Rubénerd!

It started like any other day in my CCNA course. We sat down, were presented with some Cisco slides, and our lecturer started discussing the concepts we'd be exploring in the following lab. I'm a fan of this format; for IT courses there's really no point having us sit in a two hour lecture, then have us go home without actually doing anything with it. But I digress.

When we got to the slide introducing EIGRP, it mentioned the proprietary nature of the protocol. With enthusiasm though, our lecturer overlayed a bubble over the slide, proudly announcing this was no longer true!

Sure enough, on the Cisco website, EIGRP has been submitted as a draft informational RFC:

Cisco is opening up its EIGRP routing protocol as an open standard in order to help companies operate in a multi-vendor environment. Customers should be able to pick the best protocol that works for them, based on technical merits. Any networking vendor can now freely implement EIGRP on their equipment, and interoperate with thousands of networks running EIGRP today.

"Based on technical merits" are strong words. Clearly Cisco believes other protocols were being adopted because EIGRP wasn't open, not because of any technical superiority. A shot across the bow at the likes of OSPF!

For some reason though, I couldn't shake the feeling there must be a catch. It didn't seem right to suddnly compare EIGRP to open, standard protocols like OSPF, based on a draft proposal.

Sure enough, in the second paragraph:

Cisco is releasing the basic EIGRP to the IETF as an Informational RFC. This includes all the information needed to implement EIGRP, and its associated features, including High Availability (HA).

The key word being "basic". I'm not a networking engineer, but this reads to me like if you want more of the advanced features of EIGRP, you'll still need Cisco gear.

And then we have this:

EIGRP is being released as an "Informational RFC", and that allows Cisco to retain control of the EIGRP protocol in order to preserve the customer experience and deployment investments. The EIGRP protocol will not be changed.

If I were a third party network hardware manufacturer looking to implement EIGRP, some key phrases there would give me pause.

So, not to go against my CCNA teacher, Cisco should be applauded for making steps in the right direction, but at best EIGRP could be considered a "partly-open" at this stage.

Art of Tsugumi modifying what could be a routing table, by okitakung on Pixiv.

I was going to refrain from talking about this, I really was!

The Site

In February, Microsoft launched IE6 Countdown, a site that gauges worldwide use of the archaic browser and encourages users to upgrade to newer versions.

Its been covered to death by Tweeters, Twitterers or whatever it is we're called, and many people have already voiced their opinions, which means I add a great deal of value by talking about it as well. Right? Don't answer that.

The Pirates

From a statistical perspective its interesting to see which parts of the world have moved on from the curse that is IE6, and who's sticking around. Presumably countries like China have higher usage owing to the fact pirated copies of Windows can't be updated, or at least not easily enough to be done by average people.

It's certainly an interesting philosophical and security debate, isn't it? I'm all for free software when their developers adopt FOSS licences, but I'm not for commercial software piracy; theoretically Microsoft has every right to deny unpaid customers their services.

Or do they? See, this logic works in isolation, but when we're all connected to the same network (Homer told me the Internet is on computers now) compromised machines affect all of us including, ironically, paid Microsoft customers. Botnet zombie Windows machines send most of the world's spam, they clog our networks, and they further spread worms that would otherwise find themselves harder to propagate.

This IE6 Countdown site serves as much as a testament to the effects of piracy and corporate policy on security than a simple gauge of who's using a creaky old web browser with giant toolbars.

The Browser

I sincerely applaud Microsoft for the IE6 Countdown website; people have been using this outdated software for far too long and if anyone can convince people to move off it (other than maybe Google!) it is Microsoft.

It rings a little hollow for me though. When they mention IE6 doesn't adhere to web standards, the site glosses over the fact it was intentionally designed this way. After Microsoft won the first browser war, IE was left to stagnate. By stifling standards, they were able to stunt the growth of internet applications for half a decade, a convenient coincidence for a purveyor of desktop software.

