Standards

There is a lot of talk about supporting interfaces across many devices, so I did a bit of research about where the industry sees itself going over the next few years. In terms of cross-platform programming languages, the main contenders are JavaScript (used with the W3C approved languages that it integrates well with), ActionScript (used with Flash) and Java. While Java is a wonderful language, it is not suited to the client side of the modern web, and it is the web paradigm that I am really considering here, so I will discount Java from this discussion. That just leaves Flash versus Open Web technologies, which I had increasingly thought was a battle that had been decided in the Open Web’s favour, but occasionally people get the impression that Flash will be a viable technology into the foreseeable future, and that it is preferable to using Open Web technology. It is the relative position and future of these two platforms that I have investigated, and I detail my findings below.

When writing code, it is good to be consistent about how you use whitespace. When collaborating with others, it can actually be detrimental to your group’s productivity if there is a mix of systems, so the sensible thing is to pick a standard early on and stick with it (even if that standard only defines the on-disk format, and individual programmers use editors which present the code to them in the way that works best for them). The policies that people choose may be partly a matter of taste, but there can still be logical reasons for preferring one system over another. Even though everyone weighs different pieces of evidence differently, I am going to state the whitespace system I use for my personal projects and list its good points. Maybe it will inspire someone into agreeing with me, or at least help them to be clearer about which system they prefer and why.

I have recently been looking over some interesting Wikipedia articles which deal with questions such as “When did certain wars actually end?” and “Who is the real monarch of England?” They seem to present what I call “Revisionist Present Realities” or RPRs, where the events of the past are reinterpreted in a revisionist light, and lead to unorthodox views of the present reality. I have thus been inspired to document my own RPR dealing with the history of the Christian Church. Despite the fact that the very term “protestant Pope” is contradictory to some (and unthinkable to others), I go in search of the identity of this mythical character, and, in a dramatic break with tradition, actually succeed in finding him. I’ll give you a clue: it’s probably not who you think it is, as I don’t suppose he even realises himself that he fits this description.

Email is an open standard, or several standards, as well as being many other things, such as a means of communication. Something that people might consider from time to time is “Why there is so much unsolicited bulk email?”, although for some people the answer is obvious. Others might not ever ask themselves that question, even if they use email, because they believe the spam problem has been beaten, but it hasn’t, and it is costing email providers and society a lot of money. I have been thinking about this issue myself recently, and on and off for a while, and I have some thoughts about it. While I have neither come up with a means for ending all spam, nor decided that the current email system should be abandoned, I do have a collection of thoughts which help me frame the issue and might help other people in some way.

I haven’t written many blog posts about open standards recently, and that’s possibly because all the old standards are too boring and the new ones are too immature, but I think that OpenID has now matured enough and is seeing enough adoption that it is reasonable to comment on it. It is also receiving a lot of criticism, and, while I don’t like to get caught up in knee-jerk arguments, I do feel that there are some legitimate concerns that people have about this promising standard, which I might be able to address with a coherent defence of it in this blog post. Fortunately the defence I’ve come up with should answer many of the objections to OpenID at the same time, as it puts forward a very different way of looking at the technology, one which may not be obvious to people when they first learn about it. I will first state my idea clearly for the record, then deal with any criticism I can imagine being levelled against it.

With recent events I have had Europe on my mind a lot, so there are a couple of ideas that didn’t fit into the previous mammoth blog post. In fact, as that one was so big, I think I can afford to make this slightly shorter and less coherent. The major topics I intend to cover are a debate about Europe with a German friend and a missed example of a European sentence. These may not sound particularly interesting to people, so perhaps I should create a new “Europe” category for my blog posts, allowing people who subscribe to filter out posts like that. When I think about categorising, though, I can’t help wishing that Serendipity’s bug number 1161317 (actually a feature request) concerning “Checkbox enabled entry editing” was solved, as that way I could have great fun going back and refactoring all my previous posts. Anyway, fortunately for people who aren’t interested in what I have to say about Europe, the next section below does mention “standards”, which is a topic that has been languishing recently.

Having looked in my Mystery Box of potential topics for blog posts, I’ve found a couple of things which are relatively short and don’t really make sense on their own. The first is an observation about key combinations on the command line, and the second is a joke which came to me recently and I wanted to publish before someone else came up with it independently. By my calculations, the first half of the post will be technical enough to justify writing this, and the second half will be funny enough to justify someone reading this, but not by much.

Open standards create value. Not the exclusive sort of “value” which means blocking competitors from entering the market, but the inclusive sort, where anyone can benefit from the low barriers to entry and compete based on the quality of what they build using those standards. Of course, you already know this or at least I don’t need to explain it again, but sometimes ideas can be made more reusable (for inspiring other ideas) with the help of a good example. You could say that human memory itself is an open standard, in that the means for committing an idea to memory (at least temporarily) is well known: memory is automatic.

