Is this thing on?

XKCD recently published the future and found through a good number of Google searches that finishing up HTML5 would herald the demise of newspapers and the Third Coming of Christ.

Coincidentally the W3C declared that finally CSS 2.1 had reached Proposed Recommendation status, and surely, surely!, the end, in the form of CSS 2.1 as Recommendation, should be nigh. I recapped the story in an almost four year earlier entry, Cruelly Slow Slog, a slog that cruelly continued for four more years. 11 years of labour is not bad for what was intended as a quick fix.

Heaping on the irony, a new working draft of CSS3 Speech Module was published. While CSS 2.1 was bound to reach PR some day, the CSS3 Speech Module had been missing in action for seven years, if this module had been a person he would have been recorded as dead long time ago and his belongings spread among his inheritors.

Maybe it is time for me to revive the Audio module? While the Speech module is an aural equivalent to the Text module, how to style spoken text (generated by text to speech), there would be a use, arguably a greater one, for handling audio files. Audio is to speech as image is to rendered text. Properties of an audio module would be the likes of volume, balance, delay, speed, how to present the media in a given context.

In the intervening years HTML5 has happened, with dedicated audio and video elements. As is otherwise the case having more well-defined markup makes the case for styles easier, with the ability of everyone involved to adapt content to user circumstances, for audio as well as images.

Of course, given present form, Jesus Christ would have become a frequent flyer by the time such a module would reach Proposed Recommendation.

This entry was actually made, well conceptualised, back in early July when I wrote several entries on HTML5 and XHTML2. If I made it then it could be considered prophetic, though it would only show a Nostradamus-style prophetic ability ("there will become a war, and in that war some people will suffer badly"). I lost that opportunity, but if something is worth doing, it is worth doing very, very slowly. And trust me, there will become a war, and in that war some people will suffer badly.

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Even after the death-of-XHTML2, syntax debate still dominates the day. Here is my contribution.

The XML story

In the beginning was SGML. There is a lot to be said about SGML so I won't. HTML was specified to be an application of SGML, but that never happened in practice. Among browsers Opera kept the pretence of supporting SGML for the longest time, causing us a lot of trouble because Opera behaved differently from every other browser. DocBook is another known SGML application, but in general SGML was no success.

About a decade ago a small group of people started a reformulation of the old SGML standard, First they did it outside of the W3C and later, when the success became apparent, within the W3C. The story of this simplified SGML, now known as XML, may be best told via the annotated XML, by Tim Bray, one of the principal authors. Essentially XML is angle brackets and a number of production rules on top of Unicode (for a fuller description see Comparison of SGML and XML).

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This was a comment on a New Scientist piece, Linking genes to geography could revive race myth.


The concept of human races that most of us have grown up with has been shown to be at best simplified or misleading and at worst completely false. That hasn't and won't make racism go away. Furthermore this racial theory we have inherited is founded on Victorian science, and an enlightened project to classify and make sense of the world as they knew it then. The racial theory we know is far better founded than the theories at their time, but that wasn't good enough.

Combined with the obvious question at the time, "Why are Europeans so apparently superior to other human beings?", this cause profound misery in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century. The scientists did their best based on what they knew moved on based on new data. But the societies didn't as there will always be a generation gap between the two.

I think history might repeat itself. Phrenology and talking about the Mongoloid race is (mostly) a thing of our past, slowly so may the Victorian idea of race do as well. The question of today seems to be "Why are the East Asians so much better at making money than other human beings?" Based on the past we can expect racist attacks and theories both against and by ethnically East Asians.

Science has moved on, we don't talk of race any longer, we talk of populations. But when it comes to genetics we are no better informed than the Victorians were about anthropology. We are making our conclusions on very scant material. There will be something in it for everyone, and many of these will have an axe to grind. By carefully selecting data you can get material to support every wild idea you can find on the Internet.

Nothwithstanding "It is important to emphasise that there are no genetic variations exclusive to any racial group. Some are more common in certain populations, but their distribution does not align with social categories of race." the idea of race is too ingrained and too useful to go away.

