Where I’m @

20030926

Shades of Gray in Intellectual Property
An article in the New York Times paints a suit by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) in somewhat David-and-Goliath terms. Apparently the Library Hotel should be left alone to continue their very clever (really — it is quite a good idea) design scheme in peace. But we are skeptical in this case.

Though Eric Meyer calls it “poisoning the well”, we disagree with him both on the definition of the concept and on the facts. (Allowing that he doesn’t mean the phrase in the logic sense, we still disagree with the broader meaning.) The Dewey Decimal System is a lot like a dictionary or The Chicago Manual of Style (or the AP Stylebook and Libel Manual, if that's the way you swing): In certain worlds, it’s a required part of doing business, but not a free one. As well, a library subscribing to Dewey would seem to have the option of not purchasing the upgrade, just as copyediting departments around the country have the option of standardizing on a particular edition of Chicago and not picking up the new edition immediately. Further, it seems to us that the Library Hotel is exactly the kind of institution that can afford to license the system for its purposes. In fact, we suggest that there should be a higher licensing fee for profit-oriented institutions (and at $295 – $770 nightly for a room at the Library Hotel, we would call it profit-oriented) so that libraries in communities around the world could have their fees reduced.

Simon St. Laurent says, “Trademark law does require defending the trademark, sure, but this? Come on.” He’s referring to the statement in the Times that “The Online Computer Library Center is seeking damages of three times the profits the hotel has made since it opened.” First, what is that amount? A brand new hotel may very well not have cleared that much money in its first three years of operations. Second, the Times article indicates that the OCLC took the proper steps, asking the hotel when it opened to credit the OCLC or to pay the licensing fee. The hotel, again according to the Times, blew the OCLC a raspberry. So asking for damages as they are is simply a legal way of saying “We asked you nicely before, and now we have to be mean.” The suit, unless it finds a judge beyond the pale sympatheic, will end with the OCLC being awarded significantly less than the damages requested. Of course, it's possible that the suit could still irreparably damage the hotel or that the damages awarded could be small enough to be of no consequence.

But that the suit is valid and even right, and that the damages sought are not as out of whack as they might seem, we are completely convinced. Certainly the Dewey should eventually fall into the public domain (though someone would have to maintain it even then), but until it does its supervisor has a right and even a duty to see that it is properly administered.

20030919

Friday Good News
The United Kingdom, in a move to comply with a European Union directive, has established fines for spammers. The law provides for damages up to £5000 per successful complaint, and permits endusers to sue spammers, both of which seem like a good thing to us. What, exactly does a business gain by sending email to those who haven’t requested it (however unknowingly) besides the enmity of potential customers? We suppose the people who respond to this dreck are kin to those who respond to land spam selling the latest plate from the Franklin Mint.

Anyway, this legislation does have its drawbacks, of course, most notably that the UK can’t prosecute spammers from outside their lands. And of course the very nature of spammers is to be distributed and hard to grasp, so prosecuting is not always as simple as it might seem. The next step should be to make it harder for ISPs to harbor spammers, at least by making it financially more beneficial to sweep them out from under the bed.

Update: Also seen in a short article at Wired online.

20030916

Doing It Right, The Wrong Way
Somehow we happened upon Svend Tofte’s IE-friendly means of mimicking max-width. It’s a nice little workaround, but we are hesitant to use it. There seems to us a significant difference between using the various CSS tricks to hide CSS from certain browser versions or families and using a proprietary bit of style language to permit CSS for a particular browser or family. In fact, the key here is proprietary. We've seen people suggest using Microsoft’s conditional comments to hide entire stylesheets from non-IE browsers, too, but that just adds to the cruft.

We feel somewhat on the side of “progressive enhancement”, wherein one builds a site for low-level browsers and makes it look and feel better for succeeding versions, a significant shift away from “graceful degradation”, a concept we have espoused in the past. But part of that school of thought is operating entirely within the recommendations of the W3C, not forking markup to accomodate individual browsers. You mark up a ul to look and work satisfactorily in an older browser, then add CSS that makes it look all whiz-bang for later ones. You don't bother with splitting hairs about which later ones can do what you want, you just make it work.

20030912

We’re putting in Moveable Type (MT) on our site for our tenant, Ishbadiddle, and it’s an interesting experience. Though we have only some knowledge of Perl and MySQL, those aren't the issues. Rather, it’s the installation on a remote host for whom we have no current commandline/shell access and no direct accesss to the webserver administration that makes things difficult.

First we had to make sure that they had all the requirements, which involved telling them how to obtain and install (well, how to find where to learn how to install) the DBD::mysql module. Then we had to get them to tell us the path to Perl. Then we had to have them set up a MySQL database. Now we’re having problems accessing said database. We’ve researched the issue in the MT support fora, and found a partial answer, so now we go back to the host.

It analogizes somewhat to our move from Brooklyn to the suburbs (how we shudder at that term), in that apartment renting in New York means that someone else is responsible for your dwelling and its upkeep, and you pay for it in rent; owning our own house means that we do nearly everything for ourselves (such as unclogging a messy drain as we did recently). On the one hand, one is dependent on others, but one doesn’t have to know how to fix things or to take the time to do them; on the other, one doesn’t have to wait or try to instruct someone else remotely, but one is responsible at 3 a.m. if something goes haywire.

Update: That should read “Movable Type”. And to think that we spent time getting paid to catch grievous errors like that.

20030905

Usability in Real Life
Walking out of the coffee bar the other day, the person with whom we were walking tried to exit using the right door of a pair, only to find that it was locked. Why would you, as a store, not put up a sign that that door was unusable? We'll try to keep this in mind as we build web apps.