Burningbird

I'm not part of the HTML WG, but still follow along. Enough to see that one of the big ongoing debates lately is about the HTML WG's Design Principles draft document. There are too many threads to link, but I would suggest the following as good places to start:

What can possibly top Twitter and its immediacy, as well as brevity of contact? I think we found out this week, with Google Wave. Tim O'Reilly describes it as what email would be like if invented today. My first reaction, and judging from other responses, is that it's remarkably similar to Ray Ozzie's Groove, before Groove became little more than a ghost appendage to Microsoft.

Folks immediately started rumbling about "twitter killer", but I look at it and see the answer to the question, "What can beat out 140 characters?" The answer is, evidently, echoed keystrokes as people make them.

I watched the presentation video (thank you for that, Google). Technologically, Google Wave is intriguing. What was also intriguing was Google's strong emphasis on HTML5 during the presentation, including a reference to additions to the HTML5 spec. But the part that caught my attention is that Wave is actually echoing keystrokes. I can imagine the following discussion, happening live:

A: I just saw the demo of Google Wave ...

B: Oh, yeah, that was terrific

A:....and it sucked

B: Oh, um, well I thought...

A: You liked it! Are you...

B: ...it was innovative

A: ...cracked?

Google Wave is ADD heroin.

I was thinking about Google Wave yesterday, as I ran the gauntlet that is known as Watson Street, here in St. Louis. As I dodged little old ladies who pull into the road without looking, and the 30 something guy who cut me off when he should have yielded, or contemplated the new ding in my car from some mother's precious child opening his or her car door too hard, and too wide, I began to appreciate what Twitter, Google Wave, Blogging, Facebook, and other social media are: real life alternative communities.

Because in real life, we're all pricks.

Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
become a stranger

To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.

Wish for nothing larger
Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;

Tame wild disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.

Discover the reason why
So tiny human midget
Exists at all
So scared unwise
But expect nothing. Live frugally

On surprise.

Alice Walker, "Expect Nothing"

Edited to remove irrelevant stuff

I posted about quitting the HTML WG on Twitter, but there's only so much one can shove into 140 characters. Of course, I realize that most people will probably be uninterested in a longer writing on my reasons, but that's the advantage of syndication feeds—you can see at a glance whether you want to read beyond the first few sentences of a writing. Or not.

First of all a clarification: I joined the HTML WG once. I quit the HTML WG once. I joined the HTML WG reluctantly, because as I wrote at the time, I'm really not a joiner. I feel I'm best writing in my own space, not participating in a back and forth in email lists; definitely not through quick non-thinking blurbs in an IRC channel, or teleconferences where key players never participate.

I did join, though, and became actively involved. However, I never could figure out the "rules" of the effort, and I found it both discouraging and exhausting. So much so that it drained the energy I needed for the writing I need to do for a living. More importantly, I felt I really wasn't making a difference, and I'm not sure I was willing to play the game in order to make a difference.

A further point of clarification: My decision to quit did not come about because of any exchange I had yesterday with any person. It was a number of factors that led to my quitting, a primary one being the one I just mentioned, needing to focus on work. I'd already decided to quit before yesterday, but was waiting for a specific thread on RDFa to play out. I will mention, though, that some of the reasons why I'm leaving were echoed in that thread, including the hostility of the WhatWG backchannel IRC, and the lack of respect some members of this group have for members of the HTML WG and other W3C groups.

Some of the the WhatWG members seem to think that I've quit the HTML WG more than once, but they are mistaken. I unsubscribed from the WhatWG email lists, because I found the environment hostile. I stopped working on my assessment of metadata use cases, because Hickson suddenly released a new microdata section, changing everything I wanted to write.

I have unsubscribed from the WhatWG mailing list, and that won't change. I have quit the HTML WG, and I may, but it's unlikely, rejoin at some later time. But I have not stopped writing about the HTML5 specification. Whether I make a difference or not, my way of "participating", in the HTML5 effort, and any other, is by writing in this space. And I will continue to do so, in my own time, and in my own way.

The switch to digital TV within the US will happen in less than three weeks. However, according to the Government run DTV web site, 42% of the TV broadcast market has already made the transition.

If you're reading this page via the Internet, I'm guessing you've already made your DTV switch. However, just in case I'm wrong, or you have family or friends who don't understand the DTV switch, the FCC has contracted with vendors to provide DTV support centers and events, which can be located in this DTV help center map. There are also DTV converter box coupons still available, though it's probably too late to get the coupon before the conversion.

