The Substantially Similar Weblog

Mozilla just hit critical mass. I had read a fair bit about the XUL architecture and Gecko rendering engine but I didn’t really get it until recently. David Boswell’s article, Let One Hundred Browsers Bloom on O’Reilly Network is a good introduction to the myriad possibilites that are now unleashed. 101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot on XulPlanet also is a good overview of what it’s all about. Ars Technica ran a good review when Mozilla 1.0 was released, although it’s now slightly dated.

One of my favorite applications (or “plug-ins”?) that takes advantage of Mozilla’s extensibility is MultiZilla, which does all sorts of crazy things with tabbed browsing. The webpage describes all this fairly well; my favorite extension is one where you can take a whole set of tabs and “bookmark” them as a “groupmark”, and then later open that groupmark and get all of those tabs together again. I do this to read the news—I have seven or eight news sites I like to read first thing every day, so I’ve groupmarked them, then I go through each one, opening up new tabs (by middle-button-clicking) on articles I’m interested in. As I finish going through everything in a particular tab, I close it with a Mouse gesture and move on to the next one; essentially going left-to-right, new articles leapfrogging to the end.

I suspect most people don’t necessarily want or need to use their web browsers this way, but for some it opens up new ways of interacting with the web. I believe eventually this will lead to new ways of thinking about the whole technology. We’re now at a point, finally, where the web browser can be a platform upon which castles are built. If nothing else, that’s a good thing for competition.

Rick McCallum, Producer of Star Wars, suggests that the movie industry will be destroyed in the next few years if we don’t take the piracy “threat” seriously.

I’m not sure who is more bombastic, McCallum, or Jack Valenti when he compared the VCR to the Boston Strangler.

I would suggest we take a “wait and see” approach. If we discover that Hollywood is no longer able to produce enough films to satisfy us, or that the Recording Industry ceases to give us the likes of Britney Spears and Celine Dion, then perhaps we should take a look at our policy and make some changes. We don’t even have to wait until the industries are totally destroyed, but before we bring out the big guns, let’s at least conclude that (1) “piracy” is having a material effect on creative output, and (2) we miss the stuff that’s no longer being created.

Until then, let’s just stick with stopping terrorists. And protecting our civil liberties, while we’re at it.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Total Information Awareness may be coming soon to a theatre near you.

There’s a lot of rhetoric around “TIA”, including William Safire’s slightly misleading editorial “You Are a Suspect” in today’s New York Times (use this to anonymize your registration). The scariest thing, I think, is not that this system might work, but that it might even be attempted. Although it would certainly further compromise our eroding constitutional (privacy) rights, it would also represent a terrible waste of money and security resources.

Although I would have preferred for Minority Report to answer the question, “Would we want a system of total surveillance if it worked perfectly?”, instead it answered the question, “Would we want a system of total surveillance if it made errors?” The first question is more difficult, the second more realistic. And it’s this latter question that applies particularly to Admiral John Poindexter’s “Total Information Awareness” and related programs. This technology may work fairly well in Hollywood, but in practice, has anyone ever maintained a database even remotely this large with any semblance of accuracy?

The Office of Information Awareness sounds an awful lot like the Office of Information Retrieval to me.

5:30am Cell phone alarm “loud” to make sure. Glass of grapefruit juice, comb, out the door.

5:50am Subway platform; just missed the last one. Apparently I’m not the only one up at this time.

6:05am Union Station. The Food Court Awakens. Everything Bagel with Cream Cheese, Large Urban Blend. Pocket some sugar for later.

6:20am Steps of the Court. Barely a glimmer behind the Capitol; sunrise at 7am? Yes, I’ll make it in, I’m #12.

7:20am Courtyard Plaza. Line up and take your ticket.

8:00am Court Cafeteria. Bacon and eggs. [I’ll pass].

8:30am Back out on the plaza. As the sun rises, it is colder, windier. The line extends across the plaza onto the sidewalk.

9:15am The bronze doors at the top of the stairs slide open; apparently they weigh several tons each.

9:40am We are finally lead up the stairs, herded into the vestibule. The police officer (“Iowa”) gives us a lecture. The paramount rule is silence.
9:50am No bags, coats, writing implements, laptops, or cell-phones are allowed into the courtroom. We shuffle into the coatroom to check our affairs. The coat check is free, and the locker for electronics only $0.25 (although I lost my first quarter).