And it isn't just about race. Say you have data that 30% in a population, such as a classroom or an office, are predisposed to obesity. How are the 30% or the 70% to react to this information? If you know you are predisposed, would you eat less, or will you eat more because you can't help it anyway? What if you are predisposed to being bad in math? Or to violent crime? What if it is the neighbour and the neighbour's kids?

And what if 15 years later scientist discover that you or your neighbour weren't predisposed for obesity or being bad in math or violent crime after all? How would your life have changed from living 15 years under false assumptions?

Some nights ago, at a pub in Žižkov that used to be called U smrku (The Pine), I was chatting with a friend while not listening seriously to the songs being played. I asked her what would be the ten most decadent songs in history, without really coming up with suggestions of my own.

I tentatively put up "Crazy frog" (Axel F) in position #8, but I am really not good with lists, particularly not with music lists. Maybe you can come up with some suggestions?

There have been many language threads and digressions; I should know, I have participated in most of them. Maybe it's time to start talking about talking: What is language, where did it come from and for what reason? How do languages compete, cooperate, coopt each other? Where are they going? Is one language better than another? What about dialects, sociolects, idiolects, jargon?

Follow the discussion here

I came across this report on a study by Jonathan Huebner showing that the rate of technological innovation is slowing down, and that by this rate we will be down to the Dark Ages level by 2024 (a curiously precise prediction, but presumably by comparing the technological advances of the millennium 500-1500 with the current trend).

There is no doubt this study is seriously flawed, the data picked can be seen as arbitrary and even misleading, but it is no more flawed than the other hypotheses and studies around. Self-styled futurists tend to be highly myoptic. It is a natural phenomena, you are highly aware of the changes happening to you, but less to to your parents and their parents' parents. In particular I admit a strong scorn of the singularitons claiming our world will enter a technological apocalypse in the near, but conveniently distant, future. My claim is that revolutionary, paradigm shattering, Oedipal changes are getting rarer as we live a longer productive life. Of course that is far from the whole story, but over time extrapolations always fail.

In a particular area the field may be stable or stagnant for a long time, experience rapid technological growth, and then fade into the background. This can be seen in the ages, we have had the non-starters of the Atomic Age followed by the Space Age, with the more successful Information Age which too will fade. The myoptic bias is to count the changes that are important to us now, and discount the changes that were important to us then, or will be in the future. We will have no greater problems living in our future than our predecessors have living in our present, as long as we can adjust to that change in focus. All that changes fast now will change slowly in the future.

My magazine of choice, (The) New Scientist, released its first issue 50 years ago, and more recently followed up with a hefty anniversary issue.

Reading news (or watching or browsing them for that matter) is a waste of time if you want to be informed or enlightened. I have argued before that instead of following flickering interpretations of what just happened it is better to use sources like New Scientist get an insight into what is going to happen.

Self-conscious at 50, New Scientist looked backwards for its New Zeitgeist in news articles past, as well as forward in inviting predictions for the following 50 years. While both are good reads, true to form it is the present, in the "Big Questions", that this issue shines. One present but unasked question is the role of science itself.

A test to determine the kind of action a scientific branch has is to look at the reaction. Since the time Galileo run afoul of his pope astronomy has annoyed nobody (well, dark astronomy annoyed me, which shows promise). The last public uproar based on physics were the anti-nuclear demonstrations in the 80's. There may be sufficient smokestacks left to give chemistry a bad name, but this is not where the battles lie. Meanwhile information has been the most recent inclusion into the physical system, and with the widest impact the last few decades. That notwithstanding all the theory was fairly established by the time the first issue of New Scientist was published, and thereafter nothing much has happened, and not that much is going to happen either.