As for antennas, based on my own experience, I recommend the Terk HDTVa Indoor Amplified High-Definition Antenna. Once I installed it, I was able to pick up an additional 5 channels, and I've had a much more consistent signal from all the channels. It's one of the larger indoor antennas, but the price is good (I purchased at Amazon, where it's currently listed for $36.85), as is the performance.

There's been a great deal of discussion about RDFa, HTML5, and microdata the last few days, on email lists and elsewhere. I wanted to write down notes of the discussions here, for future reference. Those working issues with RDFa in Drupal 7 should pay particular attention, but the material is relevant to anyone incorporating RDFa.

Shane McCarron released a proposal for RDFa in HTML4, which is based on creating a DTD that extends support for RDFa in HTML4. He does address some issues related to the differences in how certain data is handled in HTML4 and XHTML, but for the most part, his document refers processing issues to the original RDFaSyntax document.

Philip Taylor responded with some questions, specifically about how xml:lang is handled by HTML5 parsers, as compared to XML parsers. His second concern was how to handle XMLLiteral in HTML5, because the assumption is that RDFa extractors in JavaScript would be getting their data from the DOM, not processing the characters in the page.

"If the object of a triple would be an XMLLiteral, and the input to the processor is not well-formed [XML]" - I don't understand what that means in an HTML context. Is it meant to mean something like "the bytes in the HTML file that correspond to the contents of the relevant element could be parsed as well-formed XML (modulo various namespace declaration issues)"? If so, that seems impossible to implement. The input to the RDFa processor will most likely be a DOM, possibly manipulated by the DOM APIs rather than coming straight from an HTML parser, so it may never have had a byte representation at all.

There's a lively little sub-thread related to this one issue, but the one response I'll focus on is Shane, who replied, RDFa does not pre-suppose a processing model in which there is a DOM. The issue of xml:lang is also still under discussion, but I want to move on to new issues.

While the discussion related to Shane's document was ongoing, Philip released his own first look at RDFa in HTML5. Concern was immediately expressed about Philip's copying of some of Shane's material, in order to create a new processing rule section. The concern wasn't because of any issue to do with copyright, but the problems that can occur when you have two sets of processing rules for the same data and the same underlying data model. No matter how careful you are, at some point the two are likely to diverge, and the underlying data model corrupted.

Rather than spend time on Philip's specification directly at this time, I want to focus, instead, on a note he attached to the email entry providing the link to the spec proposal. In it he wrote:

There are several unresolved design issues (e.g. handling of case-sensitivity, use of xmlns:* vs other mechanisms that cause fewer problems, etc) - I haven't intended to make any decisions on such issues, I've just attempted to define the behaviour with sufficient detail that it should make those issues visible.

More on case sensitivity in a moment.

Discussion started a little more slowly for Philip's document, but is ongoing. In addition, both Philip and Manu Sporney released test suites. Philip's is focused on highlighting problems when parsing RDFa in HTML as compared to XHTML; The one that Manu posted, created by Shane, focused on a basic set of test cases for RDFa, generally, but migrated into the RDFa in HTML4 document space.

Returning to Philip's issue with case sensitivity, I took one of Shane's RDFa in HTML test cases, and the rdfquery JavaScript from Philip's test suit, and created pages demonstrating the case sensitivity issue. One such is the following:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//ApTest//DTD HTML4+RDFa 1.0//EN" "http://www3.aptest.com/standards/DTD/html4-rdfa-1.dtd">

<html

      xmlns:t="http://test1.org/something/"

      xmlns:T="http://test2.org/something/"

      xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">

  <head>

    <title>Test 0011</title>

  </head>

  <body>

    <div about="">

      Author: <span property="dc:creator t:apple T:banana">Albert Einstein</span>

      <h2 property="dc:title">E = mc<sup>2</sup>: The Most Urgent Problem of Our Time</h2>

  </div>

  </body>

</html>

Notice the two namespace declarations, one for "t" and one for "T". Both are used to provide properties for the object being described in the document: t:apple and T:banana. Parsing the document with a RDFa application that applies XML rules, treats the namespaces, "t" and "T" as two different namespaces. It has no problem with the RDFa annotation.

