So the United States shut down Megaupload.com today.

The United States is the major hub and remains over-represented in the management and delivery of the Internet (cf. ICANN) which, as I recall, has always been done in a consensual, multi-organisational, global environment without the need for tampering in the form of regulatory control or oversight. It’s a bit like Belgium sans gouvernement: you let people who know what they’re doing get on with it and you find that they do well enough without intervention from the political class and the money men (who are the only ones losing out here, let’s face it).

What the United States .gov has chosen to do here unilaterally – shutting down a Hong Kong company primarily serving out of China – has an obvious effect on the rest of the world, but we would be foolish to swallow any assertion that this has been done “to protect and to serve” the rest of the world.

This political blinkering is compounded by a general failure, as far as I see it, to find and support a proper, open global forum for the discussion of the Internet-specific issues beyond narrow and exclusive processes like ACTA which are about as open as a maximum security jail.

Certainly orgs on a supranational level such as WIPO have not really grasped the nettle. This may be because the ACTA process has cut them out of the deal.

Elsewhere the output of interesting developments like WSIS and WGIG has either remained fairly abstract or slowed to a trickle.

Old men with old ideas shuffling slowly

As I see it, this generation of representatives and legislators is faced with a phenomenon for which it does not really have a proper vocabulary. It continues to apply proprietary models that date back to medieval society.

These models are flawed in the online context because they are based on intrinsic notions of fixed physical boundaries and transactions conducted essentially between two parties, each with obligations that bind them to the other.

It is fairly obvious that the Internet does not slide nicely into this particular suit of armour.

To quote the Wikipedia article on WGIG:

IT experts have expressed doubts that a UN body that does not necessarily know enough about the Internet will effectively coordinate the Internet technologically.

If the Internet were a physical object, for that generation it would be a quantity of mercury: a marketable yet frustrating, shapeshifting and fairly noxious liquid which needs to be contained in a bottle.

In fact, the Internet is more like oxygen. It’s already out of the bottle, it’s all around us, you can’t measure it and even if we share a common need for it, we each have a unique relationship with it. You can package bottles and sell them in lots. You cannot package an atmospheric gas, you can only cut access to it.

So if the lawmakers have abdicated from addressing the more technical aspects of the Internet, how do they propose to address the issue?

The Internet is also, for want of a better term, a cross-cutting issue. What we are talking about here ticks an awful lot of boxes and individual institutions will find it hard to address these modern questions with the relatively narrow scope of their respective remits.

The Internet includes elements of intellectual property, the law of contract, freedom of expression, human rights, international law etc because it is the collective product of human intelligence.

If you focus on the tangible targets – the companies, the websites and the servers – you ignore the the way people behave and vice versa.

After all that, my feeling about the Internet is that it’s a reflection of our world. Some good, some bad.

Perhaps those few with the big vested interests are the ones who need to evolve instead of trying to impose their self-serving control on “the rest of us”.

I had never needed to know what actually happened when the translation crawls through a whole page until this morning, when I discovered that all of my custom meta elements were being stripped out.

The values of these meta elements were important to me because I was using them to determine on a page by page basis the parameters in a querystring for a JSONP service.

For those for whom it’s necessary to store data in meta elements in oft-translated web pages, consider yourselves well warned!

I was disappointed to learn that Google had a hand in recent proposals on Internet neutrality.

Google-Verizon proposals: telling tall tales

These proposals purport to underwrite the future of an open internet. To quote the BBC story on the subject:

“The set of seven proposals guarantee equal access to the internet and call for the prohibition of wired broadband providers from discriminating between different kinds of internet traffic to ensure that no-one can pay to have their traffic treated more favourably.”

Ostensibly it all sounds laudable, but given that only wired providers would be affected, it’s only one side of the coin. The future, we are often reminded, is wireless and between them Google and Verizon have everything to gain as the market continues to grow.

56% of Americans have accessed the Internet wirelessly

- Pew Internet & American Life Project (2009) [Source]

I sincerely hope that, with these “compromise proposals” as it calls them, Google has backed a loser.

Self-interest and the public interest

According to the blog post above, Google aimed for these two goals:

1. Users should choose what content, applications, or devices they use, since openness has been central to the explosive innovation that has made the Internet a transformative medium.
2. America must continue to encourage both investment and innovation to support the underlying broadband infrastructure; it is imperative for our global competitiveness.

