BurningbirdWeb technology
It seems like only yesterday when I upgraded to Ubuntu 14.04, but it’s been several years and it’s time now to move on to Ubuntu 16.04.
Once before I’d tried to upgrade Ubuntu to a new major release in place. In other words, upgrade my current installation.
It didn’t go well.
Once Google Reader bit the dust I made my move to Feedly, and I’m quite happy with the change. I especially like the search feature incorporated in the Pro version of Feedly. Since I follow several court cases, and the only “notification” the federal PACER system provides is an RSS feed of every court docket entry, being able to search on key terms ensures I don’t miss a filing.
Speaking of Feedly…
Food Safety News reports that a coalition of consumer groups interested in food safety are gunning for two amendments to the House Farm Bill. The one I’m most interested in is the infamous Steve King amendment titled the “Protect Interstate Commerce Act”. This amendment would start a race for the bottom when it comes to animal welfare laws, food quality, and food safety laws. The King amendment would basically allow one state’s agricultural law to override another, more restrictive law. In other words, King wants to force Iowa’s crappy agricultural laws on to the rest of the country.
It’s one of the worst amendments attached to any bill in more modern times, from a man who is infamous for bad legislation focused on supporting his big agribusiness contributors and little else. What’s surprising is how many Tea Party Congressional members voted for the amendment, as these supposedly “states rights” types are voting for a bill that undermines states rights.
Remember pink slime? There’s a hearing in December related to a motion to dismiss by ABC News and the other defendants. The story contains a link to a copy of the motion to dismiss, but I couldn’t find one for the memorandum, which is the interesting part. However, I’m assuming it’s similar (if not identical) to the one filed with a similar motion in the federal court. Food Liability Law Blog provided a copy of this document. BPI’s response at the time was to refer to its memorandum in support of its motion to remand back to the South Dakota state court.
The pink slime case started in South Dakota, moved to the federal court system, and then back to the state court. I hate it when a court case gets moved back to a state court, because most states don’t have an easily accessible document system. PACER is pricey, but at least you can easily access most documents.
Speaking of documents, California’s effort to get a case management system online has failed, and now the tech companies are circling, like vultures over a particularly juicy carcass, over new contracts to build a system.
They are scrambling for a mother lode of multimillion-dollar contracts for software and licensing, vast additional sums for upkeep, and the right to set up a toll booth on Court Road for 38 million people.
I’m all for private contracting of court systems, though I think the states would do better to share expertise with each other when it comes to implementation. My biggest concern, though, is system privatization: hiring companies to run the systems, as well as develop them.
Privatization of court systems is, in my opinion, wrong, wrong, wrong. Not only does privatization add to the expense of an already outrageously expensive legal system, they inhibit easy access to the documents. Instead of paying a fee such as ten cents a document page, like you do with PACER, it may cost you several dollars to access even the smallest document.
Still, some court document access is better than nothing, which is what you have with most state courts.
Discovered via Facebook, Harvard Business School’s extraordinarily parsimonious attempts to milk every last penny out of its material:
No one ever charges people for the act of curating and directing attention. That is our job. It is our mantra. But that is precisely what HBSP are doing. To be sure, HBR looks like any other magazine and is already paid for under an institutional license by the UofT library. What HBSP are charging for are the links to those articles made by academics in the ordinary course of teaching. While our Dean was clear that he wanted us to continue to treat ideas as ideas and give the best to our students, he also wanted us now to be aware that it was costing money each time we did so. I don’t know how much it costs but my guess is that it is $5 or so per article per student. So if I have a class of 40 students and in the process of being thorough, add 10 HBR articles to my reading list or class webpage or, if the students do the same on bulletin boards for the class, we have to pay $2,000 for the privilege. I want to adhere to norms but that is enough to cause me to think twice.
Note, this isn’t direct access to the article content, this is just linking to, or citing the article.
I guess Harvard must be hard up for cash.
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Henri Bergius wrote a piece on Google’s seeming desire to replace all web components, except HTML. Among the “new” technologies:
However, I wouldn’t leave HTML out. The only editor for HTML5 is a Google employee, Ian Hickson, who has been working with other folks, including another Google employee, to break pieces off the HTML5 specification, take them to WHATWG space, and completely re-write them in isolation. Then, when the pieces are re-written, the editors don’t seem want to bring them back to the W3C. (Or they have to ask Google Legal whether they can do so, completely ignoring the fact that as a W3C member, Google pledged to work with others.)
I’ve been battling this effort with the Editing API and just recently, the same thing happened with the section on dynamic markup insertion.
It’s not that people aren’t happy about these non-HTML components being pulled out of the HTML5 specification, but rather than work with the members of the HTML WG and the W3C, Google has been encouraging people to act unilaterally, aided and abetted by the HTML5 editor.
What’s ironic is that the concepts behind the Editing API and the dynamic markup insertion sections, which includes innerHTML among other things, actually originated with Microsoft. I’ve been waiting for Microsoft to go, “Hold on partner!” Apple already has. (And again).