However, using the rdfquery JavaScript library, which treats "t" and "T" the same because of HTML case insensitivity, an exception results: Malformed CURIE: No namespace binding for T in CURIE T:banana. Stripping away the RDFa aspects, and focusing on the namespaces, you can see how browsers handle namespace case in an HTML document and in a document served up as XHTML. To make matter more interesting, check out the two pages using Opera 10, Firefox 3.5, and the latest Safari. Opera preserves the case, while both Safari and Firefox lowercase the prefix. Even within the HTML world, the browsers handle namespace case in HTML differently. However, all handle the prefixes the same, and correctly in XHTML. So does the rdfquery JavaScript library, as this test page demonstrates.

Returning to the discussion, there is some back and forth on how to handle case sensitivity issues related to HTML, with suggestions varying as widely as: tossing the RDFa in XHTML spec out and creating a new one; tossing RDFa out in favor of Microdata; creating a best practices document that details the problem and provides appropriate warnings; creating a new RDFa in HTML document (or modifying existing profile document) specifying that all conforming applications must treat prefix names as case insensitive in HTML, (possibly cross-referencing the RDFa in XHTML document, which allows case sensitive prefixes). I am not in favor of the first two options. I do favor the latter two options, though I think the best practices document should strongly recommend using lowercase prefix names, and definitely not using two prefixes that differ only by case. During the discussion, a new conforming RDFa test case was proposed that tests based on case. This has now started its own discussion.

I think the problem of case and namespace prefixes (not to mention xmlns as compared to XMLNS) is very much an edge issue, not a show stopper. However, until a solution is formalized, be aware that xmlns prefix case is handled differently in XHTML and HTML. Since all things are equal, consider using lowercase prefixes, only, when embedding RDFa (or any other namespace-based functionality). In addition, do not use XMLNS. Ever. If not for yourself, do it for the kittens.

Speaking of RDFa in HTML issues, there is now a new RDFa in HTML issues wiki page. Knock yourselves out.

updateA new version of the RDFa in HTML4 profile has been released. It addresses a some of the concerns expressed earlier, including the issue of case and XMLLiteral. Though HTML5 doesn't support DTDs, as HTML4 does, the conformance rules should still be good for HTML5.

In early 2002 I was living in a condo overlooking the bay in San Francisco. I had just finished a gig with Stanford University and was confident about quickly finding new work. After all, I hadn't been unemployed once in the years since I graduated college. In fact, I could usually count on having multiple offers to choose from.

But as I walked past empty buildings, through streets made into homes by the homeless, and listened to the silence of my phone, I began to think that perhaps finding work wouldn't be as easy as I originally assumed.

Living in San Francisco is expensive at any time, but the  expense can quickly break you if you have no income coming in. By April I knew I had to leave San Francisco, and take my best friend's offer of a home in St. Louis. Perhaps away from Silicon Valley I could find work.

Decision made, I had only one remaining concern: what about my stuff? My roommate couldn't fly out to help me haul the stuff back, and I couldn't drive both my car and a moving truck. I checked into having the items professionally moved, but the cost was more than I could afford. I rented a storage space, instead, and hired a local moving outfit to help me move into it. I figured when I was bringing in an income again, I could hire a mover.

The steady jobs never came, though, and about six months later, I no longer had the money to pay for the space. I ran an ad in Craigslist, offering everything I owned that hadn't fit into my car when I moved. All my furniture, my crystal vases, antique cobalt blue glass ware; the sheets and towels, and kitchenware; my photo studio lights and back drops;  the Vietnamese lacquered panels and Chinese embroidered tablecloth. And my books.  I had over 20 boxes of books, both paperback and hard bound.

I found a buyer, who ended up getting a better deal than he knew. I took one last trip to California, to drop off keys and see if I could salvage a few personal items from the storage. But the moving guys had done a good job, burying the boxes under a pyramid of furniture. The only items I could salvage were two boxes of books, too heavy for the movers to push into the far back reaches of the storage space, and of no interest to the new buyer.  At that I was somewhat lucky as the books I salvaged were some of the more expensive science books I'd collected, including the pricey Gravitation, which I'd always planned to read some day before I die. The boxes also included the only fiction book I was to salvage, a hard to find book by the legendary science fiction writer, James Schmitz.

I tell you all of this by way of explaining why I find it so funny when people criticize the Kindle because "someday Amazon may pull the plug, and you'll lose all of your books". Funny, because the main reason I bought my Kindle is because I had lost all of my books; my books of paper that were, somehow, supposed to be sacrosanct.

What is a frugal girl like me ...

Typically, no special equipment is needed to read a book made of paper. All that's required is the ability to read, and a light source. eBook readers, such as the Kindle, already have one strike against them because you have to first, buy the reader, and then buy the books.