Advances in physical science and computer science is now in the realm of usability studies and market research. It is no longer iconoclastic in nature, fundamental world views are no longer turned over by breakthroughs in physics. We will probably never return to the rapid and fundamental advances in the golden era of the late 19th century and the early 20th century. The physical sciences are a part of the establishment. Einstein is an icon, and we use quantum physics when we try to understand the world. If you observe two connected butterflies causing a storm a cat will die while staying alive, therefore if something is sufficiently garbled it is scientifically proven.

Biology on the other hand is upsetting. Christians largely in USA and Muslims largely outside of USA are rallying against Darwin, in a truly impressive display of rear-guard action. What other scientific theory of that venerable age can still muster the troops this way? But it isn't just the implicit threat to creation myths that gets us going. Genetic engineering, cloning, stem cell research... You name it, we protest against it.

Back to the big questions and the long forecasts. With some exceptions we were relieved of the hyperbole. Fifty years is not a long time, half a lifetime or thereabout. The world in the 1950s was very different in flavour to ours, but it wasn't truly alien. The world in 2050 won't be either. The forecasts in physics were largely completist in nature, reminiscent of card collectors, "if we just got these two missing cards we're complete". Based on past experience we will learn more if this completition project fails, but in any case an uninspiring outlook for us non-collectors.

I am much more enthralled that we are well on our way to discovering our past. Thanks to the invention of writing we have known tales from the past for quite many generations now, but what about the unwritten stories? Fossils may be among the oldest things around, but they have been new to us. As Andrew Knoll noted, most of the the artifacts of life and civilization remain in the ground undiscovered, but fifty years from now most will have been found. Non-intrusive survey methods will cover all the land mass as well as the seas. Digging for artifacts and fossils will not be the only way of inquiry. From the human genome project of the last decade, the neandertal genome project is well on its way. We are set to discover not only who we are but how we got to be, much of it from archelogical evidence in living genes in addition to communing with the recent dead.

Applied biology is provocative enough. But when it really goes home to ourselves it will be hard to ignore. Several of the articles touched the fleeting worry that when science has disposed of free will the way it did to phlogiston or the aether, what would prevent us from doing harm as it isn't our fault anyway?

This is reminiscent of when 18th and 19th century science gutted God good, the raised concern was how a society could survive and prosper without the fear of God to scare people into subordination. As you know we still turned out pretty allright. Demystifying our own behaviour will not make us into irresponsible people even though in a deeper sense we aren't responsible for ourselves. Put the other way around proving the illusory existence of self would not turn previously selfish people any more selfless. I may not exist but I still want that car.

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.

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.

While this complete command of the Opera source code was impressive, it wouldn't fit the organisation we were to become. It must have been around 2002 when he told me with some satisfaction that he didn't personally know the code anymore. And the rookie programmers were rookies no more. It is their work you see in Opera today.

When we needed to jump ship, both continuing on what was to become Opera 6 and developing the next generation engine, Geir and Karl Anders were the architects of Presto, based on experience from the past as well as the requirements from the future. Presto is a large collaboratory effort but it was also probably the most sensitive engineering project we have ever undertaken. We had dozens of projects hanging in the balance, we could not afford to fail and we didn't.

As Opera Software has grown from a handful people to a quarter thousand I still recognize most of the same company culture as when I started. The Asterix-like attitude, never to be fazed by incredible odds (part of what makes it fun to work for this company), the drive to make something that is actually good, and never cease to improve what's there.

Some of this Opera culture can be pinned on individuals such as Jon's endearing conviction that nothing we ever do is second-rate. Less obvious but just as present is Geir's influence, both on those who met him, and those who did not. I would not call him shy, but he was intensely attention adverse, you would never see him first in line when Opera won prizes. He didn't brag even though he had better reasons than most everyone. He focused on doing the task right and doing it well, and the proof was in the code. To this day you won't hear an Opera programmer brag, even when they have good reasons to, and they often do.

Geir's understated sense of humour complemented those of us who enjoy being rather overt in our merry glibness, like elsewhere Geir was subtle but clear. He was immensely nice, likeable, unassuming, but not easily impressed. As the saying goes the good Geirs die young, but in this case his renown will last for a long time.