Conforming to the W3C standards—redux
In my previous conformance statement, I was saying that bmt-online would display the same on every XHTML 1.1 conforming browser. This is still true. However…
The sad reality is that as I write this, browsers that support XHTML 1.1 are only a
handful—that would be recent versions of Mozilla and Fire[Bird/Fox]. When vendors
choose to not implement current standards, I guess, being standard-compliant still
is vendor-specific 
fri 2004-03-26
The XHTML blogging community
I am sooo busy these days. Not necessarily busy working hard—and I know Philippe is certainly reading this—but rather busy reading. There is a rather small crowd of rigourous, bleeding-edge, blogging characters who put out a wealth of information about the Right Thing™ to do when it comes to web authoring.
Recent readings include Dive into Mark
, Mark
Pilgrim's personal blog, as well as his column
on XML,
Pete's Guide by Peter K. Sheerin,
Musings, Jacques Distler's blog, goer.org, Evan
Goer's authoring page.
The point of all these readings is that I am fascinated by the intricacies of
HTML authoring. It might seem pretty simple—and admittedly, it is
technically pretty simple—but it is a complex matter as far as publication
is concerned. There is this ongoing internal battle between technical perfection
—for
some definition of the notion of perfection—and practical issues.
Case in point: to be up to the latest and greatest, I decided I would author all
the pages on bmt-online as strict XHTML 1.1. Now, the spec
requires that such pages be served by the web server with a MIME type of
application/xhtml+xml. Now that's a problem, as there is only
one family of browsers who supports such a MIME type: recent versions of Mozilla, and
their little brother Fire[Bird/Fox]. Others, such as
IE, or Lynx, will only see that they are being served a file of unhandled format
and will propose you to download it to your computer—duh!
There is something worse, as illustrated by this entry in
Dive into Mark
. Mozilla will refuse to display an malformed XHTML page served as
application/xhtml+xml. Of course, you as an author go great length to
ensure that what you produce is correct, but if there is some dynamically, public-access
generated content on your page, such as the trackback feature in MovableType, you run
the risk that a third party will introduce malformedness into your
page, which in turn will refuse to display on the only browser that supports it…
So, things aren't so black and white anymore. Even admitting that you are reading to drop 90% of your potential readership—those who use IE—are you ready to drop the remaining 10% because half of the time, they can't even see the content of your page?
On bmt-online, I was bothered by the potential loss of readership itself. <self-irony>I
know that IE users are a lowly form of life and shouldn't be catered for</self-irony>,
but still. Fortunately, the site is also designed such that all the pages are dynamically
generated with PHP on request—which allows me to modularize content, which is a Good
Thing™. Mark Pilgrim once again saved the day, in his
column. I can easily detect which browser is ready to accept application/xhtml+xml
with the following bit of code:
<?php
if ( stristr($_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT"],"application/xhtml+xml") )
{
header("Content-type: application/xhtml+xml");
}
else
{
header("Content-type: text/html");
}
?>
What I serve to most of the world is technically incorrect, but at least, they get to see it…
wed 2004-03-24
New licensing terms
I just added explicit licensing terms for the content of bmt-online (as embodied in the Creative Commons tag appearing in the footer of every page on the site. I also wrote a little paragraph explaining the reasoning behind my choice of a license, and I'd like to invite you to read about it.
sat 2004-03-20
Legal
Everything on this site is my creation, and therefore, I own full copyright to it. However, this only really means is that I am free to decide what to do with my copy rights.
Traditionally, there were two approaches of how to handle those rights:
all
or nothing
. All
is something like All rights
reserved. Copy, distribution, reproduction, etc. are forbidden without
the express written permission of the copyright holder, who anyways is
the publishing house and they won't ever give such rights to a punk like
you.
Not very encouraging, is it? On the other hand, nothing
is
something like I hereby relinquish all rights to this work and put it
in the public domain for anyone to do whatever they wish with it.
Again,
this is a bit too much.
Creative commons is
an organization whose goals is to build a layer of reasonable copyright
,
that is, acknowledge that copyright laws give an author a set of rights,
and the freedom to decide which ones she wants to enforce.
Thus, I have decided to place the whole content of bmt-online under a Creative Commons license that lets everyone free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and also to make derivative works, provided that they give me credit, don't use it for commercial purposes and distribute derivative work under the same license.
These rights and conditions are embodied in the Creative Commons tag, and associated metadata, that appear in the footer of every page on the site.
When clicking on the Some rights reserved
button, you are taken to a
layman's description of the license, from which you can also access the true,
lawyer-readable license.
sat 2004-03-20
Online comics and micro-payments
Scott Mc Cloud
I said yesterday that r0ml Lefkowitz was a geek-in-chief at AT&T Wireless
.
One of the reasons was that, as he was presented more missing open source
projects
, basically covering the whole IT infrastructure at a mobile
phone company, he mentioned www.scottmccloud.com
as an example of a web site using a micro-payment architecture.