The only choice guaranteed by the first goal, given the content of the proposal, is Hobson’s choice. Even if access to everything is open, a two-speed wireless internet will dissuade users from consuming information and applications not already sanctioned by wireless providers and their online partners.

The ‘explosive innovation’ of which Google speaks is the fruit of unrestricted choice based on a level playing field of user access, whatever the connection.

Then there’s the second goal. Despite all the WTO-encouraged talk of stamping out protectionism, these proposals seek to bolster American interests in a global economy.

These are words designed to sound sweet to American regulators burned by the Comcast case, the American public whose jobs are threatened by cheap labour, cheap imports and massive offshoring and to Google and Verizon shareholders everywhere, who will no doubt be salivating in anticipation.

Corporations and public policy

We have reached a point in time at which corporations can now define public policy by the front door. Where once lobbyists had to ply their trade in hidden corridors, today the democracy of money and influence is out and proud.

The Apples, the Microsofts and now the Googles of this world are no longer content with telling us what to buy.

These proposals on the future of the internet show us that pervasive product marketing is no longer enough. A corporation now needs to be willing enough to dictate our future, our moral principles and how we should live.

Proper font embedding in a browser is long overdue. We’ve had to put up with the same old Arial, Verdana, Georgia, Helvetica, Times New Roman for years.

Now that browsers have to some extent caught up with the rest of us, thanks in no small part to a bit of healthy competition, Typekit has finally answered the call: you’ll soon be able to choose what fonts drive your website.

Everyone’s favourite glue

We’ve had sIFR, we’ve had MIR and we’ve had RIR. We’ve probably had enough.

None of these solutions proved to be ideal, but how often is anything ever ideal on the client side?

Well, let’s take a look at Typekit. At the time of writing, there isn’t too much to go on, but what we do know is this:

1. Typekit’s solution uses (quite a lot of) Javascript
2. The solution ‘downloads’ a font feed from a predetermined location
3. A ‘modern’ browser will interpret CSS @font-face correctly and render the desired fonts

So Typekit is merely following in the footsteps of jQuery, Prototype and other JS libraries. It’s about using Javascript as a sort of web glue to make things fit together. However, this time around it’s not being used to cover up for browser naffness.

Typekit will count on consistent support of modern browsers for the @font-face at-rule. This at-rule has actually been around since the CSS 2.0 specification, though a better, verbose description appears in CSS 3.0. An orthodox implementation of the at-rule looks like this:

@font-face {
font-family: "Mike Old Face";
src: url("http://www.mikepadgett.com/fonts/mikefont.otf")
}
/* The .TTF (true type format) will also be supported, as would *any* URL */


Once the font is “instantiated”, it can then be utilised (in Hemingway’s Fiesta sense of the word) normally:

h3 {
font: normal 120% "Mike Old Face", "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
}

Browser support for @font-face is still a bit patchy but things are picking up fast and now the browser people have discovered the joy of automatic updating, we can expect a fairly rapid uptake.

On the bright side, it’ll mean that designers can make more beautiful websites. The dark side is that many other websites are going to get a lot uglier!

But glue can get sticky

Microsoft tried and failed to get their Embedded Open Type solution accepted by the world at large (there wasn’t much of anything ‘open’ about it, of course). Redmond ended up handing it over the W3C as a feeble proposal for CSS 3.0.

One of the itchier reasons for all the fumbling was the issue of proprietary rights to the fonts themselves. This same issue may well cause problems for Typekit, though this time in the reverse sense.

You see, whilst the Typekit solution is likely to appease and perhaps even create uncharacteristic interest from type foundries (it appears to properly respect intellectual property rights), it might not sit well with many designers and even less with developers.

Here’s why:

The story goes that the Typekit script is going to be pretty hefty. It needs to be to do all the processing it would need to do and how long is that going to take? In addition, the font pattern will then also need to be downloaded (some fonts are marvellously chunky themselves).

Next, the matter of the rights. One of the first things I learned about business is that the real value is in contracts rather than sales, especially when you’re selling other people’s products. So it goes without saying that Typekit needs to be a subscription service.

