Out of the way

(Back to blogging, and thinking about it)

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I am in Maputo, Mozambique, in a W3C workshop about how the Mobile Web (in my mind the web in general) can help the developing world develop.

Interesting times...

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I get a lot of email. Sometimes it looks a lot like spam (I get a lot of that too) but is really very important. How do people learn to write email?

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It is almost enough to round off to one. And then I really would be it. YtseJam and Toman both tagged me, so I guess I gotta answer...

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The US Congress are at it again. Another law attempts to protect children using the internet. This time the target is social networking sites and chat rooms, where children (and adults for that matter) can be approached and drawn into something bad.

It looks good for a politician to say "I'm taking concrete action to look after the children of [insert your home here]". Who in their right mind doesn't support the idea of protecting children from evil? But does this law really healp, or is it just like trying to lock them in Rapunzel's tower?

Children are inquisitive. They are, at their best, naturally inclined to learn about what it is to be an adult - those mythical figures who earn their own money, don't have an enforced bedtime, don't have to ask if they can go to a friend's house, and apparently have the kind of wisdom that makes "because I said so" a rational argument.

At some point they discover that among the things adults do which are forbidden to children is the one that caused them to exist in the first place. In our marketing-driven culture, it's hard not to learn that people do this because they enjoy it, and fortunately many discover it as an expression of love, a gift that people can offer again and again, and moreover one that comes from themselves, not from a shop.

Children are often sociable, friendly, and we try to teach them that giving is a positive thing. Shops, offices, homes, are filled with artwork that is not very good, but proudly displayed because it is a gift from a child.

As individuals we try to protect those we love from harm, and that naturally includes our children. We try to teach them to avoid the dangers in the world, from being hit by a car while crossing the road to being struck down by nasty diseases caused by smoking. Parents make an effort to know what their children are doing, to ensure that they are safe.

As a society we try to extend that protection to all the members of society. To do so, we make some very arbitrary decisions. We set age limits on all kinds of things, from leaving school to seeing violent films. We try to give people enough education to enable them to survive as independent adults and discourage them from surviving by stealing, from coping with difficulties by taking drugs we consider harmful.

None of these mechanisms are perfect, but that in itself does not mean they are unimportant. What we do try to ensure is that there is a reasonable balance between the freedom to live an independent and fulfilling life, making a sufficient contribution to the society so it can continue to function, and providing effective protection for society at the cost of restricting the lives of individuals - or in some societies by taking the lives of individuals.

From Algeria to Afghanistan to America, from Norway to Nuie to New Zealand, people have different ideas of the best way to do this, and governments have more or less success in reflecting those desires in the structures that they create. The key is to ensure that whatever we do is an effective part of maintaining that balance.

To return to this law then. Is it going to achieve its stated goal, or is there a better way? Does it respect the need for freedom and help ensure people can achieve their goals in life (and our goals for them)? Does it recognise the realities of the world or is it based on assumptions whose unrealistic nature dooms it to failure? In short, does it meet that test of effectively maintaining the balance?

The American Library Association did not think so. In their submission (PDF 34kb) they pointed out that social networking provides an enormous value to education, and that the proposal paints a distorted view of the internet. I am certain that among the 65,000 members of the assocation not all of them are the wonderful people we would like our librarians to be, but equally sure that the overwhelming majority of them are in fact people who understand a lot about children.

I think they are correct. Not all parents are wonderful. Not all children will avoid being killed by cars. Not everyone will avoid smoking, or any of the thousands of other dangers in life. But this law will not stop inquisitive children from meeting inventive predators, nor even (in my opinion) significantly hinder the process. It will not teach children how to protect themselves from falling into such situations. It will reduce their ability to learn, by reducing many children's opportunities for educational social interaction. This is a net loss for socety, and a serious one.

There are nasty things, nasty people, nasty situations on the internet, just as there are in the physical world. There are more powerful ways of creating barriers, of making it clear to people that they are going to a dangerous place, and making it difficult to get in. They are not perfect. But they are, I believe, more effective than simplistic legislation.

One of the simplest and best-known today is "tagging". We can tell our children not to go to this or that dangerous place, but by the time they learn to read we can teach them that a variety of signs mean a place is dangerous and should be avoided. In the long run this is far more helpful. (Funnily enough, it is something that has long been advocated and adopted by large sections of the adult entertainment industry and by many schools and libraries).

Paedophilia is widely agreed to be evil and bad for children (although it wasn't always so), and the sexual predator in the park looking for little children is a familiar figure in the shared nightmares of our society. I grew up being warned about "danger stranger" and that the toilets at the park were a place where some men looked for children to do things that we probably wouldn't want to do. (I never saw any of these people, but their graffiti messaging system was familiar from similar examples in universities and libraries I had been to).

