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On Reflection

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Having reread my recent post on HTML5, I suppose I’d better stress the fact that it was never meant to be a commentary on HTML5 itself. It was a rant, something that happened because of the attitudes I think have increased in tandem with HTML5’s growing popularity. I really don’t know enough HTML5 to have an informed opinion beyond what I see suggested and discussed about it that is related to markup in general. My comments should be read in that light.

Take the addition of document semantics in HTML5 as a case in point. For example, the article and section tags are welcomed additions, as are, in my humble opinion, the fairly minor redefinitions of the em and strong semantics. And there’s some important work being done in the area of extensible semantics for the web (see, for example, Robin Berjon’s XML Prague paper, Distributed Extensibility: Finally Done Right? and the Web Components web page on best practices), which turned out to be a heated topic at Balisage this year because quite a few of its participants are, like me, grumpy old men defending their own turf.

These are steps in the right direction, because they move away from the presentational horror that is the “old” HTML and to a more semantic web. Semantics is about meaning, and meaning is now being added to the web rather than simply empty but oh-so-cool visuals. I should add that some very cool visuals are being added, too, but in, and please pardon the joke, a meaningful way.

But, and maybe this is just me, it’s when those steps are being heralded as original and unique, never thought of before or at least never done right, when history and past (and working) solutions are ignored or misinterpreted because they are part of a standard (XML or even SGML) that is regarded as failed, when I react. Google’s Dominic Denicola provided a case in point when he held a controversial presentation on the subject called Non-Extensible Markup Language at Balisage; unfortunately, only the abstract seems to be available at their website.

That grumpy old men thing, above, is meant as a joke, of course, but I imagine there to be some truth in it. Part of the HTML5 crowd will certainly see it that way because they are trying to solve a very practical problem using a very pragmatic standard. HTML5 is, in part, about keeping old things working while adding new features, and it seems to do the job well. Having to listen to some older markup geeks argue about what XML was actually designed to do must seem to be as being utterly beside the point.

So, what to do? Well, I think it’s largely about education, both for the newer guys to read up on the historical stuff, and the older guys to try to understand why HTML5 is happening the way it is, and then attempting to meet halfway because I’m pretty sure it will benefit both.

Me, I’m in the midst of the reading up phase, and HTML5 – The Missing Manual is an important part of that.

Reading Up On HTML5 – A Rant

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I’ve been reading up on HTML5 lately, feeling that I should brush up my web development skills before I attempt an upgrade of a personal web page. Every other web page these days seems to be taking its design cues from some for me yet unknown source and I figured HTML5 is probably the place to look.

I’ve come across it before, of course, both in my day-to-day work and at markup conferences. We’ve been doing various web solutions and mobile apps involving HTML5 for some time now, and this year’s Balisage, to pick the most recent markup conference I’ve attended, started with a one-day symposium on HTML5 which was both interesting and illuminating. There’s a lot of it going on, right now.

And the other day, I came across HTML5 – The Missing Manual and have been reading it on and off since. It seems to be quite comprehensive and more or less what I need right now, but it is not a book primarily written for markup geeks. Don’t get me wrong; it is well written, as are all of the Missing Manuals I’ve read, and it seems to do a reasonably good job explaining its subject.

But–and there’s always a but, isn’t there?–there’s stuff in that book that makes me cringe. Or rather, it’s not the book itself but what the book represents. See, the book seems to define that moment in time when I am no longer able to selectively ignore the HTML5 crowd.

There are a couple of terminology issues, of which the most annoying to me right now is that empty elements are apparently called void elements these days. This is not the author doing a reinterpretation of anything, this is the W3C working group talking–I just checked–but it is a symptom of what I am talking about here.

Another symptom, and one known to everyone who’s done any web-related markup since the inception of the web, is how markup errors are frequently shrugged at. Nesting errors are the most glaring, of course, and the way they are ignored is to say that everybody does them but the browsers can all handle them, so while you may decide to be anal and actually validate your HTML, the message between the lines is that it’s OK and you shouldn’t worry about it since the browsers can handle it.

Coupled with this lax attitude towards draconian error handling (actually any error handling that is not related to browser-based limitations) in the book is the not-so-subtle hint that this is all the fault of the oh-so-obviously failed XHTML attempt from a few years back, when W3C tried to introduce XML syntax rather than fix HTML.

And there are the usual mentions of missing end tags (but no recognition of the fact that this was actually an SGML feature, once upon a time) and how that’s really not such a bad thing after all because modern browsers can handle it, and the closely related ignorance towards empty (sorry, void) element syntax. It’s OK, no need to be anal about it, because modern browsers can handle it. It’s a question of style.