On the one hand, some orgs would sell their chairman to properly and faithfully reproduce their branding online. How on the other, as one commenter suggested, do you now square it with your client that your design will actually attract an ongoing cost? Could this be another opportunity for Open Source or are the foundries on the edge of the precipice into which the music industry has already fallen?

This is my first proper evening on Linux. Last night I had the impulse at about 23:30 to install Linux Mint and I’m only now starting to use it.

After Partition Magic almost destroyed my Windows partition, I had to run a chkdisk to recover it, but all is well and I find I can leave Windows in peace and head back to Mint!

Indeed, there’s much to do here. My sound card doesn’t work, my networking seems a bit flaky and the typography in Gnome is awful. I looked at KDE briefly earlier on, but I’ll stick with Gnome for now.

I’m not completely new to Linux. J has been a fan since it was invented and she’s been playing around with various distros for several years. When we moved to Brussels, we came armed with a laptop running Mint and I got quite accustomed to its lo-fi charms. I’ll let you know how I get on!

Microsoft applies accessibility best practice fairly solidly on the desktop, but the same couldn’t be said of its recent online efforts.

Redmond has often been seen to lag behind the rest of the online industry and resentments have built up over the years, particularly fuelled by the development of Internet Explorer.

So it’ll be welcome news from Microsoft that Sharepoint 2003 – a release pockmarked by deficiencies in both usability and accessibility – has been replaced by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, complete with numerous interface improvements.

However what we’re seeing are quick wins rather than big changes: some attention has been given to (easily altered) markup and the visual styles of out-of-the-box skins.

For better or for worse?

MOSS: hasn’t aged so well

The origins of Sharepoint’s critical accessibility issues – and these are still more or less the same in MOSS 2007 as they were in Sharepoint 2003 – lie in Microsoft’s dogged commitment to delivering the functional equivalent of WinForms in a browser.

The practical result is a sort of Frankenstein’s Monster of desktop and web paradigms, onerously dependent on client-side scripting to hold it all together.

Closer inspection of this scripting suggests that MOSS 2007 is in fact potentially less accessible than 2003.

An uphill slog

If we can do without bells and whistles on the front-end, it’s not especially difficult to publish a semantically valid, usable and accessible Sharepoint intranet.

It’s just that we have to customise to comply, to the extent that the cost-benefit of Sharepoint is much diminished by the considerable resources required to make it seaworthy.

Administrative concerns

Assuming we’re ready to receive visitors to our newly-compliant Sharepoint front-end, let’s turn to that Microsoft speciality: the delegation of administration. Here’s where the complexity of transferring WinForms literalism to the web starts to take its toll.

The technology required to leverage the power of the Sharepoint’s administration interface is also the heartbeat of the product, but some assistive technologies won’t support it. An assistive technology user can access a carefully modified website, but she won’t feasibly be able to administer it. Unless, it seems, we’re prepared to put our hand in our pocket again.

The cost of concessions: “More Accessible Mode” and the Accessibility Kit for Sharepoint

In his article on expected accessibility improvements for MOSS 2007, Microsoft’s Lawrence Liu envisaged a “‘more accessible’ mode that allows users with special needs to identify themselves so that we can change the way some of our dynamic content is rendered” (note the choice of the phrase “more accessible”, rather than plain “accessible”).

Indeed, now that we have the finished product, Liu’s follow-up remark is more accurate, with the ‘more accessible mode’ being made available “… so that third parties can create solutions catered to screen reader users”. The implication being that “more accessible” properly equates to “more development”: this mode still appears to depend upon at least some out-of-the-box client-side scripting to function properly.

A requirement for extra development in MOSS 2007 is honestly acknowledged by Microsoft, though Redmond obviously stops short of seeing that as a potential negative.

Some organisations have made the investment: there is a collection in the public domain today of websites (numbers still in single figures) that have been created to meet accessible standards. And it’s clear that in these examples, MOSS 2007′s rich functionality is missing. Nor can we guess whether or not these examples are capable of being administered accessibly.

As the respected creator of accessibility test engine CynthiaSays, provider and vendor HiSoftware has partnered with Microsoft to develop an Accessibility Kit for Sharepoint (AKS), which will target MOSS 2007. AKS will “deliver a kit that can significantly reduce the time, knowledge, and effort required to implement a Sharepoint-based web site”, say Microsoft and HiSoftware in a joint statement.

