How the Internet has changed

A Debates & Discussions forum thread:

How has the Internet changed (or changed your life)? How will it change in you lifetime?

I can recall as a kid in the seventh grade, in Montreal Quebec, in our computer science class we had access to a time-sharing computer based somewhere else in the country. The method of data input/output was an enormous Telex teletype machine that sounded like a jackhammer when printing. […] My vision of the future for Internet is not all rosy. […] What I’m sure of is that the Internet will continue to become part of our lifestyle and those who are Internet illiterate will slowly be left behind as progress marches steadily on. […] I invite any and all to send their ideas.

En svensk tiger

Opera 9.0 Beta is now available for download. For those of you who have regularly tested the 9.0 previews and weeklies the difference from those isn’t that great (except in stability), but from 8.5 it is huge. There are new features and advances in standards. One that has truly progressed since 8.5 is SVG. While we don’t have complete SVG Basic support yet, with full styling and scripting, we are close. Getting here has been a long journey.

The first version of SVG, SVG 1.0, became a W3C Recommendation in September 2001. We had an interest in SVG even earlier, but the sheer size of the specification made us decide against it, it was hard to justify putting so much effort into a format that was going to need years to get a foothold in the market. We had done it with PNG before, but that was easy. The arrival of the Adobe plug-in decided the matter, why should we spend our remaining resources on SVG when there was a viable alternative?

We weren’t looking for a Flash competitor, which seemed to be Adobe’s main drive until they bought Flash several years later. It definitely wasn’t to make a Purity of Essence markup language not sullied by the real world like the HTML harlot – many working group members at that time were deeply hostile to the Web. The mobile companies were the next to turn on to SVG, and while there are clear benefits with SVG on phones, the gains can be even larger on a larger screen.

We saw a vector graphics markup language as an adjunct to HTML, together they would become more than they were separately. Each language could provide what the other one could not. HTML augmented with CSS could do both text, layout, hypertext, semantics and more. But it couldn’t do the simplest illustrations (except through brutal hacks), or graphs, or fancy boxes or headlines. As HTML was a W3C language and SVG was a W3C language you would have expected that these two were well integrated, that you could easily use one to enhance the other.

That certainly isn’t the case and this is a tremendous unfulfilled promise. It isn’t all bad, the two languages do integrate with each other after a fashion. They can be looked at as feuding siblings, having them in the same room will cause torment, but they are family. Hopefully some years from now they will both grow up.

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Hardware

I don’t buy much electronic stuff, but I have been on the look-out for a new phone since my old one died, letting my company Sony-Ericsson P800 double as my own phone in the meantime. Working for Opera makes buying a new phone harder as I can see products not yet on the market, tempting me to wait for the next generation, which in the phone world means 6-12 months in the future. The venerable P800 has already become a great grandfather of its line, it may be filled with wisdom, but not with verve.

So laden with cash I went out to buy me a phone. Of course nowadays buying means comparing what is in the market, their characteristics with my requirements, with some recommendations to seal the deal, then checking what price I could get (no operator binding please). The actual buying meant going into a store, pointing at a plastic dummy and saying “I want that one, please” and was done within minutes.

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Prague Guide for Norwegians

Note
To change from Czech Crowns (CZK, koruna, Kč) into Norwegian Crowns (NOK, kroner, kr), use the Currency Converter.
Airlines
Norwegian, ČSA, SAS, and sometimes Sterling have direct flights to Prague from Oslo (Norwegian also has it from Bergen and Trondheim). I like ČSA, but they rarely come with good offers, so Norwegian is the airline I most commonly use and can recommend.
Preparation
Bring a passport, a mobile phone with charger, some plastic for the ATM, non-smelly clothes, and toiletries. If you have time and inclination read about Prague and the Czech Republic beforehand. Go for the stuff you won’t discover on your own the first five minutes you get there (e.g. look for history, culture, architecture, current affairs). The Czech Republic uses all the normal standards for electicity, phone networks, etc. You can expect things just to work. Don’t bring stuff, you don’t need it. Unless you go to Prague in the winter where warm clothing is recommended. That way you don’t have to check in any luggage either and don’t have to wait for your luggage to come through. Check with Trafikanten for travel options to Gardermoen.