Freedom and copyright

I have long intended to blog about my personal views on licensing software, not least because the software I write and publicise here should be accompanied by the reasoning behind the choice of licence. Previous posts have probably made clear that I have benefited from [Free] Software, that is, software which is licensed in a way that gives licensees the Four Freedoms (no, not those Four Freedoms). It is thus easy for me to see the advantage to society and the overall economy that Free Software brings, and correspondingly hard for me to justify licensing my own software in a way that disadvantages society and the economy. If my software were of unusually high value (or I were unusually remote from society and the economy) there might be some net value to me in restrictively licensing my software, but to base my decision on that alone assumes that I am not prepared to make the slightest sacrifice (or equivalently, the slightest effort) to improve society or the economy.

That title is probably enough to put off most people from reading this post, but it might be enough to convince someone searching for a solution to their problem that this post can help them. If you are impatient, skip to the end where I give the one-liner change, but for the rest of you who want to understand the context, read on.

Yes, I have a new mobile phone. The word “new” is redundant, however, as it is the only mobile phone I own, or have ever owned. To give a full record, I should mention the times I borrowed an old family mobile while away at university, but as I didn’t use it between terms, and didn’t pay the bill on it, and didn’t carry it around with me, I don’t think that counts.

I suppose this raises the obvious question of “Why not earlier?” or “Why now?”. Well, to some extent, the longer you go without a mobile, the easier it is, but those occasional moments where owning a phone would prevent one from having to wait around somewhere, or would enable one to do the polite thing of passing on useful information, start to add up. The more general principle, however, is that, when faced with accelerating change, with technology being out of date before you even get it home, the most sensible policy I have for making buying decisions is:

“Decide what the perfect form of this product is, then wait for it to exist.”

Optionally one can add:

“Then wait for the price to go down.”

which is an almost inevitable occurence. There is also a corollary to this:

“Then when you get it, keep telling yourself you don’t need anything else.”

Introduction

Yes, another installment of my views on recent and classic standards. A mountain of standards have come to my attention, making me think I should have blogged the first few earlier and split this into two posts. Fortunately HTML gives us the wonderful semantic markup for sections and lists, which should aid readability, including machine readability.

Motivation

We are currently at a critical stage in the development of computer technology, and our choices now affect the sort of world we are going to live in. People are having to make choices about products and services, and often the information they need to make informed choices is not widely available. Over the course of writing this blog I have seen many examples of people making these choices, some poorly, some wisely, in the news and in real life, and have been at a loss for a complete and hopefully compelling commentary on the issues involved. The following, then, is my attempt at such a piece, which should also serve as a lemma for future posts I have in mind.

It’s been a while since I contributed to this thing, but I haven’t run out of things to say. The main reasons for the delay is waiting to hear back from an email and talk to my hosting admin to get a setting or two changed. For that reason I thought it was time for another Lemma post, where I explain something which I might later rely on in another post. Alternatively, these Lemmas may actually be “proto-categories”; that is, discussion on a subject which I think is important enough for a one-off post, but, until amassing some undetermined number of posts on the subject, not worthy of a category of its own.

Helpfully, that introduces an important concept: the balance between creating structure (like categories for blog posts) and the distraction that unnecessary structure can produce. Another example would be how directory trees or menus should be structured. Clearly a directory containing a single file makes it harder to navigate to that file (in some circumstances), but I don’t think there is a mathematically derivable value which is ideal for all directories. This minor uncertainty is perhaps what makes good design and good structure so hard to achieve: on the surface there is no clear distinction between right and wrong, as every person using a system will have a different approach or different strengths.

Acknowledging that, though, I have come to appreciate that there is a valid methodology which can be applied to design decisions, based on the principles of usability. For simplicity and hopefully relevance, I am mostly talking about computer software and website usability, such as is worked on by Open Usability and Jakob Nielsen respectively, but my eye for usability has stretched far beyond that as I will discuss later.

Admittedly, my lovely parodic validator had some errors, which the new version 0,5 fixes. For a start, I hadn’t been specifying the character encoding, so I now have the line

in the head. Even worse, I had a mistake in my DOCTYPE, which now reads

The hard work has paid off though, because the validator has shown me how easy it is to fail to meet ISO standards. As the saying goes, “Many a true word spoken in jest”. Obviously I applied the validator to [Google] and [Wikipedia] and found that Google’s count of how many pages it is searching uses commas to separate triples, and that Wikipedia’s count of how many articles it contains also uses commas in this way. The difference is, though, that Wikipedia use a 6 digit number like “711,346”, which my validator forgivingly assumes may mean “seven hundred and eleven decimal three four six”. I am considering adding a warning for numbers which contain one comma preceded by one to three digits and followed by three digits.