There are at the time of writing no published release dates.

While-U-Wait: Master Pages, User Controls and Web Parts

In the meantime, general experience of .NET development has already raised the issue of how to guarantee good markup from programming, a task that has become slightly easier since the release of .NET 2.0.

Developers must first produce accessible, valid Master pages. Rather than out-of-the-box Master pages, this process should start with a minimal template, such as an example made available by Microsoft.

Thereafter the quality of markup output by .NET 2.0 user controls can be improved upon quite significantly using delegate controls or CSS-Friendly Control Adapters.

Unlike many of the widgets and plugins of other, comparable products, MOSS 2007′s own Web Parts are rarely configurable (presumably because of their proprietary nature), which contributes to the issue of accessibility, since these same Web Parts typically spit out execrable markup.

Most such Web Parts exhibit one or more of the following issues:

• HTML tables for layout, or improperly marked up for data
• Obtrusive Javascript that fails to provide alternatives
• Inline styles rather than applying external CSS by class or ID
• Multiple instances of ID attributes instead of unique IDs
• Fixed rather than relative units

Accordingly, it is essential that simple semantic markup is used in order to achieve maximum flexibility and optimal accessibility, otherwise all the hard work done on fine-tuning the Master and other user controls will be compromised.

Conclusion: fit for purpose?

Web-based groupware promises much for the future: information architecture, findability, collaboration and a single point of origin for access, audit and workflow.

The debate on how far Sharepoint achieves the definition is open. At the time of writing (October 2007) the Intranet Benchmarking Forum published a report on the suitability of Sharepoint for an organisation intranet and its findings were mixed, while earlier in the year respected analyst CMSWatch considered MOSS 2007 inappropriate for web publishing scenarios.

Whether or not Sharepoint does the job in a general sense, organisations for whom a high level of accessibility is important (in an ideal world, that would be all organisations) should be concerned about MOSS 2007.

Organisations looking to develop an accessible MOSS 2007 solution for both visitors and administrators will need to make significant investment in development and to accept the probable loss of much of Sharepoint’s richer functionality.

If Microsoft Office integration (or lock-in, depending on the reader’s interpretation) isn’t a key deliverable, then consideration could be given to a content management platform with a lighter footprint that wraps in a high level of accessibility as standard and offers plenty of flexibility at the front-end.

First, there was panic over students using the World Wide Web to cheat on their essays.

Then it was revealed that CIA employees had been doctoring Wikipedia articles on the subject of such public menaces as President Ahmadinejad and Oprah Winfrey.

The Internet and Hard Fact have always enjoyed a difficult relationship. Sometimes the truths were held to be self-evident to all but the most gullible users (remember the Nigerian 419 Scam?); others were open to interpretation (cf. the Taser incidents at the Universities of Florida and Los Angeles respectively).

For millions around the world, Wikipedia is the cutting edge of information delivery. At the time of writing, the website claims to deliver in the region of 8.2 million articles in 253 languages [source] – it’s a veritable fountain of knowledge, much to the bitter chagrin of commercial encyclopaedia publishers.

Anyone can edit Wikipedia and access to content is free. Whereas access to the 120,000+ online articles provided by a leading commercial encyclopaedia is normally about £5.00 per month. Put it that way and a couple of key points emerge:

• You’re more likely to expect (and forgive) if a bit of inaccuracy creeps into 8.2 million freely available articles in 253 languages
• A commercial encyclopaedia couldn’t compete, even with “a staff of 19 full-time editors and over 4,000 expert contributors” [Encyclopaedia Britannica, source].

We don’t really have any numbers on Wikipedia vandalism. One or two concerned parties have taken to documenting outrages, often with the righteous indignation of a juror.

Meantime, those of us on the fringe of the debate might be inclined to see the funny side. Am I the only puerile fool barely able to stifle a giggle at Bill Gates’ portrait defaced with a silly moustache? Or the assertion that George Washington “had a shit on a stick and then told people that it was OK to have unprotected sex …”? Or this non-sequitor I found this evening?

A very public row broke out recently over a report concerning the results of a survey published by Socitm entitled Better Connected 2007, which surveyed the level of accessibility of 544 local authority websites.