The HTML DOCTYPE declaration is explained, of course, and its lack of any kind of versioning indicators, SYSTEM or PUBLIC identifiers, etc, declared to be a good thing. Again, the motivations are browser-based and basically about doing it in this way because the browsers can handle it. The DOCTYPE declaration’s existence is only important because of legacy reasons.

And the whole concept of well-formedness is explained as a matter of good style but really not much more than that (since yes, the browsers can handle it), and the benefit mainly the ability to include a couple of attributes in the root element.

And on and on it goes.

I don’t mean to say that HTML5 is a bad set of standards–I know far too little about it to have an informed opinion–but much of the attitude I’m seeing in the wonderful world of HTML5, both now in this book and earlier in the various presentations and discussions I’ve witnessed or been a part of, seems both frivolous and dangerous. It seems to me to be a combination of reinventing the wheel and ignoring the lessons learned by others, and I can’t help wondering what damage it will do to other markup technologies.

The Balisage symposium from earlier this year did give me hope–the people present were both smart and reasonable, more than willing to listen and learn from each other, and the discussion that ensued was informative and balanced–but most people do not go to Balisage, or any other markup conference, for that matter. They learn by doing, and some by reading, and quite a few sources now are like HTML5 – The Missing Manual, well written, comprehensive–and potentially dangerous to anyone with no experience of markup technologies outside their immediate needs, because they reinvent, reinterpret and redefine what they need and ignore everything else.

The result, I fear, is a more complex situation than ever in the world of markup, a situation where different sets of standards apply depending on the context and where XML, while sorely needed by some parts of the community, is ignored by others.

End of rant. Thanks for reading.

I Should Probably…

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Following this year’s Balisage conference, I should probably do a rewrite and update of the whitepaper I presented. It’s on my list of things to do.

On the other hand, I should do an eXist implementation of the version handling system I suggested in that paper. It’s also on my list of things to do.

But then again, I still have to finish my ProXist implementation, the one I presented at XML Prague. It is (you guessed it) on my list.

I have lots of good (well, I think so) ideas first presented at XML conferences, many of which deserve (well, I think so) to live beyond them. After all, a lot of work goes into the papers and the presentations, so shouldn’t I follow up on them more?

My version handling system, for example, should be easy enough to do in eXist. It doesn’t require a revolution, it doesn’t require me to learn how to code in Java, it should be enough to spend a couple of nights writing XQueries and XSLT to produce a usable first version.

ProXist is both simpler and more difficult to finish, but on the other hand, the basic application is already out there and works. It’s a question of rewriting it to be easier for others to test, which basically means redoing it as a standard eXist app.

Yet, instead of doing something about either of them, here I am, writing this blog post. It’s conference procrastination taken to yet another level.

And the next XML Prague deadline is coming up fast.

Another Take on English vs Swedish

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Some years ago, I visited the library to get a C book or two to read while waiting for the one I had ordered from Amazon. The only C book I found, however, was the Swedish translation of Stephen Prata’s C++ Primer. The problem was, though, that I never read computer literature in Swedish (I don’t even know the Swedish word for “encapsulation”) so procrastination ensued. I’d heard some good things about that book, though, so in the end, I had to try, Swedish or not.

But the book felt weird, as if Prata wasn’t really serious about programming. It was as if he had decided to make up the terminology as he went along, and as if I had two foreign languages (computer-Swedish and C++) to master, instead of just one.

And that, I guess, was the real problem. The whole computerised world speaks English, which means that if we need to talk about computing, we need to do it in English or risk not being understood. In Sweden, we’ll invariably borrow from English when discussing anything having to do with computers and IT, even if the main conversation is in Swedish. Sometimes the words are semi-translated and (sort of) accepted, but often we just use the English terminology directly, without even stopping to think about what the corresponding Swedish word might be. Yet nobody cares, because we all seem to agree that the Swedish words are, or at least sound, phoney.

It is a problem, however, one of the curses of the modern western civilisation and shared by every nation with a native language other than English. Precious few see it in that way; most accept the consequences without a second thought, with devastating consequences for their native tongues.

Icelanders have a different approach. The authorities will produce official Icelandic translations for every single new word that pops up in a book, television show or United Nations address. Every single one, and not just for the English ones either. Everything: German, Spanish, Swahili, doesn’t matter what the language is. See, the Icelandic language police regards every foreign influence as potentially harmful and acts accordingly. For example, they never use “television” or “TV”, they use “sjónvarp” (roughly “flying picture”). “Telephone” is “sími” (original meaning: “thread”), and “computer” is “tölvu”.

Cool, isn’t it?