Jeff Bezos understood this when he released the Kindle, and promised that many of the books available for the Kindle at Amazon would cost less than their paper counterparts. The $9.99 bestseller is famous, though there's no guarantee that every bestseller would sell at that price, or even be released on a Kindle. Currently, Ken Follett's World Without End in paperback format sells for $12.50, but the Kindle version sells for $9.99. However, the Kindle version for the second entry in the popular Twilight series, New Moon is priced the same, $6.04, regardless of whether you buy a paperback, or a Kindle eBook. And, in some cases, the Kindle books have actually been priced higher than available paperbacks; with the Kindle prices based more on the hard cover book, rather than the lower cost paperback.

Generally, though, I have found the books I'm interested in to be cheaper than whatever is the lowest cost paper version of the book— higher when the book is first released as a hard cover, with the price dropping when the paperback releases. Though some Kindle owners get angry when a book is priced over $9.99, I'm not adverse to paying more, as long as the eBook is cheaper than the paper book. That's really the key to making the Kindle work when you're frugal: setting a maximum you'll pay for a book, and not buying it until the price is reached. And while you're waiting for the book, you can always try out one of the thousands of free books available for the Kindle and other devices.

Project Gutenberg books have been converted into Kindle format, and many are now available for one click, free downloads from Amazon. In addition, several publishers, such as Random House and Tor, and others have been offering free books as part of a series or author promotion. The free books may be formatted in the Kindle format, in which can all you need do is drop them into the Kindle memory when next you hook it up to a computer. You can also email books to a special conversion address and the book will be uploaded to the device for you.

...doing with a Kindle?

I've not replaced all the books I lost years ago. For one, no matter how good the price, I can only afford so many new books. In addition, not all of the books I'm interested in have been converted to eBook format.

My reading interests have also changed in the last several years, and I'm now more interested in non-fiction works. With the new discussions about economic depressions and climate change, I've been trying out books on history and the climate, downloading a sample chapter and then buying the book if the sample is interesting. In a way, the Kindle has changed how I read, by making sample chapters so easy to access. It was through the sample program that I discovered David Kennedy's excellent Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 and Havana Nocturne by T. J. English.

The Kindle isn't perfect, and the imperfections have less to do with the design of the Kindle 1.0 and more to do with Amazon's policies. It does bother me that the Kindle is a closed loop system, at least for books protected by DRM. I have grown increasingly uncomfortable buying books at Amazon, knowing that I'm locked into one vendor if I want to read them. So much so that lately, if I'm interested in a newer book, I get a paper one from the library; all my recently added Kindle books have been freebies. Between both, I'm covered. For now.

Still, Amazon does sell eBooks more cheaply than any other eBook vendor, and the money you save can offset the cost of the device. But that's not the reason I bought my Kindle.

Philosophy of the turtle

I was watching a news story last week about one new industry that is adding jobs, rather than shedding them. So many foreclosed homes have furniture and other items left in them, abandoned when the owners moved. When you lose your home, I imagine you don't care how it looks. I also imagine that most people having to move have to move into smaller homes.

There are now companies whose only task is to clean out these homes, and I watched workers from one as they tossed furniture and toys into a truck to haul off. Furniture, toys, and books. When you move from a house to a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment, or into a friend's basement, or a parent's attic, books take up a lot of room.

Whatever other advantage the Kindle provides me, the ability to pick up all my books and put them into my purse remains the primary reason I like my Kindle. No matter what happens in the future, I'll never have to leave my library behind, again.

>

I couldn't resist the title. Just be glad I refrained from using one of the old animated "Under Construction" GIFs.

Since I'm no longer on the hook for anything related to HTML5 and RDFa, I can return to my books. Books, plural, as I hope to be starting a new book within the "traditional" publishing track, soon.

I doubt I'll have much to say over the next few months. Just a heads up that the site may look odd or not work at times, as I try out some new stuff. No worries, it hasn't been taken over by aliens.

I love books on history, and have read several on my Kindle. I hope to someday write book reviews, or perhaps use quotes from the books in my future writings. Kindle facilitated this capability by providing functionality to highlight passages, add book notes, and especially, save a Kindle "page" to a clipping file.

By saving passages from the book to a text file, I can copy and paste quotes, without worry about mistyping the text. In addition, if my Kindle died, though I may not have the books, I'd at least have my notes.