So what?
, would you say.
So, Scott McCloud is a very respectable, and very respected comic book author, who,
after explain[ing] the inner workings of the medium
in a comic book, went on to
advocate twelve different revolutions in the way comics are created, distributed and
perceived with special emphasis on the potential of Online Comics
in yet
another comic
book.
Needless to say I am a fan of Scott's work, but that makes me no less a geek than r0ml Lefkowitz.
Demian5
What better than the link page of a comic book artist to lead you to other, yet unknown, online comics? I naturally floated from Scott's universe to that of Demian5, a german online comic author, with a sleek look.
To get an idea of Demian5's work, check out his free classic When I am king
.
Micro-payments
Now, the interesting part is that both these authors, and a few others, use micro-payment technologies for support, including the classic PayPal and the less well-known, and even more micro BitPass.
I think it's pretty original (at least as far as I am concerned), and clever
too: who would refuse to put 25¢ out to read a comic that
she appreciates, or $3 for one year with no automatic
rebill
bullshit or credit card hassle. I, for one, am convinced. By the way,
feel free to try the system out 
fri 2004-03-19
Open Source/Free Software
As I was writing the entry about OSBC 2004, I realized that maybe I hadn't been quite clear enough about Open Source and its relation to business.
I don't want to get into details, but I want to point out that, yes indeed, Open Source, embodied by the Open Source Initiative, and Free Software, embodied by the Free Software Foundation, are different beasts. This is clearly, if with a slight bias, pointed out in this essay by Richard M. Stallman.
thu 2004-03-18
OSBC 2004
Pff... Just got out of a two day marathon at
OSBC 2004. So. Yeah.
Some might be shocked by the subtitle of the conference: Home of the Open Source
capitalism
. Some might think that there is an oxymoron right there, that
Open Source
and capitalism
don't mix. Well. That's not true.
It's not true for two reasons.
-
The
de facto
reason: look at the list of sponsors for the conference. Novell, HP, IBM, intel, VERITAS, Oracle, sgi, Wind River... yes, even Microsoft. All these big names of software development are having a go at open source. Right now. They are companies. They are american, for-profit companies. They want to make money. They wouldn't invest in something that did not have promising returns. - The pragmatic reason: Open Source, as we know it, was certainly originated as a political statement. The GPL is as much Richard Stallman's manifesto as it is a software license. However, the dynamics of Open Source, which can be summed up to open-sharing of source code, collaborative development and peer co-appreciation, do not have to exist within the framework of that manifesto. On the contrary, they can be successfully adapted into viable business models.
Admittedly, the strong business tone of the conference was a little much for a mere geek like me. I found out that I currently obviously have other interests than the successful development of a business. I'd rather contribute to the successful development of a product that will in turn fit in the successful business developed by my associates (which is exactly what is happening at nexB).
Still, I was happy to be able to meet and see a lot of the big shots of the
(business-side of) the Open Source movement: there was Brian Behlendorf, president
of the Apache Software Foundation and
founder of CollabNet, Mitchell Baker,
Chief Lizard Wrangler
at mozilla.org,
Chris Dibona, an original heavy contributor to SourceForge, Tim O'Reilly,
the editor, r0ml Lefkowitz,
geek-in-chief at AT&T Wireless, Mårten Mickos,
of MySQL, Ian Murdock, founder of Debian, Haavard Nord, co-founder of TrollTech, Rob Page, of Zope, Larry Rosen, author of the OSL and legal
counsel to the OSI.
I also had the pleasure to listen to two very articulate and knowledgeable
speakers: Larry Lessig, Professor
of Law at Stanford Law School, and Clayton
Christensen, Professor
of Business Administration at the Harvard
Business School and author of The
Innovator's Dilemma
. If you ever have an occasion to listen to them, do not
pass on. It is worth it.
Of course, the marathon part wasn't so much because the agenda was heavy, but because of what was at stake for nexB. This conference was our official coming-out! Michael got to present the company in front of a panel of VCs, along with three other companies, which, let's be honest, sucked. And we got to network hard! Let's hope we reap the rewards of the intensive labor of those two days.
thu 2004-03-18
LLPG and a.a-a
I am a fan of comic books and graphic novels. Ascii art cartoons are no exception to my taste for graphic stories. Quite by chance, I was lucky to discover the newsgroup alt.ascii-art a few months ago. I was lucky because two talented artists post their comic creation several times a week.
OO Hi!
`||
db
Joaquim Gândara, who is not spanish, already produced more than five hundred(!)
episodes of Nerd Boy (see above), while
Khamura just started LLPG,
understand Life, Love, and the Pursuit of Geekiness
.
As an aside, it so happens that my newsreader is Mozilla Thunderbird, which has an option to transform text smileys into little graphical smileys. Below is the episode 24 of LLPG, with an interestingly placed smiley.
wed 2004-03-03