[joho] JOHO - Feb. 04, 2008
- From: "David Weinberger" <dweinberger@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: joho@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2008 17:47:21 -0500
This issue of Joho (Feb. 4, '08) can be viewed online at
http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-feb04-08.html
(link<http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-feb04-08.html>
)
[image: joho logo]
February 4, 2008
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Contents
Is the Web
different?<http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-feb04-08.html#different>Is
the Web just the next medium in our history of media, or is it a
spiritual transformation, the great hope, blah-di-blah-di-blah?
Fairness and
scarcity<http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-feb04-08.html#fairness>
: In a world of abundance, fairness is so 1990s.
The next future of
HTML:<http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-feb04-08.html#html> The
draft of the next version of HTML manages a surprisingly fine balance
between the needs of humans and the needs of our computer overlords.
Bogus Contest: Tech
clichés<http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-feb04-08.html#bogus>
Moi moi moi ... now with added Facebook!
I assume subscribers to this newsletter know that I blog every freaking day,
but just in case, here's the link:
www.JohoTheBlog.com<http://www.johotheblog.com/>
.
I also twitter: www.twitter.com/dweinberger
I also maintain a blog about Everything Is Misc at
www.EverythingIsMisc.com<http://www.everythingismisc.com/>.
(EIMisc.com works also.)
If you want to chart my receding hairline, I post other people's video
interviews with me at www.hyperorg.com/video.html
Pretty soon now I'm going to update my list of publications,
etc<http://www.hyperorg.com/johonews.html>.
Right now, it's seriously out of date.
I've even set up a Facebook
group<http://harvardfacebook.com/group.php?gid=20492790524>for Joho
readers, just because that's what the cool kids are doing. It's
called — surprise! — Joho. You have to join Facebook to avail yourself of
it, which means you have Yet Another inbox to check. But once there, you'll
be able to do something or other. It beats me. Let me know if you figure it
out.
Teaching again
I'm teaching a college course again, for the first time since 1986. This
doesn't make me anxious at all. After all, teaching is just like riding a
bicycle: Even after all these years, you just get back on, slam into mail
boxes, and look way worse in spandex.
The course is at Harvard Law, which doesn't ratchet up my anxiety even seven
or eight orders of magnitude. Fortunately, my co-teacher is John
Palfrey<http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/palfrey/>,
who is (a) wise beyond his or anyone's years, (b) one of the best teachers
I've ever seen, (c) the sweetest man on the planet. Our topic is: Is the Web
different from what came before it, and what effect does and should that
have on law and policy?
You can read the class blog here<http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/webdifference/>.
There's a
syllabus<http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/webdifference/syllabus-ever-evolving/>posted
there, too.
[image: dividing line]
Is the Web Different?
The question "Is the Web different?" is actually not so much a question as a
shibboleth in the original sense: The answer determines which tribe you're
in.
The Web utopians point to the ways in which the Web has changed some of the
basic assumptions about how we live together, removing old obstacles and
enabling shiny new possibilities.
The Web dystopians agree that the Web is having a major effect on our lives.
They, however, think that effect is detrimental.
The Web realists say the Web hasn't had nearly as much effect as the
utopians and dystopians proclaim. The Web carries with it certain
possibilities and limitations, but (the realists say) not many more than
other major communications medium.
Each of these is a political position: They imply normative beliefs, and
they lead their holders to certain types of behaviors and actions:
The utopians want the Web to have wide effects as quickly as possible. They
therefore favor connecting as many people as possible and maintaining the
Web as an open, public space.
The dystopians want to curb the excesses of the Web, or prepare us to deal
with those excesses.
The realists want to curb the excesses of the utopians who, they think, are
feeding unrealistic expectations.
Simply the act of holding the position is itself a political action for all
three groups:
The utopians think that by holding out a vision of what will or might be,
they are affecting the direction of the present.
The dystopians are sounding a call to action, even if some dystopians think
that we are doomed to suffer under the Web's increasing hegemony.
The realists may not view their position as political because it is — they
believe — based merely on a clear-eyed, non-politicized view of the world.
But this is itself a political decision that leans toward supporting the
status quo because what-is is more knowable than what might be.
So, which of the three positions — or some variant — is right? Is the Web
different in a way that matters?
------------------------------
The obvious answer to the question "Which one is right?" is: Time will tell.