I’m not entirely sure their way is better. The Icelandic market is far too small for translating every new book or film or United Nations address there is, and certainly not immediately, which means that if there is some new and important terminology to learn, it is not translated either. Which in turn means that the foreign-language terminology is actually needed after all if you want to keep up, at least for a transitional period. So, by the time the authorities come up with an Icelandic translation, the English terminology might already be in use and hard to get rid of.

There are not that many Icelanders. How many of them can keep up with the advances of the western computing?

As for me, I now know how to translate “encapsulation” (“datagömning”, which, by the way, is not quite as Swedish a word as it might look to you, dear reader, but that’s another story). It’s not a word I’ll use any time soon. It sounds downright silly.

Further Unity Comments

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After a couple of days with Ubuntu and the Unity desktop, I have another couple of comments.

First of all, I don’t like the global menu bar. I really don’t like it. It takes up space for no good reason – the clock, etc don’t require it, not really, and if you turn off global menus, which I did, it is mostly empty.

Second, I hate the “Amazon Lens”. It’s not that I don’t shop on Amazon – I do, all the time – but I want to choose when to interact with Amazon (or other commercial providers) without my desktop interfering. So I’ve turned that off, too.

I also don’t like how newly opened windows are placed on the desktop. It’s probably configurable using some of the tweak tools that are available, but I can’t be bothered to look it up.

This morning, I switched back to KDE and the more traditional desktop metaphor, and immediately realised that it’s rather boring, too. It’s nice, with all kinds of extras and eye candy and stuff, but it’s boring and it should be possible for someone to come up with a more modern Linux desktop.

It’s just that Unity isn’t the answer.

New Distro, Part Two

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After a couple of days of Kubuntu, my curiosity took the upper hand and I decided to install the Unity desktop along KDE.

It’s an interesting GUI, I have to admit, but I remain unconvinced. The search-oriented task bar thingy to the left is an odd bird, for example. It is as if Canonical were mixing their desktop metaphors. There must be a task bar because everyone’s got one, but it seems as if they’ve gone out of their way to ensure it is different. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing yet.

Worse is that the global menus do not work–as many others have pointed out, on a large screen the menus will simply be too far off from the programme window itself. I know, OS X does this also, but the difference, the crucial difference, is that the menus and their behaviour are consistent on a Mac, something they can never be on Linux.

Version 14.0 allows you to move the global menus to their respective windows, which solves the problem but also highlight a less serious one: the top bar, now mostly empty sans a few icons to the right, still takes up space but now provides no real benefit.

On the whole, though, the GUI looks nice, with better graphics than I remember from past Ubuntu versions. It looks like a finished product, something that, say, Debian Testing, doesn’t–the XFCE desktop I briefly tried when deciding ona new distro looks ghastly. I know it’s not supposed to have the bells and whistles of a Plasma desktop, Windows 7 or even Gnome, but my god, the damned thing put me off to an extent I didn’t think possible.

Submitted My Final Balisage Edit

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I submitted the final edit of my Balisage paper, Multilevel Versioning for XML Documents, the other day. While I did try to shorten it (I seem to be unable to produce a short paper) and, of course, correct problems and mistakes pointed out by reviewers, there were no radical changes, and so I am forced to draw one of two possible conclusions:

I am deluded and simply don’t know what I’m talking about. This is an awful feeling and happens to me a lot after submitting papers.

The paper suggests something that might actually work.

(There is a third conclusion, obviously, one that is a mix of the two, but let’s not go there.)

My paper is about a simple versioning scheme for the eXist XML database, built on top of the versioning extension that ships with it. Its main purpose is to provide granularity to versioning, to provide an author of XML documents with a method to recognise significant new versions as opposed to the long series of saves, each of which comprises a new eXist version.

On the surface of it, my scheme is a typical multilevel versioning system,with integers, decimals, centecimals, etc (1, 1.1, 1.1.1, 1.1.2, 1.1.3, 1.2, …) identifying a level of granularity. The idea is that the lowest level (centecimal, in this case) denotes actual edits while the levels above identify significant new versions. Nothing new or fancy, in other words. What is new (to me, at least; I have not seen this suggested elsewhere) is how the scheme is handled in eXist.

I’m proposing that each level is handled in its separate collection, each using eXist’s versioning extension to keep track of new versions in the respective collections. When a level change occurs (for example, if a new centecimal version such as 1.3.1 is created from 1.3), the new version is created using a simple copy operation from the decimal collection to the centecimal collection. The operation itself (in this case, a check-out from a decimal version to a centecimal version) is kept track of using an XML file logging each such operation and mapping the eXist “standard” version to the new integer, decimal or centecimal revision.