I had a very good teacher in primary school who was a known paedophile. I don't recall the details, but I knew at the time that no chldren were to be left alone with him. What I didn't realise until very much later is that another (not very good) teacher of mine was also a paedophile. I only discovered this because someone else's child discovered, too late, the very very hard way.

We cannot protect ourselves from all risks, and we cannot protect others from all danger. As adults, we freely and consciously engage in risk-taking behaviour, and children also do this. We can try to provide some basic protections, like ensuring that people are not driving cars in suburban streets so fast that it is impossible to stop if a child runs onto the road, or providing a raft of sanctions and proactively attempting to protect our children from sexual predators (or any other kind of sexual activity). But unless we equip them to make sensible decisions, by understanding the nature of the world, we are doing them a disservice and leaving them more vulnerable than ever to those who have found a way around our simple-minded approach.

I'm not a US citizen, I do not live there. It is not my place to decide, for them, how their society should run its own affairs. But I do hope that this law doesn't make it through the political process to become the law of their land, because I think it will harm the American people, and by further isolating them from the rest of the world will eventually have a negative global impact.

I'm at The Gathering, an event where 5000 mostly norwegian folks (maybe 500 come from overseas), mostly 15-21, get together with their computers and geek on...

Actually a big part of what people do is gaming. Fair enough, there are a lot of people who like gaming. But Opera came here as a sponsor playing an active part. Some people came and ran games competitions. We came and ran a competition for making widgets. Which are not that much of a stretch, but are cool. And put up a heavy-duty games machine for the best one that gets done this weekend.

I've slept for two nights on a shelf, been up to see the sunrise, given a talk about standards and an online tutorial from 2am, eaten only junk food for two days, written a few widgets (most are rubbish for playing around, but I like my SVG clock), given away t-shirts and squeeze-balls, cleaned up around something close to a shanty-town (but in a real shanty-town there are people who care more about keeping it clean), and even been outside a couple of times.

A few people here have done some really cool stuff (apart from the crew who put the event on - they have actually done a really great job. The only thing I can fault them on is the food available here - not a piece of fruit to be seen without walking a mile). Some neat widgets, people doing standard geek stuff (world record for making a picture, playing huge multi-player games, sleeping on their keyboards, sitting until teir eyes are falling out of their heads and they are seeing triple), lots of people being helpful in almost anything you can think of, and Arne.

Arne is a tradition. Maybe it started in 2001 when Arne forgot his lunch, and his mum came in to give it to him walking around yelling "Arne", since it is hard to find someone if you don't get teh systems that are used to organise places. Maybe it was because he was underage and being told off for something. (That's not hard in Norway). Maybe it was because he had run off with some other girl, and his poor distraught girlfriend was wailing for him, back in '97. (But I don't think so. It isn't that kind of gig. There are maybe 15% women here, which is high, and they are generally girlfriends, but they are generally unlikely to have to chase their boyfriends down).

So somehow or other, as is the way, the gathring got a tradition. Calling for Arne. Which happens throughout the day and more particularly the night, as 5000 people call out. There are t-shirts. There are official announcements about him.

One day I'll come to the gathering, in a decade or two, saying "Hi, I want to get in free. I deserve to, I am Arne".

In the meantime it's fun. And there are nice people here. If I hae to work overtime, it isn't a bad way to do it.

Well, for the first time I am writing live in an aeroplane. It's still ridiculously expensive, but now it is just a luxury and not a ludicrous idea that has nothing to do with real people.

From up here, you don't always see a lot. Clouds below, sky in front, burning sun utside and air that will snap freeze you. But you get time to think, between teh noise of teh plane, the fact taht I haven't slept properly and have been too close to the sun for too many hours already.

A little while ago now, Hallvord wrote a beautiful blog entry about browser compatibility with the web, and how the compatibility is like dancers being used to each other.

It made me think about standards. Partly because my job is to think about standards, of course. But if the browser is a dancer, then standards are the floor. It is possible to create a unique dance for a unique occasion. Artists do this with the Web, too, making something that only exists once, and isn't really meant to be captured but to be participatory. But most of the web is about something that anyone can get.

In dance, and especially in things like rhythmic gymnastics, there are people who know the size of the floor to n inch or two. They rely on it being the same size and having the same spring, in the way that dancers rely on their partners doing what they do. Those are the standards.

On top of the standards, people are building brilliant individual performances, extending what we thought of as possible. Sometimes those are the one-offs that require a particular setup. Sometimes there is no reason it can't be repeated but it just happens to be an uncommon setup. Sometimes, people do things that rely on particular configurations that aren't possible for everyone. Accessibilty is like this - a page that relies on tiny fonts and having good colours is like a dance performance that relies on being up 16 stairs. It doesn't matter how good it is, you can't get there in a wheelchair.