Unfortunately, time papers over all wounds. Our values change, so our
evaluations of change shift over time. The extraordinary becomes ordinary
with extraordinary rapidity and insinuates itself into memory, undercutting
the reliability of our judgments about the magnitude of change. So, time
will not tell.
Nor is this a simple fact-based issue. Realists would like it to be, but
that's what makes them realists. Consider this hypothetical exchange:
Realist: You say that the Web will transform politics. But politics is as it
ever was.
Utopian: Just wait.
This is, indeed, one of the two basic blocking tactics used by Web utopians:
The changes are so important that they will take a while to arrive, and the
changes are so fundamental that we aren't always even aware of them. Here's
an example of the second tactic at work:
Realist: You say that the Web will transform business, but business is as it
ever was.
Utopian: Not at all! For example, email has transformed meetings, but we're
so used to the change that we don't even recognize it.
To this, the Web realist has a number of responses: Denying that the changes
are real, that they are important, or that they are due to the Web.
When a dystopian points to a bad effect of the Web, the utopian denies the
truth of the value claim, its inevitability, or its importance:
Dystopian: The Web has made pornography available to every schoolchild!
Utopian: It is the responsibility of parents to make sure their kids are
using child-safe filters. Besides, viewing pornography may weaken our
unhealthy anti-sexual attitudes. Besides, greater access to porn is just one
effect of the Web; it's brought greater access to literature, art,
science...
The realist wants to bring the argument squarely within the realm of facts.
Facts can, of course, resolve some disputes. But facts are unlikely to
settle the overall question of the Web's difference because the utopians,
dystopians and realists are probably operating from different views of
history, and the framing of history also frames facts.
Many utopians think the Web has uncanny power because they are McLuhanites
who think media transform institutions and even consciousness. The
McLuhanites' belief in the shaping power of media leads them to a rhetoric
of "not only": Not only did the printing press enable the spread of
literacy, it led to our reliance on experts. The next McLuhanite up says,
"Not only did it lead to experts, it actually changed the shape of
knowledge." Web utopians engage in the same rhetorical one-upmanship.
Many Web dystopians share the utopians' disruptive view of the Web, although
they are struck more by the facts with negative values.
Many Web realists think change happens far more incrementally. They feel the
inertial weight of existing institutions and social structures. Nothing as
trivial as HTML will change the fact that most of the world is in poverty
and that corrupt corporations are firmly in control.
These positions about how history works cannot be defended by looking at
history, for they determine how history is to be read. For example, did the
Howard Dean campaign in 2004 show that the Web is profoundly altering
politics, that the Web has had little effect on politics, or that the Web is
further degrading politics? All three positions are defensible because
historical events such as presidential campaigns are carried along social
wavefronts of unfathomable complexity. Did Dean get as far as he did because
of the Web or because of the media? Did his campaign fail because the Web
created a bubble of self-involvement, because the Web ultimately did not get
people out to vote, or because he was a quirky candidate who, without the
Web, wouldn't have been noticed outside of his home state of Vermont?
To make matters yet more complex, holders of these three positions are not
merely uttering descriptive statements. Frequently, they speak in order to
have a political effect:
Utopians want to excite us about the future possibilities because they want
policies that will keep the Internet an open field for bottom-up
innovation.
Dystopians want to warn us of the dangers of the Web so we can create
policies and practices that will mitigate those dangers.
Realists want to clear away false promises so we can focus on what really
needs to be done. Also, they'd like the blowhard utopians to just shut up
for a while.
Arguments that have different aims and are based on differing views of how
history works and of the nature of the interactions between the material and
social realms are not settled by facts. In fact, they're not settled. Ever.
Even after the changes happen, these three temperaments and cognitive sets
will debate why the changes happened, how significant they were, and whether
they were good, bad or indifferent.
Time won't tell.
------------------------------
Unfortunately, we can't afford to wait for time not to tell us. "Is the Web
different?" is an urgent question. Decisions depend on our answer.
For example, if the Web utopians are right — if the Web is transformative in
an overall positive way — then it's thus morally incumbent upon us to
provide widespread access to as much of the world as is possible, focusing
on the disadvantaged. If the Web dystopians are right, we need to put in
place whatever safeguards we can. If the realists are right, then we ought
to make tactical adjustments but ignore the hyperventilations of the
utopians and dystopians.