Much like my American friends are supposed to believe GM are suddenly concerned with the environment only after they ran themselves into the ground with light trucks and SUVs, the site also fails to point out that it wasn't until competing browsers started strong-arming Microsoft with increasing market share again did they start taking standards more seriously. Forgive some of us for being sceptical of their motives, and for thinking some of the language on their site is a little rich:

Its name was Internet Explorer 6. Now that we’re in 2011, in an era of modern web standards, it’s time to say goodbye.

This website is dedicated to watching Internet Explorer 6 usage drop to less than 1% worldwide, so more websites can choose to drop support for Internet Explorer 6, saving hours of work for web developers.

Uh huh

Finally, despite the assertions of otherwise smart people like Renai LeMay from Delimeter, IE9 still lags inexcusably behind in web standards, to say nothing of the previous versions after IE6, which leads me to my ultimate argument for the site: I believe it should be renamed from IE6 Countdown to IE Countdown. Make no mistake, we would still all benefit from IE not being used at all.

I last mentioned IE9 back in February 2011: Internet Explorer 9 relativity. The gist of that post in two sentences:

Progress is being made, but it still performs relatively poorly in standards tests and still feels like too little too late in my books. A company with Microsoft’s resources should have made this progress years ago.

Be afraid, be very very afraid!

You get me my Cheez Whiz, boy?

Along with all that sweet, sweet syntactic sugar that HTML5 gives us and cool properties in CSS3 like border-radius, I've been aware of a part of the CSS3 specification that has me more terrified than the days when I had to endure the <marquee> tag.

I'm talking of transition effects, and depending on your flavour of browser you call it in one of these ways:

transition-duration: 0.40s;
transition-timing-function: ease-out;
-khtml-transition-duration: 0.40s; 
-khtml-transition-timing-function: ease-out;
-moz-transition-duration: 0.40s;  
-moz-transition-timing-function: ease-out;
-o-transition-duration: 0.40s;  
-o-transition-timing-function: ease-out;
-webkit-transition-duration: 0.40s; 
-webkit-transition-timing-function: ease-out;

I can already see this being abused by script kiddies and people on sites like Tumblr using this to death. TO DEATH. When this become mainstream, there will be parts of the net that will be unbearable to use again. Not to say with gratuitous animated gifs and JavaScript they're not doing this, but still!

Save us!

Giorgio Maone over at NoScript has taken it upon himself to modify the plugin of late to help protect us from lots of elements rather than just automatically loaded JS. His extension made Firefox the first browser to respect the proposed DNT opt outs before Mozilla, Apple, Google and Microsoft had. It helps to prevents XSS attacks and in a pinch can block content being automatically loaded in with HTML5's <video> and <audio> tags. More than any other browser or browser extension, NoScript quite literally makes the net usable.

I'm sure Giorgio could block transitions and timing effects too, just so we don't have to go into our preferences files and manually add overrides. As I said, he's done a great job proactively including new features to guard against threats, and I believe gratuitous use of these transitions could be the greatest threat to our collective sanity since Windows Aero and hip hop.

Good grief I'm nearly 25, but this post makes me sound like I'm in my 70s. Hey you kids, get off my lawn!

Thanks to はしりべ (member 1790437) on Pixiv ;).

So the iPhone is coming to Verizon? This is bigger news: The Google Chromium team have announced the impending removal of the H.264 codec from Chrome. Oh well, I never used it as my primary browser anyway.

Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.

I envy their convictions, but I see several glaring issues with this.

Being open by being closed

Leaving aside all the other glaring technical and legal shortcomings of WebM -- Google's proposed new video standard that's grounded in good intentions but alas falls short -- the main problem with it right now is it requires a Flash wrapper.

Google is claiming they're doing this for the sake of "open innovation"... by requiring Flash? Maybe they mean open because Flash is one of the most insecure pieces of junk online and they give open access to your machine by malicious users. Yeah, that must be it!

If we were to draw their line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, Google should be dropping the closed, proprietary Flash from Chrome [fixed] as well. They're not, and there's no way around this glaring fact. Well, maybe if you're a Fox News presenter you could figure out a way, like Glenn Beck no doubt will after this fiasco! But I digress.

