CNET: Microsoft's browser play. The removal of IE as a free, downloadable software application could have a profound effect on the Web and the development of Web standards.

Zeldman: IE/AOL; the flip side. Why proposed negative (anti-IE) and positive (pro-luxury-browser) grassroots campaigns cannot change consumer behavior or alter Microsoft and AOL's business decisions. What is likely to happen to design and development methods over the next few years. Some of this is actually good news, really.

Whopper of the day, another one from Microsoft:

In response to some skeptical questioning from the Indian press about the investments, Gates had this to say:- "It is only because of Microsoft's approach that the computer industry has become a worldwide industry."

And he probably believes it, too. In Bill's model of globalization, he is the world.

CNN: Microsoft to pay AOL $750M. Tech titans settle Netscape lawsuit, set seven-year licensing pact for AOL to use Internet Explorer.

CNET: Microsoft to abandon standalone IE.

So, AOL can now install IE with their product for no charge, just as MS terminates development of the installable IE. Great deal.

Jeffrey Zeldman has some great analysis.

Aside: does this mean AOL must use IE? From initial reports, the answer appears to be no. The alternative browser would just have to be free to AOL (or strategically valuable enough to justify its cost). However, AOL’s track record has it bundling IE for Windows even without a special agreement, even as it owned Netscape.

Presumably the termination of IE development means that users can only receive major browser updates by buying new versions of Windows. For the majority of users, who are likely to stick with their current OS version for a while, IE 6 SP1 is the end of the road. Its slow march toward compliance with CSS and other standards can go no further, no new web technologies will be added, and no more bugs will be fixed.

This is a huge problem for web programmers and designers. A large majority of web surfers—those using IE on probably all versions of Windows before Longhorn (scheduled for 2005)—have just had their browser orphaned, with no simple upgrade path. With all its warts, it’s going to stick around for a long time.

In other words, Internet Explorer 6 has been Netscape 4-ed.

Whopper of the day (from the CNET article): "Legacy OSes have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1," [IE program manager] Countryman said. “Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS.” Is he trying make us believe that bug fixes, CSS3, XForms, etc., are impossible without a new operating system, due to some technical limitation? Maybe the quote was meant to look like a statement of technical possibility, while it was really a marketing dictum. As in: for the users to get further improvements in IE, they must first buy and install an updated OS. (Because we want it that way.)

Tim Bray, wresting with page layout in IE, puts it more strongly:

The problem isn’t that CSS is too hard. The problem isn’t browser incompatibilities in general. The problem is specifically that Microsoft Internet Explorer is a mouldering, out-of-date, amateurish, out-of-date pile of dung. Did I say it’s out-of-date? As in past its sell-by, seen better days, mutton dressed as lamb, superannuated, time-worn. It’s so, like, you know, so twentieth-century.

Ron Green raised the alarm, which echoed through Scripting News and then around the usual hallways: “All this has lead me to ask if IE is dead.”

Firebird [mozilla.org] and Safari [apple.com] are looking really good right now.

Aaron sums it up nicely:

Everything is under copyright. But most of those things aren’t making money, so no one cares about their copyright anymore. The Eldred Act will let you use those things.

Sign the petition. Tell your friends.

[via Aaron Swartz: The Weblog]

Managing the Semantic Web, Sandro Zic

How to ensure usability of distributed content & knowledge management?

Intelligent systems, peer-to-peer, remote programming rather than RPC.

Software agents. I’ve never quite understood the need for these. Why do we need to send code around? What couldn’t be accomplished ahead of time by Googlebot or having a direct interface exposed? Some use for disconnected operation, maybe, but increasingly we’re always connected and want immediate results anyway. Due to lack of time, we never got to this question.

Excellent keynote. He started with a simple, obvious thing which we tend to get wrong because we’re blind to it: weblog item doctitles that show up properly in search engines. Then a bunch of specific things we can implement, and a look toward the future. Good, practical stuff.

Talked about the content side of content management. Importance of titles and topic sentences. Communication skills. Don’t hit.

Content is the expression of ideas, request for attention, or attempt to influence. Technologists don’t think hard enough about the effort & the reward of making content.

Showed an entry on Don Box's site that displayed its title perfectly in his aggregator NetNewsWire, but Google didn't see it, because it wasn't in the doctitle. Easy to make this mistake. (Reiterated point: Publishing is essentially engineering. We forget these issues because engineers think from the inside out.) What is the right unit of content? Radio Userland has the day’s posts on one page, with the date as doctitle; Moveable Type one per page, so it can use the item's RSS title. Dave Winer's weblog comes in like an IV drip all day, but the audience for most weblogs isn't like that, and they need titles.

This affects how John Udell uses Radio Userland. Dave Winer interjected to ask if it would help to have a field to choose the day's title.

Brent’s Law of URLs: the more expensive the CMS, the crappier the URL. Showed a bunch of typical CMS & welogging system URLs. Tim Bray’s homegrown site was best: example ended with 2002/02/13/NamingFinishing. Vignette’s > $200K product was worst with an awful, long numeric URL.

Structure in doctitles. Search results pages can parse & group the titles. Example: with doctitle like Magazine Name | Date | Dept | title, group search results by magazine issue. Showed good example of this on O'Reilly's site.

Great example of broken titles in just about every mailing list archive. All the titles are wrong—they are the same as the last message in the thread. Not scannable. Showed a mockup with meaningful titles.