Then there are the more localized decisions. If the Web is transforming
business, for better or for worse, then businesses need to alter their
strategic plans. If the Web is merely one more way information travels, then
businesses should be looking only at tactical responses. Likewise for every
other institution that deals with information, including government, media,
science, and education.
So, we need to decide.
But there is no way to decide.
Fortunately, this is not the first time we humans have been in this
position. In fact, it is characteristic of politics overall. Who's right,
the liberals, the conservatives, or neither? Because such a question can't
be answered to the satisfaction of all the parties involved, we come up with
political means for resolving issues. For politics to work in helping us to
decide what to do about and with the Web, we need all three positions plus
the incalculable variants represented.
Together we'll settle the future's hash.
------------------------------
But I don't want to leave it at that happy, liberal conclusion because it
is, I believe, incomplete. The fuller statement of the conclusion should
include: It is vital to have realists in the discussion, but they are
essentially wrong.
I am using the word "essentially" carefully here. Web realists are often
right in their particular arguments, demurrals and corrections, and the
utopians and dystopians are often wrong in their predictions, readings, and
even facts. That matters. Yet, the essence of the utopian and dystopian view
is that the Web is truly different. About that they are right.
Why? I am enough of a McLuhanite to believe that media do not simply
transmit messages. The means by which we communicate has a deep, profound
and even fundamental effect on how we understand ourselves and how we
associate with one another. Yes, the medium is the message.
If that's the case (and notice I am not giving any further argument for it),
then there are good reasons to think that the Web as a medium is likely to
be as disruptive as other media that have had profound effects on culture.
Perhaps the best comparison is to the effect Gutenberg's invention has had
on the West. Access to printed books gave many more people access to
knowledge, changed the economics of knowledge, undermined institutions that
were premised on knowledge being scarce and difficult to find, altered the
nature and role of expertise, and established the idea that knowledge is
capable of being chunked into stable topics. These in turn affected our
ideas about what it means to be a human and to be human together. But these
are exactly the domains within which the Web is bringing change. Indeed, it
is altering not just the content of knowledge but our sense of how ideas go
together, for the Web is first and foremost about connections.
Clearly, there is much more to say about this, and much has already been
said. But that is the general shape of one Web utopian argument.
It can, of course, be challenged. It should be challenged, both in its
outline and in its particulars. Here Web realists have a vital role to play.
But at the highest level of abstraction, these three positions are not truly
arguable. Each is an expression of an attitude towards the future, and the
future is that which does not yet exist. None of these three positions truly
knows what the future holds if only because the prevalence of these
positions itself shapes the unknown future.
And that is a reason to join the utopian tribe, or at least to acknowledge
the special value it brings to the conversation. Innovation requires the
realism that keeps us from wasting time on the impossible. But some of the
most radical innovation requires ignoring one's deep-bred confidence about
what is possible. This is especially true within the social realm where the
limits on new ways to associate are almost always transgressible simply by
changing how we think about ourselves. We thus need utopians to invent the
impossible future.
And we need lots and lots of them. There is so much to invent, and the new
forms of association that emerge often only succeed if there are enough
people to embrace them.
Web realists perform the vital function of keeping us from running down dead
ends longer than we need to, and from getting into feedback loops that
distort the innovation process. For those services, we should thank and
encourage the realists. But we should also recognize that beyond the
particulars, they are essentially wrong.
The contention among dystopians, realists and utopians is is a struggle
among the past, the present and the future. The present is always right
about itself but — in times of disruption — essentially wrong about the
future. That's why we need to flood the field with utopians so we can be
right often enough that we build the best future we can.
------------------------------
It is, of course, simply an accident that this defense of Web utopianism
comes from someone who is personally a Web utopian. Absolutely coincidental.
Uh huh.
[image: dividing line]
Fairness and scarcity
Time-Warner Cable (TWC) recently acknowledged that it's going to test a
billing system that will move Internet access closer to the cellphone
model: Those in the test will subscribe to a tier of service that buys them
a certain number of bytes (like buying a package that gives you 500 minutes
of cellphone time), and if they go over their allotment, they'll pay per
byte.
This certainly seems fair. And it's better than other, threatened ways of
limiting the amount of network traffic. But, in my opinion, it's ultimately
a bad way to go. Being fair is not enough. In fact, sometimes what's fair is
wrong precisely because it's fair.
