The Norwegian Prime Minister, having been grounded in New York by Icelandic eruptions, did the natural thing for a politician in a modern democracy. He called in the press.

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There has been a lot of talk about HTML5 video, codecs, containers, and the lot. That certainly matters, but it isn’t something I care about. Assuming the browsers could agree on some standard media codec plug-in interface, like they have done before, browsers shouldn’t be different from any other media player like VLC. That way it wouldn’t be a major work to update the browsers and the spec itself to new formats. Problem solved. …

The licensing problem wouldn’t go away, but it would be moved from the domain of the browsers (or other media players). If a royalty-free codec like Theora were shown to be torpedoed by one of those media patents, and we had to use some Plan TheorB it would be a matter of discovering how to evade the patent in question and distribute the new patent-proof plug-in, instead of involving a number of browser upgrade cycles. It also moves the patent risk from the browser companies, which are huge lawsuit targets like Microsoft, Google, and Apple, and smaller ones like Opera and Mozilla, to the plug-in developers that would be so small and fleet as not to be a viable target.

I care about a much simpler issue, subtitles, those little blocks of text that put movies into writing. For all the controversy of the video element, the design goals have pretty modest, essentially recreating YouTube without using Flash. But HTML5 doesn’t “natively” support YouTube’s captions, annotations, and subtitles. Of course it doesn’t have to, anything you can do, you can do with JavaScript. However it would be a missed opportunity.

Why care about subtitles?

Subtitles are not that popular in mostly monolingual countries like USA with a tradition of dubbing foreign videos, they can be considered an aquired taste. They are still superior to dubbing, and crucially subtitles are more adapted to the Internet age, and they are searchable and accessible as well.

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This Is Your Brain on Kafka

Absurdist literature, it appears, stimulates our brains.

That’s the conclusion of a study recently published in the journal Psychological Science. Psychologists Travis Proulx of the University of California, Santa Barbara and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia report our ability to find patterns is stimulated when we are faced with the task of making sense of an absurd tale. What’s more, this heightened capability carries over to unrelated tasks.

In the first of two experiments, 40 participants (all Canadian college undergraduates) read one of two versions of a Franz Kafka story, The Country Doctor. In the first version, which was only slightly modified from the original, “the narrative gradually breaks down and ends abruptly after a series of non sequiturs,” the researchers write. “We also included a series of bizarre illustrations that were unrelated to the story.”

The second version contained extensive revisions to the original. The non sequiturs were removed, and a “conventional narrative” was added, along with relevant illustrations.

In other news, Reader’s Digest files for bankrupcy. Hope for the human mind?

The last W3C working group I participated in, Multimodal Interaction (MMI), is at the periphery of the Web and is unlikely to make much of an impact on it in the foreseeable future. However they have produced a few interesting specs (and a few uninteresting frameworks), one of which I will return to in much greater detail later.

The most obscure one may be InkML. The name might imply a language for tagging with paint, but is really describing the set of movements registered by a touch-sensitive tablet or screen so that the scribbles you make can be processed and enhanced by someone more clever than the tablet driver. Unfortunately this specification is made by a tablet-maker subgroup that like Schrödinger's cat is living or dead depending on your perception, and the spec is progressing at a less than vital speed. …

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To transportinnlegg på fremtidsblogg.

Augustine-kommisjonen til Obama: Ingen måneferd før 2020

Kan høyhastighetstog bli ryggraden i vår megaregion?

Cat free 9/9/9? Great, but what about all the other days?

Denne uken kom det et opprop fra kunstnerdypet, iallfall noen av dem, som sa seg forfordelt, eller var det forforstjelt? At bransjeorganisasjonene ikke er velvillig innstilt til fildeling er knapt nytt, men denne gangen var kampanjen frontet av forfattere og utøvere. Gitt det 20. århundres historie gir forfatteropprop meg mange assosiasjoner, ikke alle like gode. …

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Minimal markup seen from a data point of view rather than a document point of view.

I wouldn’t say it is XML’s fault as such, but it being used for a purpose it is less than ideally suited for, a consequence of early oversell (those who remember 2000 would know what I talk about).

There is another lesson that is web-relevant. Big dataset like these shouldn’t be naively be tagged into an XML format and presented as is on the Web. This is because in a web setting the overhead for each element is rather large as the DOM will be applied to it, allowing arbitrary dynamic mutations. It is easy to overwhelm even the most powerful processor this way and zap all available memory.

Last issue of New Scientist published a paean to IPhone named Appland: How smartphones are transforming our lives. It follows a traditional NS pattern of being ahead of the curve for science and behind it with technology. The author was elated, and there is a crucial distinction between things that make you happy and things that don't. …

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I have earlier proclaimed markup an [necessary] evil. A more constructive way of putting it is to say that markup should always be minimal. You should use as much markup as you need, and no more. Markup is something we add to aid machines. Too much or wrong markup can do more damage as too little or too vague.

This design principle determines how to standardize markup. Unless the author knows something the user doesn't, the markup should not be there.

This principle obviously caters to the author's laziness, the admirable human trait not to do more than necessary. It is less obvious, but no less important, that it also empowers the user. More minimal markup means more flexible and accessible markup, assuming that the user agents do their job and actually act on their users' behalf. …

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Where we are

Four years ago I wrote a small piece on conditional comments in IE7, and whether there should be an institutionalised Opera CSS hack, in the style of @opera or @browser opera. While IE's standards support isn't stellar, it is still better than it was four years ago, and the desire to make specific hacks for the shortcomings of IE, Opera, or any other browser hasn't gone away and is unlikely to go away in the next decade either. This entry is triggered by a comment this Friday asking for Opera conditional comments. For all the talk about the ills of browser sniffing, and using capability detection instead, it is not going to go away. In that case wouldn't it be better to make browser sniffing less bad? …

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