Google has become all that is arrogant conceit. It believes it can do anything better than anyone else. It has dropped any pretense of seemingly wanting to work with others, and pretends its work is open, as long as it “gives” it all away when it’s finished.
The internet and the web were created so that people could connect; that those who were separated physically could still work together. The roots of the web are based in openness and cooperation, not unilateral decisions that demonstrate little tolerance and no empathy. I’d rather use an imperfect technology created by a team of varied and interested people, then a “perfect” work created in isolation and dumped on the world in some grand “Ta Da!” moment.
An imperfect technology can be perfected, but you can’t fix hubris.
Earlier today I got into a friendly discussion and debate on Twitter about a new web site called W3Fools. The site bills itself as a “W3Schools intervention”, and the purpose is to wake developers up to the fact that W3School tutorials can, and do, have errors.
The problem with a site like W3Fools, I said (using shorter words, or course, since this was Twitter), is that it focuses too much on the negative aspects of W3Schools, without providing a viable alternative.
But, they said, W3Fools does provide links to other sites that provide information on HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. And, I was also told, the reason W3Schools shows up first in search results is because of uncanny use of SEO optimization.
Hmmm.
It may be true that W3Schools makes excellent use of SEO, and it may be equally true that W3Schools commits egregious and painful errors. However, neither of these account for what W3Schools is doing right. If you don’t acknowledge what the site does well, you’re not going to make much headway into turning people off the site—no matter how many cleverly named sites you create.
For instance, one of the superior information sites recommended by W3Fools is the Mozilla Doc Center, or MDC as it is affectionately known. Now, I’m a big fan of MDC. I use it all the time, especially when I want to get a better idea of what Firefox supports. But look at the work you have to put in to learn about a new HTML5 element, such as the new HTML5 hgroup element:
As compared to W3Schools:
One thing W3Schools does well is provide a clean, simple to navigate interface that makes it very easy to find exactly what you need with a minimum of scrolling or searching.
Returning to our comparison between W3Schools and MDC, we then search for information on SQL. Oh, wait a sec: there isn’t anything on SQL at the Mozilla site. That’s because Mozilla is primarily a browser company and is only interested in documenting browser stuff.
So then our intrepid explorer must find another site, this one providing information on SQL. And if they want to learn more about PHP, they have to find yet another site. To learn about ASP? Another site, and so on.
What W3Schools also provides is one stop shopping for the web developer. Once you’ve become familiar with the interface, and once the site has proved helpful, you’re more likely to return when you need additional information. Let’s face it: wouldn’t you rather use one site than dozens?
Let’s say, though, that you need information on CSS3. Well, you know that MDC covers CSS, so you return to the MDC site, and you click on the link that’s labeled “CSS”, and you look for something that says CSS3.
What do you mean there isn’t anything that says CSS3? What do you mean that transitions are CSS3—how am I, a CSS3 neophyte, supposed to know this?
Returning to W3Schools, I click the link in the main page that is labeled CSS3. Oh look, in the page that opens, there’s a sidebar link that’s labeled “CSS3 transitions”. And when I click that link, a page opens that provides an immediate example of using CSS3 transitions that I can try, as well as an easy to read table of browser support.
W3Schools doesn’t throw a lot of text before the examples, primarily because we learn web material best by example. Remember that entire generations of web developers grew up with “View Source” as our primary learning tool.
But so far, I’ve only compared W3Schools to MDC. There are other useful sites that the W3Fools site approves. So I try the “Google: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from the ground up” web page. When it opens, I click the link labeled CSS…
And I get a video about using CSS.
A video.
Remember in junior high or high school, when your science teacher would bring out the projector and you knew you were going to get a video? Do you remember that feeling that came over you? How you kind of relaxed, because you know the teacher wasn’t going to ask you any questions, and you didn’t have to write any notes, or even really pay attention?
I bet some of you even fell asleep during the video.
Videos are good for specific types of demonstrations—when something is complex, with many different steps, and the order of the steps and other factors have to be just so.
When it comes to CSS, HTML, and so many other web technologies, though, video is about the most passive and non-interactive learning experience there is. More importantly, if the video doesn’t have captioning, and most don’t, you’re also leaving part of your audience behind.
Now let’s return to the W3Schools site, this time looking at one of the CSS selector tutorials. The first thing you notice is that right below the example there’s a button, labeled “Try it Yourself”.
Why read about it, when you can play?
One of the more annoying aspects of trying to learn about a specific HTML element, or a bit of CSS, is that you have to create an entire web page just to try it out. What W3Schools provides is that all important, absolutely essential, one button click to Try it out.
I’m not defending W3Schools. The site has played off the W3C title, though that doesn’t have a lot of meaning nowadays. More importantly, some of the material has errors and the site is resistant to correcting any of these errors, and this is unconscionable.
But you aren’t going to dent the popularity of the site without at least understanding why it is so popular. The W3Schools’ site is not popular because of SEO, and it’s not popular because of the W3 part of the name.
The W3Schools web site is so popular because it is so usable.