Oooh! A seeming paradox! One of the top three rhetorical forms for essays!
TWC's proposal is a welcome relief from the Internet carriers' arguments
against Net neutrality. (See box below.) It lets users decide whether they
want to spend their Internet allotment on, say, lots and lots of email or a
few high-definition movies. Users could decide that doing VOIP, which burns
through bits with some rapidity, is worth it even if that means they can't
do all the Facebooking they might want to do. Letting users decide is
waybetter than letting the carriers decide that we all want Hollywood
movie
packets to shoulder aside World of Warcraft packets, YouTube packets, or
Nigerian spam packets.
Nevertheless, I don't like the TWC proposal. It's fair but it's a good
example of where fairness can get in the way.
I've
written<http://www.openrightsgroup.org/orgwiki/index.php/Fair_but_Wrong>about
the fairness argument before, when arguing against the tit-for-tat
view of "intellectual property" that says a creator ought to be paid every
time her audience gets any value from her work. That's fair, if fairness
means an equivalence of value in an
exchange.1<http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-jan22-08-draft2.html#f2>
But
it leads to a worse world. And that's why I don't like the TWC proposal. In
both cases, we reduce our cultural context to a transaction. We have to
think and calculate before we engage with one another and with what we
create for one another.
It doesn't take much friction to disrupt a social or cultural ecology. Think
about how badly having to watch what you say disrupts your relationship with
your boss or your prospective in-laws. Having to watch what you read or hear
is just as disruptive. That is precisely what making fairness our highest
value will do to culture, whether that fairness is the basis of our
increasing copyright totalitarianism or TWC's pay-per-packet scheme.
Fairness will change the Internet from a world into a resource. Abundance
doesn't work its transformative magic if you have to justify your every use
of it. That brings scarcity-thinking to the abundance table.
Fairness in fact operates best in times of scarcity. When you're trapped in
a subway tunnel with only enough food for three days, and the zombies are
scratching at the rubble, fairness is a good way to divide up the remaining
saltines, although you'll have to argue whether it's fair to give out five
per person, or to give the big folks more than the wee folks, or maybe to
let market forces determine the outcome. Nevertheless, you'd be right to use
fairness as your guide.
In times of abundance, tit-for-tat fairness plays a different role. Rather
than being a positive principle, unfairness becomes a bottom limit, a
minimum standard. That a billing scheme is fair doesn't tell us that it's
the right one, but if it were unfair — half off for Aryans! — that would
tell us that it's the wrong one.
Utopianism is frequently a better guide than fairness in such cases. If we
could pay for Internet content any way we wanted, what would wring the
maximum social, cultural, political and economic value out of this new
infrastructure? I think the answer to that question isn't all that
controversial: Everyone would have all they could use, everywhere they are,
without price much inhibiting their participation...while still providing
sufficient incentives so that creators will continue to create. How we get
there is, of course, subject to tons of debate. But our aim should be to
make the Net so abundant that fairness is irrelevant.
Why I'm not neutral about Net neutrality
Net neutrality, as I understand it, is the fundamental architectural
principle of the Internet that says that all packets will be treated
equally. It thus prevents Internet carriers from discriminating against
packets based on their origin or application type.
The Internet carriers' strongest
argument2<http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-jan22-08-draft2.html#fn1>against
Net neutrality goes roughly as follows:
1. Network traffic is overwhelming capacity.
2. Therefore, we have to limit network traffic somehow.
3. Some types of traffic are more time-sensitive than others: You don't care
if your email arrives one second later, but you do care if your
Internet-based telephone call or movie jitters by a second.
4. Therefore, carriers ought to be allowed to "shape" net traffic by
delaying non-time-sensitive packets, and hurrying the time-sensitive ones.
This argument fails (imo) because: (i) It assumes that, if indeed premise #1
is true, the carriers, who are in the business of selling us content, are
the best ones to decide which content to deliver fast. In fact, there are
better alternatives, such as letting each user decide that, say, she wants
World of Warcraft bits to get priority over CD-quality phone calls, or that
she'd prefer to get jitter-free YouTubes but never watches Hollywood movies.
(ii) This argument gives carriers a financial incentive to keep Net
connectivity scarce.
(Just in case you're keeping score:
Obama<http://www.barackobama.com/issues/technology/>supports Net
Neutrality, Hillary doesn't talk about it, and as far as I can
tell, none of the Republicans do.)
