu item disappear as the pointer gets near.

What we do know is Apple is well aware of this. If you look at their own sites you’ll see that they’ve known this was coming for a long time. Look at the trailers site⁷. Each trailer page has a widget that requires a click (or tap) to open where a previous solution to hiding content might have been to hide until hover. You can also see their approach in the liberal use of lightboxes across their product pages.

I know a lot of web developers/designers are not going to like this.

Tough.

From now on, we need to design not just for mice, but also for sausage-like fingers that can't register a hover or mouseover event.

I'm sure you've heard the debate surrounding Flash and the future of the plugin-hobbled web. WebKit, the open source browser engine (the project's managed by Apple) that powers Safari, Google's Chrome, and a variety of other mobile browsers (it's the defacto standard for mobile devices) is really leading the pack when it comes to supporting new features in HTML5 & CSS3.

To make that point and show us all what we can expect to be able to do, they created the following: http://www.apple.com/html5/

It's obviously best in Safari or the latest nightly build of WebKit. However, just from my testing, many of the demos do work in Chrome as well. If you must use Chrome, Click the "Learn More" link to access the demos. The issue you'll see with Chrome is that they don't necessarily keep up with the latest WebKit updates as quickly as Apple does with Safari. That's why you may see some differences.

About the video demo: The HTML5 video tag allows you to integrate video within your website’s code. And Safari offers HTTP streaming, so playback quality dynamically adjusts to the available speed of wired or wireless networks — perfect for viewing on mobile devices such as iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch.

That dynamic adjustment of the bitrate is what we're trying to get working with Flash on Akamai. At some point, all browsers will be able to do it natively. That's what's so sweet about these emerging standards.

A plugin-free web. It's time. We just need content creators (my employer is one of them) to force the issue & push the other browser makers and dev tool makers (I'm looking at you, Adobe) to make it happen post haste.