The Google IO Factor

This was a comment left by Bob Andfeld on my post back in May 2010 about Google's support for Flash (Google supporting Flash doesn't make it open). My verbosity frustrates even me, he put it more eloquently and in less space than I ever could:

For a company such as Google that prides itself on being open and advertises its mobile platform as such, their support of closed Flash is absolutely baffling, yet enough people are willing to parade in their defense.

But it gets better! Say what you will about the open/closed nature of H.264, but at the last Google IO conference Eric Schmidt made the comment that the web should be about inclusion not exclusion, in reference to Apple's exclusion of Flash from their iDevices. And now, Google is excluding something.

I suppose that's no different than people like Paul Thurrott poking fun at Apple for not including cut and paste, then rushing to Microsoft's defence when they didn't ship the feature in Windows Phone 7. I suppose doing no evil doesn't include having double standards ;).

Knowledge is better than ignorance ~ Sergey Brin

I’m not one to dwell on conspiracy theories (unless they’re fun ones like the moon landing was fake, or Area 51 was actually where Chuck Norris had a house), but I’m beginning to entertain the notion that Google is hiding something, and its only becoming more obvious. Why would a company that prides itself on being open have such support for a plugin that is anything but, even going out of their way to demonstrate their mobile phone hardware with it at events? Are they in kahoots with Adobe?

There’s something more going on here, and we’re not being told about it. I reckon Shantanu wants a ride in Sergey and Larry’s private 767 with the hammocks, and Sergey and Larry want some free copies of Illustrator so they can redesign the Chrome logo to not look like the Windows XP logo that's been swirled once. Yeah, that must be it!

There's hope!

At this stage I'd triumphantly talk about my browser vendor since 2003, but Mozilla will probably side with Google on this. At this rate maybe I need to switch to Safari with FlashBlock! Nah, eLinks is where its at! :D

Needless to say, I'm glad I heeded no attention to the constant and increasingly vocal barrage of advice from people to move over to it. Ruben, move to Chrome! Hey Ruben, Chrome is cool, use it! Yo dawg, I heard you like Google tracking you...!

With all this gloom and doom talk, sometimes its worth remembering though what makes the web so strong and open in the first place. If a browser vendor starts to not make any sense, or do things we don't approve of or agree with, we can always just switch to something else and access the same internet as everyone else. Well, other than Internet Explorer, or Windows Internet Explorer Service Pack 1 Home Premium Edition or whatever they're calling it now :).

And from how this affects me personally, I use [flavour of the month] wrapped in Matroska from BitTorrent anyway. I mean, wait, no I don't. You didn't read that.

From the very beginning of the first iPhone I defended Apple's position against adding Flash support, and the same went for the iPad. Now it seems their position has finally started to pay off, and you won't even need to be an Apple customer to benefit.

First, the two arguments Flash proponents almost universally take when debating this issue are:

1. There's lots of useful, important Flash material out there
2. Why not include Flash by default, but allow people to turn it off?

Except in a few extreme cases where the developers don't provide an open alternative (and they're disappearing rapidly), the first point is patently false, and the second one ignores the fact that much of Flash wouldn't work on a portable device (how do you hover a cursor?) and would just encourage developers to merely put a warning on their pages telling iPhone users to switch on Flash support. Either way, no progress gets made.

Now it seems pages have started popping up across the net with Flash-free, HTML5 support for Apple's iPad. Love or hate the device (and there's certainly lots of material discussing both sides), both it and the iPhone are making a noticeable difference in the adoption of open web standards over closed, proprietary web APIs such as Flash, and Silverlight if that even mattered in the first place.

The iPhone is better for standards than Android?

What I find ironic is that it took a traditionally closed company such as Apple to get the web moving away from the slow, buggy, closed Flash API with limited platform support instead of the so called open Android platform which either comes with or supports Flash. If we were all using Android devices, we'd probably still be using more Flash.

I am a proponent of free and open source software in general, but what I'm a zealot for is open standards. As far as I'm concerned, a proprietary product that exports, saves, opens and manipulates data in open formats is superior to an open source platform that either pays lip service to closed APIs or approves of them.