My routine would be to read a book, such as A Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s or Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, and once finished would copy the clipping file to my computer, delete the one on the Kindle, and start fresh. However, while reading Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, about a third of a way through, when I went to save a page with a passage of interest to my clipping file, I received an error:

Unable to save clipping. You have
reached the clipping limit for this item.

Clipping limit? This was the first I'd heard of clipping limits.

I deleted the clipping file, but it made no difference. Per suggestions on an Amazon thread, I also deleted a metadata file associated with the book, but again, had no luck.

I tried to find information about the clipping limit in the Kindle TOS or User Guide, but nothing was covered. I also tried to find out if one can "delete" items from the existing clipping file, in order to replace with other clippings at a later time, but once the limit is reached, nothing associated with the book can be added to the clipping file, not even a highlighted sentence.

Not all books have a clipping limit, and the limit is not the same for all books. However, there is no way to find out if a book has a clipping limit, or how big it is, unless using software to 'crack' the DRM (Digital Rights Management) for the book.

That I'm peeved is to put it mildly, as that was one of the Kindle features I found most valuable. It was also one of the features I've used to sell the reading device to others. And now I'm afraid to make notes or save clippings without wondering if I won't hit the limit. Contrary to what Amazon or the Publishers must assume, I'm not going to use the "Save as Clipping" feature to copy the entire book—I'd rather get the book from the library and photocopy each page, because it would be easier. And I can't wait to find out what happens when several college students hit this limit with their fancy, and expensive, new large form Kindle DXes.

More importantly, Amazon does not mention this limitation with the sales material for the device, though the company does tout the "Save as clipping" capability.

Bookmarks and Annotations

By using the QWERTY keyboard, you can add annotations to text, just like you might write in the margins of a book. And because it is digital, you can edit, delete, and export your notes. Using the new 5-way controller, you can highlight and clip key passages and bookmark pages for future use.

Yet there's nothing about clipping limits: in the documentation, or the web site. This, to me, is a deceptive business practice. Making an assumption that people will somehow "know" about the limits because of copyright laws is especially weak, because the amount you can copy seems to be arbitrary, and we readers have no way of knowing what these limits are.

Even more disappointing, the clipping limit also applies to DRM free books from Amazon, according to a MobileRead forum entry.

update I counted the clippings from "Banana...", and discovered that the clipping limit for this book has been set to 40. That's Kindle clippings, not book pages. Following is a typical clipping:

busy, modern family would consist of bananas sliced into corn flakes with milk. It wasn’t just the recipe that broke new ground. It was also the coupons, pioneered by the company, packed inside cereal boxes (redeemable for free bananas that the cereal companies, not the fruit importer, paid for). The company made sure that children knew about bananas, too. It set up an official “education department,” devoted to publishing textbooks and curriculum materials that subtly provided information about the fruit. United Fruit also added a new element to its political strategy. If military action was impractical (U.S. troops might be unavailable or force precluded by situations on the ground), Central America’s geography became an ally. The region’s countries were small and easy to move between. There were plenty of natural ports on both the eastern and western coasts, and bananas could be grown just about anywhere land could be cleared and a railroad could be laid. If a government became particularly balky, the company would simply threaten to go next door. But one thing United Fruit couldn’t control was nature. Not long after bananas added themselves as a third party in cereal and milk, the troubles growers were beginning to have with an aggressive malady became public. One headline in The New York Times read: “Banana Disease Ruins Plantations—No Remedy is Available—Whole Regions Have Been Laid Waste and Improvements Abandoned by

update I've tried the Perl tool mobi2mobi on several of the books I have, including those with an expired copyright downloaded from Amazon, one that is copyrighted and with DRM, and one that is copyrighted, without DRM.

The values I'm getting would seem to be percentages, not absolute clipping instances. So a value of 0xa, which is hex for 10, would be 10 percent, not 10 instances. Non-DRM books return a clipping limit of 0x64, which is hex for 100, which would be, if my guess is accurate, 100%. This matches our expectation for a non-DRM enabled book: that we can highlight, or clip pages up to 100% of the content.

That the value is a percentage may have been obvious to some of you, but the idea of that Amazon would enforce such an arbitrary limit, and without notice to the customers, is still new to me.

Note, also, that Amazon is attaching what seems to be a default value of 10% to books that are no longer covered by copyright, but which you can download for free from Amazon. Looks like Amazon is also attaching DRM to these books, too. My suggestion would be to get these books elsewhere, like feedbooks.com, and hope they aren't so limited.