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Change of Address

I left the hotel in for the last time today. Except for my flat in Oslo this was the place I had spent most nights the last few years. I have never lived long-term in a hotel before, but I could get used to it. The reason I left was that I had finally gotten the keys to my own apartment, signed the lease, paid the rent. I miss having a reception so that I didn’t have to carry my keys around, the two keys to my door are fine but the key to the entrance door is a huge brass thing that seems more appropriate for ceremonially giving someone the key to the city rather than actually unlocking a door.

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Strong is wrong

Early mistakes are the hardest ones to fix. From the start HTML supported semantic markup, which is one of its selling points and in the same tradition as SGML. The early HTML had markup typical for its use of the day (code, dir, samp, kbd…). Today elements more like byline or nav might have been picked instead. But formatting elements like i, b, or u were of lesser value, because they gave information of what the phrases looked like, not what they were.

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Death in the Family

Co-founder of Opera Software, Geir Ivarsøy, died of cancer last Thursday.

The first time I met Geir Ivarsøy was in 1998 installing Opera 3.5, when Opera got CSS support. What I didn’t know then was that this very first good CSS implementation had been Geir’s work in few months, but it made CSS geeks worldwide pay attention to the Opera browser. A couple years later many of us ended up as Opera employees.

When I started in Opera I was charmed by that people worked regular hours, the atmosphere was as far removed from the life of a microserf as could be. Geir, our lead developer, went to the office in the morning and home to his family in the afternoon. But what happened in between was pure gold. Dozens of newly employed Opera programmers lined up at his door whenever they had a problem they couldn’t fix. Geir would pinpoint the problem and the solution within minutes.

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Web 2.1: Making it whole again

Attended the W3C Technical Plenary, in Cannes, France. W3C has played the United Nations of Web standards for a decade now. In that period they have created 85 recommendations (finished specifications). In the works are 2 proposed recommendations, 28 candidate recommendations, and 111 working drafts, 25 of which are in last call (actually a few more, but I dropped some of the more process-oriented documents from the list).

The World Wide Web comprised three standards initially, URL, HTTP, and HTML. The URL, the location of a resource, was the crucial one. It created one standardised way of describing an address. The HTTP transport protocol allowed any machine to pick up or send to that resource, and HTML like this included the URLs as hypertext links. WWW built upon existing Internet standards as well as predecessors like Gopher, FTP, and Enriched Text.

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Fig leaves

Going from the usefully useless spacer to the false start of HTML 3.0. HTML 3.0 never made it to a final specification, but it contained many interesting if half-baked ideas. One of these was the fig element. Like spacer the element had many attributes now obsoleted by CSS.

Also like spacer or the logo and photo types in vCard, but unlike img, object, or canvas elements fig tells what kind of image is shown, here a figure. In addition the figure had associated content, the caption and credit elements, as well as content fallback like for object in HTML4. caption reappears in XHTML2, while credit has yet to reappear.

Two other properties were unique for this version of HTML, the overlay, an image positioned on top of the figure, handy for sprite animations, but here ostensibly to save bandwidth. The images could have a checksum so that when leeching an image the owner of the site would not be able to swap the image with an inappropriate one without the browser detecting that the image had been tampered with.

Last week in Berlin

Berlin may be my most bypassed city. In the old days I would either take bus or train the Oslo-Göteborg-Malmö-Sassnitz-Berlin-Dresden-Prague route. Apart from train change I rarely spent much time in Berlin, and the bus wisely took a huge circle around it. So it is now when I’m mostly flying over the city that I seek it out, and this time I did it the old-fashioned way, taking the Budapest-Hamburg train from Prague. The web site had warned me the train was running 18 minutes late so I could leave later than I otherwise would have to. The 350km train ride might have costed more than the 900km airfare from Oslo but that is fair since the ride lasted more than twice as long, passing through the pretty but depressed landscape of the Czech-German hinterlands.

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