------------------------------
1 <http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-jan24-08-draft4.html#fs2>Note
that I am not using fairness in the way most prevalent among philosophers
since 1971 when John Rawls published A Theory of
Justice<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Theory_of_Justice>.
I mean it in the simple sense that a transaction is fair if what's given is
roughly of the same value as what's taken.
2 <http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-feb04-08.html#fs1>The carriers
frequently add a second argument: Some sites generate more traffic than
others, so it is only fair that they pay more if they want their packets
delivered speedily. But: Those sites already pay for the packets they're
producing, and letting some sites respond more speedily by paying off the
carriers works against small sites and thus hurts innovativeness.
[image: dividing line] The next future of HTML
Remember back before HTML, when SGML was battling to be the way software
expressed a document and its structure? SGML was precise and kept every hair
in place, while HTML was ok with some ambiguity and hadn't showered in a
couple of days. With the release of a draft of HTML
5<http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/>,
we see that the battle is not over. Far from it.
SGML lets you specify all the parts of a document and how they go together:
A cookbook might have elements such as recipe, list_of_ingredients,
instructions, photo and notes, and you might set up rules such as: "Every
recipe must have a list_of_ingredients and instructions." You could do this
in infinite detail. In fact, SGML was such a fine standard that entire
industries came to a standstill as they tried to perfect the structures
required for complex document sets such as aircraft repair manuals and
telecommunications equipment specification sheets.
Then along came HTML, which is the SGML specification of the elements a Web
page can or should have. HTML said that a Web page can have six different
types of headings (H1 ... H6), paragraphs (p), links (A), etc. It was so
simple and incomplete the SGML-ers generally referred to it as "brain dead."
But HTML ruled because it was so simple, and enabled us to make clickable
links that brought to each individual document the value of the web in which
it was embedded.
HTML succeeded also because Web browsers had an incentive to forgive its
trespasses. SGML systems were generally installed in controlled, disciplined
environments where you could insist that your writers use no <p> without a
corresponding </p>. But HTML was taken up by undisciplined amateurs who just
wanted to type 'n' post. They didn't want to run a spellchecker much less an
arcane syntax validator. What benefit does the person posting directions to
her house or instructions for setting a Casio watch get from worrying about
syntax? So, the browsers forgave just about all mistakes. Competition
assured this. If you were making a new browser, you wanted it to be able to
read every page your competitors could, and more.
The browsers then fought for dominance in part by coming up with their own
structural elements, hoping that people would create pages using them, so
that their browser would display something that other browsers did not. Some
were useful. Some were the blink tag<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_tag>.
Such tags drove the standards folks crazy. Take the blink tag. SGML-style
standards folks hated it because: (1) It's ugly. (2) It came from a single
vendor (Netscape Navigator, way back when) and thus was not uniformly
accepted. (3) The blink tag expresses how information is displayed, not
anything about the document's structure. For that same reason, SGML folks
don't like the font tag.
SGML's preference for structure over format (or "presentation," as they way)
is simple, powerful, and annoying. For example, SGML would let you note
that this is a headline, that is a by-line, and that other thing is body
text, and it could let you specify that every article has to begin with a
headline, optionally have a by-line, and always be followed by body text.
But SGML was not designed to let you say that headlines are in 24pt type and
centered while by-lines are in 10pt type and italicized. That sort of
formatting information was to be kept in a separate file that defined the
stylistic properties of the various elements. Put in new style definitions,
and suddenly your newspaper goes in appearance from NY Times to NY Post,
while maintaining the same structure — the lead story is the same, the
articles have by-lines, etc. Separating structural and formatting
information is an amazingly powerful, even liberating idea.
The problem is that most of us aren't standards folks and we don't write by
dividing documents into structure and format. Certainly when we read we
don't: We use format as a guide to structure. And we know from 20+ years of
word processing wars that we don't write by separating the two. Back in the
late 1980's, WordPerfect was kicking Microsoft Word's skinny butt by letting
you create, say, a title by hitting the "center" key and the "bold" key.