That's not to say Android hasn't also done amazing things, one of which was to usurp Microsoft's terrible WiMo and make free(er) software the norm on mobile phones which is unprecedented. Have you ever used Pocket Office on WiMo, ugh!

Related posts

• 2010.01.30: iPad without Flash is Google without IE6
• 2010.01.30 Adobe attacks… with figures!

Having been better for a couple of years compared to their less than stellar record in 2007, recent stability problems with Twitter have highlighted its vulnerability from a technical standpoint, though it's not the problem I wanted to talk sweepingly about here.

It occurred to me after reading that the free and open source Laconi.ca software powering Identi.ca had changed its name to StatusNet (for some reason) how great it would be to be able to sent Twitter @replies to people over there, and to be able to get replies back. Social networks are only as valuable as the people who use them, and for me nobody in my life excursively uses Identi.ca over Twitter, though that could change.

The problem with social networks like Twitter is that we're limited to having conversations with people using the same service, much like ICQ and Yahoo Messenger for example. The solution then was much the same as what Identi.ca is trying to do now with status services and microblogs: create a free and open alternative in the form of Jabber. Unfortunately while Jabber is used by a sufficiently large group of people it suffers from the same problems as many free and open source projects; while it is a viable alternative, aside from possibly being slightly more reliable and robust it doesn't offer any compelling reason for the vast majority of people to switch from what they're currently using, in this case Identi.ca to Twitter.

The other approach to fixing the problem with closed IM networks was kind of kludgy but was accepted because it worked in current reality: services such as Pidgin and Adium aggregated many disparate networks into one application. The same can be said with next-generation software such as TweetDeck now where you can import your Twitter, Facebook (and for some reason MySpace) contacts and track what they're doing. The problem with this approach is while such software gives the illusion we're all talking together, in reality I still can't reply to a Facebook message with a tweet from my Twitter account. The different networks are presented in the same way, but are entirely separate.

I used to be somewhat a free and open source zealot, but I've come to realise especially in the last few years that free and open source software is much less important than free and open standards, at least in my own opinion. People can create their own walled gardens and closed networks for their own reasons, but they should offer lifeboats in the form of accessible, open protocols and standards that others could write to. As we've seen with the WWW, standards that are implemented [properly] can be an extraordinary way to level the playing field and to allow small, independent services to compete with larger, more established ones.

It is for this reason though why I think we won't ever see direct collaboration between Twitter and Laconi.ca, or FriendFeed or other such services. I love Twitter and it forms a critical part of my life now that I could honestly not imagine not having any more (I really do mean that), but that doesn't mean it doesn't scare me just a little. Though to be fair, it scares me infinitely less than Facebook.

As of February 2009, page 145 is one of the last ones!

Checking, correcting and validating malformed (or in most cases typo filled) XHTML code is a very useful thing to do when you're sick because it takes almost no brains whatsoever to do and it keeps you occupied instead of watching daytime television.

I can now say with 99.95% certainty (my solicitor advises me against ever being 100% certain) that every friggen page and post on this blog is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. Sheesh.

Tentatively every page and post is valid XHTML 1.1 as well with two caveats

1. I don't have an XML declaration in the first line of the source so I don't trip Internet Explorer's Quirks Mode
2. Pages are still being served with the text/html mime type instead of the technically correct application/xhtml+xml, again for compatibility with even the latest versions of Internet Explorer such as 7 and 8 Beta.

Both of these could be handled and adjusted on the web server so that depending on what browser the client is accessing your site from you could dynamically add declarations and change mime types on the fly (I believe that's the W3C recommendation with XHTML 1.1) but it seems like a bit too much trouble to deal with now. I'll be keeping my eye on this though.

Obligatory Microsoft rant

Microsoft was sued by the European Union because they felt they were being anti-competitive by bundling Internet Explorer.

While I believe that suit did have some merit, the really should have gone after Microsoft's appalling standards record instead. They've been responsible for untold amounts of damage by keeping back the progress of the internet and have caused frustration and head butting on walls by programmers and web designers.