9:55am Courtroom. More hallowed than you can shake a finger at. The chairs are tall, but the bench is not all that high up. Certainly not as intimidating as St. Peter’s Gate.

10:00am The Chief Justice accepts several dozen attorneys into the Supreme Court Bar. Each of them is introduced by a member of the Bar who says, “I am satisfied the applicant possesses the necessary qualifications.” They stand as they are introduced. The Clerk swears them in.

10:10am Where are Scalia and Stevens? Tall empty chairs.

10:35am The attorney for the respondents is a man with long hair. He is unable to address hypothetical situations that he hadn’t considered. The woman next to me was wearing a Moms for Megan’s Law pin which she had to remove upon entering the Court. On the other side, a women points at her boyfriend and whispers to me, “This is so boring. I’m here because he’s affected by it.”

10:45am Scalia and Stevens enter and take their seats. Perhaps they were having a bagel and coffee.

10:50am Clarence Thomas is really living up to his reputation. He’s yet to ask a question, although he does like to make funny faces.

11:00am The first case is over; many people leave. We get to move to more comfortable seats with a better view.

Sadly, I have no wisdom to share with you about this experience, only this brief chronology. You might read Are sex offenders uniquely dangerous? in the Washington Times for a good editorial about these two cases, which involved challenges to the Constitutionality of Megan’s Law.

Declan McCullagh’s popular Politech e-mail listserv recently published an essay by James Gattuso on “Why Americans with Disabilities Act should not apply to web”, supporting the recent court decision Access Now v. Southwest Airlines, which held that the ADA did not apply to Internet websites.

Although I’m not totally certain whether the court reached the correct result (i.e., whether the result was “best” and whether the result was “right”), Gattuso’s piece was rife with misconceptions. Here’s the response I sent Declan, although he declined to publish it [update 11/13/2002: Declan did, in fact, publish the response]:

CEI Research Fellow Gattuso’s claim that making websites accessible will stunt creativity, spontaneity, and functionality is disingenuous. Accessible websites need not eschew the use of color to convey information; rather, if certain information is conveyed through color or images, there ought to be an alternative mode that also conveys the same information. This is often as simple as adding ALT tags to images, as required by w3c standards. Accessibility rules would set a baseline for website design, but wouldn’t prevent any web designer from going beyond that with non-accessible chrome if she so desires.

Furthermore, accessibility is not just an ADA issue. A non-accessible website is often one that only renders properly with Internet Explorer; the pressure to create “Best viewed with IE” sites significantly reinforces Microsoft’s monopolostic powers.

Finally, I had trouble finding a weblog that fails basic accessibility guidelines. Weblogs are mostly plain text with hyperlinks in simple tables; although they don’t always pass w3c validation, they are usually quite readable by browsers designed for the blind, for example. Perhaps Gattuso can point us to some weblogs that would be harmed by a contrary ADA court decision. (not to mention that utter improbability of the ADA being applied to non-commercial personal weblogs even had the court decided otherwise).

Although there are few enforcement mechanisms for Internet standards, good netizens are expected to comply with them. These standards don’t stunt creativity; they create a democratic space where ideas can be exchanged, flourish, and grow. If not for some adherence to HTTP and HTML standards, the Internet would not be the rich informational resource it has become. For Gattuso to suggest that these sorts of rules would limit creativity on the web is to deny these first principles.

As I’ve been creating this weblog over the past few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between the “content” of this site; the layout; and the code that generates it. The “romantic author” myth relies on an instant “creative spark” in which some new idea is born, presumably something that (in Internet postmodernist vernacular) lies in the domain of “content”. Yet, at least subjectively, I feel just as creative when I’m working on the code that presents this content to the world (and specifically to you, my perhaps imaginary audience). Or when I’m working on the “stylesheet” of this site, where most of the decisions are made about color, font, and the like.

Until recently, the new and the unique were not all that highly valued. Dozens of roles were involved in creating a book (or scroll, &c.), and historically the role of the “author” was not necessarily the lynchpin. Who truly creates anything new anyway?

There’s also an interesting interplay between these various parts. The weblog code makes a number of decisions about how content is presented, linked together, organized; the content itself contains metadata that create some internal structure that is apart from “the ideas” themselves; and the stylesheet is reflected in both the coding and the content.

This will be my weblog. Right now it’s nothing; well, I guess it’s this. If I play my cards right, it will be “something”.