Month: March 2008

Categories
Copyright Web Writing

Something for nothing

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I like Andrew Orlowski, though he offered me a writing job once and then yanked it. I don’t always agree with him, and I don’t always agree with how he phrases some of his material, but he typically has a good point.

Take the recent Nine Inch Nails album release. Several songs for free, and the rest of the album costs $5.00. What happens? It’s immediately dumped on Pirate Bay. Bandwidth issues aside, as Radiohead found out, people won’t pay.

The anti-copyright crowd kicked at the music business, because it was complacent, wasteful and reactionary, and no digital download services were available. Then they kicked at DRM-locked music, because DRM was there. Then DRM died, and they’d indiscriminately kick at the music business – indie or major – simply because there was a middleman. But now, with no middleman, they just kick the creator directly. They can’t stop kicking. These zombies are unstoppable. Are they incurable, too?

This goes beyond copyright. Too many people expect immediate access to anything on the Net, or anything that could possibly be put on the Net. They want something for nothing. This isn’t free speech, this isn’t Free the Mouse, this isn’t anything to do with not stifling creativity: people assume a privilege for themselves they, frankly, don’t deserve. Their cry is, “gimme gimme gimme”, existing in a state of selfishness to bring down the band. And by their selfishness, they’ll probably screw things up for the rest of us. After all, DRM doesn’t exist so you can’t copy a song on to your iPod.

Excuse me, while I go put my DRM locked movie into the DVD player.

Categories
XHTML/HTML

IE8: Standards mode by default

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Others might talk about Microsoft’s move to the clouds, but one decision MS made shows its feet are firmly planted on solid ground: IE8 will be standards mode by default.

This was a good decision, but it’s also an ominous decision. Not a word on support for the XHTML mime type. With no clear idea of exactly what MS has planned for this release, I am forced to hold my huzzahs until we see what IE8 actually delivers. According to the ieblog report, IE8 will be one of the topics covered at MIX08. Perhaps we’ll see the first beta release of IE8 this week.

To put this in perspective, Microsoft has just agreed to deliver what Opera, Firefox, and Safari have always delivered.

update One interesting thing about this announcement–the IE program manager announced the move on the ieblog, and Ray Ozzie announced it in the press release. Where’s Chris Wilson?

second update Jeffrey Zeldman sounds like a man who put himself on a line that just disappeared.

third update I just sent an email off asking the opinion of someone who knows this stuff better than me what he thinks, but from web log entries for this site, based on the new MSIE 8.0 user agent string, IE8 does not support the XHTML mime type. I repeat: IE8 does not support pages served up with application/xhtml+xml.

Again, this statement isn’t based on a confirmation from the company. It’s a guess based on current web log entries reflecting the new user agent string for IE8, and matching a pattern I’ve seen with previous IE versions that cannot access this site because of the MIME type I use. I sincerely hope I’m proven wrong.

Categories
Programming Languages

Learning something new in PHP

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I didn’t know the ?> closing tag was optional with PHP code only files, either. I did know about white space following the end tag. Probably every PHP developer knows about the white space following the end tag problem.

What header? What ******** header!?

Other useful stuff on PHP best practices at the Drupal site, with more detail on omitting the end tag.

Question to those who know Drupal: how is it on supporting XHTML? Both published and consumed via comments?

Categories
Diversity Web

Women and tech, money and sex, and Wikipedia

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Seth Finkelstein has one of the better takes on the Wikipdia “sex” scandal. I wouldn’t even be interested except for two things:

1. Seth and All’s Wool both mention about the deep irregularities associated with the Wikipedia Foundation’s money, including how Foundation money is finding it’s way into founder Jimmy Wales pocket. If the organization hasn’t been audited recently, I would say it’s due.

2. Why is it that most of the time women and Silicon Valley or women and tech generate a lot of buzz in the tech community, it’s in reference to women and clothes, women and clothes, or women as former girlfriends? Or some variation of the latter: woman as vamp, woman as bitch, woman as whore, woman as babe, etc…and this geek or that tech.

Wow, guys, we don’t only dress and date. Next time you pair “women” and “technology”, try writing a story about women who program, design web sites, write or speak about technology, participate in standards committees, manage companies, or generally do things that you all don’t seem to notice or give a damn about until we’re either stripped naked or wearing purple, or have our sex chats blasted across your front pages.

Categories
SVG XHTML/HTML

If you’re pushing the grapefruit, make sure the apples don’t stink

Though RealTech is a weblog, it’s also the place where I do much of my experimentation with technology. It’s the site I use to test out the plug-ins, graphics applications, and what not I’m eventually planning on using in the rest of my web sites. Normally you don’t use a ‘live’ site to test changes, but I happen to think a live technology weblog is one of the better places to try something out. All those juicy testers.

However, one of the downsides to such effort is that the page may be challenging to access at times. Or a challenge to access at all times for IE7 and lower if it comes to that.

Another downside is that when I’m pushing one type of technology, my uses of other technologies may make it seem like the one I’m pushing is causing problems, when the reality is it could be any number of other tweaks and tricks.

As an example, I’m a big fan of SVG and XHTML. I serve my pages up as XHTML, and I use SVG inline. I write quite a bit on XHTML and SVG because I’m trying to encourage the use of both. If you access this page and it loads slowly, or seems to have other problems, you might think ithe problems are generated by my use of SVG, because it’s the technology I write about the most. However, it could also just as likely be any of a number of other tweaks I’m currently trying out.

In my post WordPress at the Top: Not, a couple of folks (Seth and Daniel) mentioned they had problems loading the page and scrolling and both thought it might be the inline SVG. It’s true that in their client environments, the inline SVG could be causing the problems–especially with my use of gradients, which are quite CPU intensive.

However, a little experimentation of my own shows that problems with the scrolling could also be caused by two older technologies: the first being the use of the CSS fixed background, which no browser seems to handle efficiently; the second being the use of the JavaScript-collapsed posts.

I also use rather large images in the header, and load them as background for elements, which turns off image caching. The lack of caching and the larger image sizes, combined with the derived CSS could slow load times. However, my experiments for sampling images and deriving CSS elements rather depends on my use of the CSS background attributes for adding the images, rather than just loading them using IMG.

To determine whether it is the SVG causing problems, or my other tweaks, I’ve removed the fixed CSS positioning, for now, as well as the collapsed posts and optimized the images and slimmed down the code deriving the CSS. If you’ve noticed performance problems in the past, can you access the pages now and see if the problems you had have been eliminated?

In the meantime, in addition to the other changes I’m making to support XHTML (BTW, you’ll notice that my XHTML validation of comments is too strict at this time, and will more or less give you invalid errors for any use of element attributes), I’m going to look more closely at my use of photo sampling, photo as CSS background, and what I can do to improve this type of functionality.

Then I’ll probably corrupt all that hard work by experimenting around with something else new, and causing my site performance to tank. Again.