What a mess!

I was under the impression that newer web standards emphasised the separation of content from presentation markup. This was the reason for the creation of CSS and relegating the humble table back to displaying... tabular data.

I've been an unabashed and unapologetic supporter of the web standards themselves, even if in the past my interpretations of them weren't exactly correct ;-). I'm attempting to correct this though because I see real value in everyone being on the same page on net as it were. That was a really clever and entirely unintended pun. I'm not Bill Kurtis.

What concerns me though is the removal of the value attribute from the humble ordered list element. This attribute is vital for generating non-contiguous but ordered lists of items, or where selected items share the same value, such as this example of ranking some of the cities I grew up living in based on the amount of time I spent there:

<ol>
<li value="1">Singapore</li>
<li value="2">Melbourne, Victoria, Australia</li>
<li value="3">Adelaide, South Australia, Australia</li>
<li value="4">Brisbane, Queensland, Australia</li>
<li value="4">Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia</li>
<li value="6">Sydney, New South Wales, Australia</li>
<li value="0">Orion's Belt, Far Far Away!</li>
</ol>

According to the W3Schools list element article, the value attribute was deprecated by the W3C for use in XHTML because you can "use styles instead". There's just one problem with this line of reasoning: The value of a list item is NOT a style attribute, it's DATA.

By removing this so called "presentation information" we're also removing an integral part of the information itself which is absolutely unacceptable.

If we were to take what they were saying as Gospel and represented these values in CSS (it is possible), then we rendered our now standards compliant document using another browser that didn't support CSS, we would be presented with a list without this data.

I urge the W3C (in my very limited capacity!) to seriously reconsider the omission of this attribute in their specifications.

One of the final pieces of the puzzle (to use a worn out cliche that long since overstayed it's welcome) of moving web servers is making sure that the code in the blog posts here and for the show are valid XHTML (I had kept this in mind for several years, but I have made mistakes that need correcting). This is important for several reasons which I won't bore you with here, suffice to say it has to do with moving over to a new server with a new theme, possible assignment marks and with some XML software I'm writing.

For those who are staring at me with blank faces right now (even more than usual I mean), XHTML is a reformulation of HTML into strict XML instead of the more lenient SGML. Alphabet soup sentences aside, pragmatically this means you can pass your web pages through a XML parser which allows you to do some really cool things like converting pages into other file formats, extract data more easily, use microformats to generate feeds, and so on. The theory also is because XML is stricter than SGML, pages written in XHTML are more "correct" and should be easier for browsers to render.

ASIDE: You can tell if a page has been optimised for an XHTML standard by looking at the head of the source code for a page for a DOCTYPE definition.

The current standards are XHTML 1.0 Frameset, XHTML 1.0 Transitional and XHTML 1.0 Strict (which is what I currently use). XHTML 1.1 also exists, but has seen limited adoption given Internet Explorer 6's hostility towards the required xml version declaration which triggers it's quirks mode which isn't what we want!

There seems to be a huge difference of opinion between people who see the value of validating web pages with a XHTML W3C specification, and those who say it's a waste of time and more of a hindrance to the web than an assistance.

I'm firmly in the first camp, but that's not to say I approve of everything the W3C is doing with their specs. Unfortunately the way I see it, for every three steps forward they make, they take one step backwards. This means they're definitely heading in the right direction and making progress (albeit at a snail's pace), but they're shedding some useful stuff along the way in their absolute rigid pursuit of code purity and correctness. Iframe elements and ordered lists come to mind, but I'll save them for another post where I can elaborate further.

As of the 5th of February 2009 the home page of this blog is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict, but there's still lots of work to be done for individual posts. A lot of this can be done automatically with a few Perl scripts I've hacked together, but a few tags that will need replacement can really only be taken care of by a human looking at it and making the correct substitutions. At least I feel I'm making progress.

XHTML sounds like an isotonic energy drink. It doesn't sound like Bill Kurtis, which is useful because I'm not Bill Kurtis.