A related task for the XML file is to map the name of the resource to its address; the XML file’s other big purpose is to provide the resources with a naming abstraction so a named resource in a specific significant version can be mapped to an address on the system. I propose using URNs, but most naming conventions should work just as well.

Implementation-wise, the XML version map abstraction is very attractive to me as a non-programmer (or rather, someone whose toolkit of programming languages is mostly restricted to those commonly associated with XML technologies), as I believe most of the operations can be implemented in XSLT and XQuery.

But I’m not there yet. I’ve submitted the final paper and now, I have to produce a sufficiently convincing presentation on the subject.

The presentation is on Tuesday, August 5th, and I’d love to see you there.

Time for a New Distro

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Recently, I upgraded my work laptop with an SSD disk.The laptop, a Lenovo Thinkpad T510, has been pretty reliable but getting a bit long in the tooth. A conventional 2.5″ disk three years old is a cause for concern if used daily, and anyway, SSDs are amazingly fast these days. It’s almost like buying a new computer.

I should also mention the Nvidia Optimus graphics card. It’s basically two cards in one, an Intel graphics chip for the daily stuff that doesn’t require much graphics processing and an Nvidia chip for the stuff that does, the idea being that the OS switches between the two to either save battery or boost performance.

So, anyway, while I simply cloned the Windows partitions from the old disk (using Acronis software), I eventually decided to try a new Linux distro rather than fixing the cloned Debian Sid I’ve been running since 2010 or so. The Debian system was spread out over several partitions, which caused problems when booting the cloned system–apparently UUIDs changed when cloning, crashing the system.

I wanted something Debian-based, of course. Apt-get rules and all that, and Debian is pretty hard to break even if you run an unstable version of it.

First, I tried the new Linux Mint Cinnamon distro (v 17), having heard some very good things about it. The installation went without a hitch and I was soon able to boot into the desktop (what a pretty one, btw) using the open-source Nouveau display drivers. They were OK but not great, so I decided to replace them with Nvidia’s proprietary package and something called nvidia-prime that would allow me to switch between the two graphics chips. This seemed to work well, until I came to work the next morning, placed the laptop into a dock and booted using an external monitor only.

No desktop appeared, just a black screen.

Opening the laptop’s lid, I discovered that the desktop was actually there, after all, but only on the laptop screen. Nvidia Settings, the helper software that allows you to configure the X server and screens, was broken and so I couldn’t use it to configure the monitors. The Cinnamon display settings would only share the desktop between the two screens but not allow me to only use the external monitor.

Changing from the Nvidia chip to the Intel one did not significantly change this, but introduced a new problem: I no longer had the option to change back to Nvidia.

I looked around to see if there were newer Nvidia packages around, or perhaps a newer kernel, since that’s what I would always do in Debian Sid; there would frequently be something in the experimental branch that would help me. Linux Mint, however, while Debian-based, is far from Debian Sid. It is meant to be stable, and anything, um, unstable would have to come from somewhere else entirely.

I found a 3.15 kernel from a Ubuntu branch and installed that, but Linux Mint would then insist that a 3.13 kernel was actually an upgrade, so I gave up and realised Linux Mint wasn’t for me after all.

I then spent the following evening (and night) installing and testing Ubuntu 14.04 in place of Linux Mint, as a Google search suggested nvidia-prime would work out of the box in it. It did, but after a few hours of fooling around with Ubuntu, I realised I truly hated Ubuntu’s Unity desktop.

Discouraged, I wiped Ubuntu from the disk in favour of Debian’s Testing branch, but that didn’t go well. I downloaded an ISO, remembering that Debian’s installer would not support WiFi cards during the install, only to discover that they had a) switched to XFCE from Gnome as their default desktop and, more importantly, b) my WiFi card was still considered bad as it was non-free according to Debian’s rather strict criteria and so the firmware was not on the ISO and I had no wired network hooked up to that laptop.

I could have used the Windows partition or my Macbook Pro to download the missing firmware, of course, but I got annoyed and wiped the disk again, now installing the new Kubuntu 14.04 instead.

Which is where I am now. Kubuntu also handles nvidia-prime out of the box, but it also has the (for me) familiar KDE desktop. It’s not perfect (the system fonts, for example, are ghastly and I have to do something about that very soon) but it’s good enough for now.

Now, you may be tempted to point out that Nvidia Optimus works out of the box there, too, and with more finesse, but if so, you are missing the point.

Linux is fun, and the very fact that there are so many distros out there speaks in its favour. If something in Windows doesn’t work for you, you won’t have a Windows alternative. Well, you have Windows 8, but seriously?