A few of the examples had the common thread of repetition of data in the user interface. Search results kept repeating the site name in document titles. Discussion board forums kept repeating the same subject lines. The mailing list example he showed was pretty much wall-to-wall repetition of the same thing. Only difference between successive lines was indentation and author name. A better interface would strip it all out, summarize, whatever. I've run into all the things he mentioned and just gotten used to them. I have to look at them with new eyes.

Call to implement ThreadsML.

Discussion of SlideML. Showed his method of generating it, but it isn't usable by “civilians”. No help in writing the actual content apart from typing raw XHTML in Emacs.

CMS systems came from publishing & were ported to web. Weblogs are web-first.

Hypertextual writing is still stuck in 1995. Netscape did as much or more than wer're doing today in 1996. We need lightweight web-aware writing tool. Need to advance beyond emacs, TEXTAREAs or the shoddy Windows DHTML edit control. InfoPath still relies on crummy XHTML editor.

Compound documents: tend to explode to meaningless names because the system has to add them (e.g. slide027.html). Discussion of old Netscape cid: protocol.

CMSs solve refactoring problems “in the large”: making consistent changes to many files, access, etc. Refactoring “in the small” suck up a huge amount of time: reformatting email messages, etc.

Categorization is a heavyweight operation; there should be other lightweight ad-hoc ways. Example: All Consuming book aggregator finds book references in blogs.

Showed example of searching his SlideML markup with XPath for code examples.

Update: Here are the slides and notes from Bitflux: part one, part two.

OpenLaw.org. Wendy Seltzer.

Parallels between law and open source software. It's generally public, has a revision history, forks and joins (Supreme Court over differing circuit courts). But process of forming arguments hasn't been public. So they opened up the process to the public in Eldred vs. Ashcroft. Now opening the DeCSS DVD DMCA case.

Developed an annotation system to comment on or rebut other web pages. Looked like a scrollable iframe with the original site on right, with comments in parallel on left. The courts have accepted their amicus briefs, and they have submitted comments to Copyright Office. Archives of case material, opinions, articles, etc. Important take-away from the session: now I know how to pronounce “amicus.” Or I thought I had just learned, but Larry Rosen behind me pronounced it a different way.

ChillingEffects.org.

Often just the threat of monetary losses in cease-and-desist letters is enough to shut the site down, independent of legal merit. “Shadow of the law.” Example: “you are sharing approximately 0 song files”. Little cost to send C & Ds.

So Chilling Effects archives and publicises them, increasing the cost of sending them by shaming the companies. This also spreads knowledge of the issues.

Update: Donna Wentworth at Harvard Law picked up this entry and provided the link for the C & D example. See her entry for more notes. Thanks, Donna!

I had no idea the credit reporting agencies were institutionally this sloppy.

Hartford Courant: A credit trap for consumers. The nation's credit reporting business is built on a system so seriously flawed that costly errors are inevitable. [via Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

10 Best Features from Commercial CMS

Browser-based image editing, pre-localized interfaces

Extra credit: In-context editing (Edit This Page), dependency reporting, semblance of autoclassification, relational viewing tools

Reporting: such as Never Logged In

Configurable, forms-based workflow (ingest Visio WFML?)

508/WA compliant output — accessibility. Table headings + row headings, alts, etc.

Browser-based content object development (schema, essentially)

OpenCourse educational site. opencourse.org. “It rhymes with open source!” (The presenter avoided saying this, but I'm sure he wanted to.) Slow-moving.

Dublin Core Metadata in CMS

On oscom.org presentation slide show, different DC formats for XHTML, HTML, RDF XML are linked.

Good reference impl.: DC-dot. Another: Reggie

Elements (such as DC.Subject.Keyword) appearing multiple times, yes. Comma-separated value lists, no.

Discussion on thesauri, search engines, etc. Overall, I didn't get a huge amount out of this session, at least not directly. I'll have to find the references impls online.

Provides a standard way to place content on a web server, with metadata, file locking, versioning. Also can decouple filesystem layout from author's view. Uses HTTP for all logins, so no need to create full user accounts.

Very few clients support metadata so far. Cadaver does, but cmd-line based. Kcera? KExplorer? support properties.

To check out: Joe Orton's sitecopy. Twingle.

WebDAV for filesharing tested lighter than SMB on network traffic.

Question on ranged PUTs. WebDAV and mod_dav support it, but some servers don't. The Mac OS X WebDAV client can't use ranged PUTs for this reason, or it would risk replacing the entire file with the tiny part that was changed. They're working toward some kind of solution.

Servers include Apache mod_dav (which the speaker wrote) and Zope, Tomcat. Jakarta Slide requires a lot of work to connect its memory-based store to something. Can even handle WebDAV with CGI except for OPTIONS method.

Subversion supports DeltaV WebDAV. You can mount & copy files from vanilla Windows & Mac OS X. But you can't modify them, because the client don't support DeltaV. (There is an experimental "autoversion" plugin to server to allow this.)

Extensions: ACL. Remote management of ACLs; close to RFC status. DASL (DAV Searching & Locating). Yet another query language. Further off.

MS WebDAV does a little check for FrontPage first, but is pretty much straight WebDAV otherwise.

My question: best/simplest route to implement a change trigger for a WebDAV server, so I could run a script? Can I plug in easily to any of the existing servers?

A. Zope supports WebDAV and is programmable. It uses its own data store, though, not the filesystem. So the whole system would have to use Zope.

Best answer. Could look at logs / an Apache filter to implement change response. Great idea.

Alternative: Author of FS watch & notify utils suggested those. They only run on Unixes, though. (I need Windows support, so I could look into NT's APIs for filesystem notification too.)