The brouhaha centred upon the methods employed by Socitm to generate metrics amounting to a thumbs up or down.

The ink on the publication had barely dried when the influential PSF weighed in conspicuously with vocal criticism of “continued peddling of what can at best called ill-informed pontificating and at worst out and out drivel.”

Better Connected is one such example, and the Insight team behind it add insult to injury by clipping town halls for £395 a pop as they vacuum up cash like the most opportunistic of privateers while cowering behind and milking their quasi-official .gov.uk status for every penny they can. [1]

The methodology consisted of a programme of automated testing, followed by human testing conducted by the RNIB, an organisation which has been seen to take a leading role in the promotion of accessibility best practice in recent years.

Acrimony surrounds the report’s implication that sites that did not meet the W3C‘s WCAG were deemed to have “failed”, contributing to a generally gloomy bigger picture in which the site of only one local authority was rated ‘excellent’, 64 others reached Level A Conformance (compared to 62 in 2006) and the rest presumably trailed even basic standards.

The overwhelming issue highlighted by PSF and others [2] is that reliance upon WCAG, automated testing and narrow criteria does not make for an accurate assessment of accessibility, generating instead sensational headlines and more spin based on a “dodgy methodology which fails (and therefore implies inacesssibility of) perfectly good websites … This is doing more harm than good” [3].

Are false impressions being created? Certainly a great deal of energy has been spent mooting just that, but away from the glowering flames, there’s also the year-on-year grinding negativity of Better Connected to worry about.

The RNIB‘s Donna Smillie suggests that there’s something inherently wrong about seeing accessibility as a boolean [4], yet there can be little doubt that many do make that mistake.

Though the context of Smillie’s statements is intended to support Better Connected, doesn’t the report – and the study as a whole – encourage a pass/fail view of things, attempting as it does to generalise into a digestible format what is a wide-ranging and often laborious area of practice treated in varied meticulous ways by hundreds of different organisations?

This is after all a quantitative study, not a qualitative one.

About eight years ago when I was still a student, I visited New York and Washington DC. Washington is home to many of the United States’ government agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose headquarters I toured like a good little tourist.

As well as the historical and scientific elements and the obligatory firearms display, at the end of one corridor there was an inocuous-looking wall display. It turned out to be a kind of leaderboard for the FBI‘s 10 Most Wanted.

Yes, it’s a lengthy preamble, but I was eventually going to come around to a couple of United Kingdom equivalents [1],[2], [3].

The Crimestoppers site is relatively new. According to a BBC news article, it received 350,000 hits in its first day live. Even the fervently archantitech amongst the mandarins in Whitehall must have noted that.

However, it seems that our nation’s leaders have a bit further to go before they truly appreciate the scope of the Internet. It seems today that the Home Office, ever confident of the infinite wisdom of its management cadres, has announced that sex offenders may be forced to register their email addresses and chatroom handles.

Presumably this glorious concept will allow those who run websites to sort the fiddlers from the tiddlers, so to speak.

The internet child safety expert of children’s charity NCH applauds the idea. Well, perhaps the expert needs to be retrained, because whilst a Most Wanted mugshot is fairly hard to fake, an internet identity is not.

It was always going to hurt her more than it was going to hurt you.

And you thought that, after you’d filled her head with fast food self-esteem and E number untruths, this unfortunate slum wretch would be a suitable spokesperson for the nation?

You thought wrong, idiots.

What a ridiculous nation we have become. We create these media sluts and then we knock them down. We call this entertainment. How very droll.

If only the minds of our desperate press hadn’t turned to jelly.

If only they stuck to reporting newsworthy stories instead of impregnating the self-serving, ever-decreasing circles of the mind-numbing celebritish. If only the population would grow tired of these unfunny laughing stock turds.

If only our politicians would refrain from debasing themselves at the altar of whore-cheap headline mediocrity. But no. Today’s BBC entertainment news page was sick with overexposure.

It’s the last bloody straw. Enough already!

Ignore them and they will just go away. They’re not like toothache.

Ask her if you don’t believe me, she still probably remembers enough about toothache to go right back there and show you where to swill your mouth out. Dental hygiene and dignity are still great things.