Which is another important point about standards. They have to be reproducible. W3C does a god job of checking out how to make standards work in different environments, in different languages. I think WHATWG does a better job, although probably over a more limited range of circumstances. In general, these two are ahead of most of the rest of the various groups trying t odevelop things that get taken up as standards for the Web (but not always).

So we try to dance, first on the floors everyone dances on. And then we do a few special things. We dance on floors few people can dance on with Opera mini. We put a bit more into the browser on the stnadard floor.

And some of us try to figure out more about the floor, or look at ways that we can make it better - preferably without breaking what everyone already knows. And that's some of where I spend my time. Dancing.

Well, it's a nice way to think of it. And I don't have to do the physical training that dancers do.

I gave a talk in London last week, at the W3C's Mobile Web event there. Lots of the folks were talking about the future, how some day people with super-expensive phones would be able to get the Web to do stuff for them. In the meantime, I had decided to do some work on my style. I'm not really a great one for design, as many people know. I like pretty simple layouts, plain colours, and I tend not to do much to adjust whatever default style I get (except to make text bigger, which I nearly always do).

I managed to get the same slides to appear in fullscreen mode (the OperaShow presentation mode), in a different style for normal on-screen reading, and to show them on my phone in a presentationoptimised for the phone. It wasn't rocket science, and I thought I would share how I did it. (Thanks Tommy for the photographic evidence that this works on a real phone running Opera Mini) (The next bit involves digging into the HTML source code. If you think that's boring, skip to the slides themselves - if you have Opera you can switch from fullscreen (which won't work before December - only the mobile version is uploaded) to small screen rendering and see how it comes out, then write a comment saying "Oooh, Aaaah" and I will be grateful ).

So what did I do? The first thing was to write some slides, to use OperaShow. I originally did this with the online tool, because it made the stylesheet for me. I copied the entire stylesheet into a seperated file, and I edited it a bit. Then I started to look at my own slides. I had some simple XHTML - this is what OperaShow is based on - its structure is the one I got from teh generator, and it works well for me even after hacking around. I added a link to the external stylesheet I had created, and said it was for several media types:

<link rel="style" type="text/css" href="slides.css"
  [B]media="print, tv, projection, screen"[/B] />

Then I added an internal stylesheet:

<style type="text/css" [B]media="handheld"[/B]><[CDATA[
/* Style rules go here */
]]>
</style>

(Why the funny extra brackets? Because this is real XHTML, following real XML rules. Just in case someone wants to build a really basic browser that only understands real XML, and skips all the error-correcting that Opera does to make the web that's out there actually work).

What rules do I actually put in? The following isn't exactly the same as the source. I've improved a bit, left out a few repetitive things, but you should get the idea. The first ones are to reduce the margins, padding and so on to something more obvious for mobiles, and remove the big bullets from lists. Stuff like:

ul,ol,ul li { margin: 3px ; padding: 3px ; list-style: none }

There are a number of images used in the screen and projection version. Most of them are more than 50kb, they are fairly large, and they are not really cool for mobiles. Fortunately, they are all styled with a couple of classes. I added a link to a very small, mobile-optimised picture, and gave it a special class that is set not to render in the linked stylsheet. While I was there, I decided to tell a logo image to show itself small (it's not too heavy, but its normal size was much too big), and I decided the first slide was not worth seeing as a slide. Those two things have an id, so I styled them too.

#mwi {width:55px;height:58px}
.r {float:right; padding:0px; margin:0px}
.topleft, .right, #s1 {display:none}

Then I decided I wanted to make the slides stand out a bit. Put a box around them, add a little slide number to each box, like a real slideset (This uses some CSS 2 - the counter won't work on some basic browsers, but the content is still there):

div.slide { counter-increment: slide; }
.slide { border: 1px black solid; padding: 4px; margin: 0px 0px 5px}
.slide:before { content: "Slide " counter(slide); float:right; }

By this time, I was messing around in the depths of stylesheets I never really understood before. (I found things like background images included through the use of data: URIs and all sorts of wierd and wonderful stuff). One of the things I found in the print style was that it put lots of metadata into the print version, but I was too slack to add metadata yet. (I'll dig back in and do that, because it is pretty useful as well as cool to see it printing). But I did use a couple of rules I found to add some simple metadata:

head { display: block; border: 1px black; padding:5px; width:100%}
title { display: block; padding: 0px; margin: 0px;
   text-align:center ; font-weight: bold;}

If you look at the real source, you'll see the slight differences. You can look at how the other stylesheets work, too. But you're better off asking a different expert about the details of those - all I did that was special is trim them down to something I can manage, and make the mobile-friendly version work. (Even then, I could have done a bit more... maybe next time I'll explain that instead).