Word, on the other hand, encouraged you to define the line as a "title," and
then give formatting properties (centered and bold) to "title" elements, in
quite an SGMLy way. It turned out that few people actually wanted to do
that, so they instead "misused" Word by using it exactly how they used
WordPerfect. You still see this behavior in Word users who separate
paragraphs by hitting the Enter key twice. Foolish mortals! The proper SGMLy
method is to define your paragraph element as having a certain bottom margin
and only hitting the Enter key once. Otherwise you are creating a structural
element (a paragraph) simply to accomplish a formatting aim (putting space
between the paragraphs), which is a violation that can cost you your
structured document driving license. In fact, you should probably just sign
in to your nearest SGML rehab center.
So, now the HTML standards folks are ready for us to take the next big step
forward. We are currently in official version 4 of HTML, first published in
December 1997. Despite the fact that we should beware any standard ten years
in the making, HTML 5 it attempts in a sensible way to let us have our
structured cake and eat its format
too<http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/section-conformance.html>.
HTML 4 lets us work the way most of us want to: We use the basic HTML
elements, but we format them in the WordPerfect way. So, if we don't like
the default format of an <H1>, we'll put in some code like this:
<h1><font face="Arial" color="red"><u>Howdy!</u></font></h1>
Certainly, these days many of us would instead do the right thing, which is
to have our HTML reference a format file (CSS) that defines H1 as being red,
Arial, and underlined. Even so, if we want an exception — we want this
particular H1 to be green or underlined — we won't bother creating a special
class of H1 via CSS. We'll just stick in a <font> tag that colors it and a
<u> tag that underlines it (or we'll insert a snippet of CSS style info
right into our HTML). The SGML folks may snicker, but it's just not worth it
to us to open up a CSS editor and make the change.
Although HTML 5 doesn't like the <font> element, it recognizes something
that SGML long struggled against: Not only do computers and humans read
documents differently, each has its place. So, HTML 5 introduces a
distinction between HTML done for and by "user-agents" (browsers and other
programs that handle pages) and authors. And authors are given concessions.
Sure, it'd be better to separate all the formatting info from all the
structural and content info, but it's not gonna happen so long as humans are
in control. So, the <font> tag survives. Sort of. One of the W3C
docs<http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-diff-20080122/>puts it this
way: the font tag "is allowed when inserted by a WYSIWYG editor
due to limitations in the state of the art in user interface for these
editors."
Other formatting tags escape unscathed, although they are redefined in
non-formatting ways, often quite awkwardly. For example, the <b> element now
"represents a span of text to be stylistically offset from the normal prose
without conveying any extra importance, such as key words in a document
abstract, product names in a review, or other spans of text whose typical
typographic presentation is emboldened." In other words, it's defined as an
element worth bolding and that is typically bolded, but not as an element
that is bolded. I'm sure that distinction makes someone happy. In any case,
HTML 5 supports <b> pretty much as it always has. And the new <m> element
indicates marked or highlighted text; while that does not dictate how the
element should be highlighted — yellow overlay? red box? — it acknowledges
that some document structures are inextricably tied to their display.
The underline and strikethrough tags (<u>,<s>) are discontinued in HTML 5
because they are "purely presentational," although they don't seem any more
or less structural than bold and italic. There must have been some fun
debates about these on the HTML 5 mailing list.
At the same time, HTML 5 introduces some obvious structural elements lacking
in HTML 4. Most important, the <section> tag will tell browsers and other
apps that you mean to divvy up your page in a structural way. Before that,
people usd the <div> tag to indicate sections, but you can also use the
<div> to mark any stretch of a document, not just its sections. The
<section> tag comes with a meaning already set, marking a structural element
of documents common enough that it deserves to be a built-in part of the
semantics of Web pages.
Similarly, the <figure> tag lets documents express a common structural
relationship: This graphic (or video or whatever) goes with this caption (or
whatever). And an <aside> is of peripheral interest. And an <article> is an
"independent piece of content" such as a blog post or a newspaper article.
All of these new HTML 5 elements are structures common enough that they
indeed deserve their own tags. Trying to come up with HTML 5 elements much
more specific than this would have driven it into the deep weeds that
swallowed so many SGML efforts.
This is by no means a full representation of all that's in HTML 5. Nor am I
a competent reviewer. I am impressed, however, that the upgraded standard
leaves wriggle room for imperfect humans to mix structure and formatting
instructions, rather than insisting that we always structurally separate
structure and format the way our computers would like us to. HTML 5 favors
the computer view, but leaves room for us silly humans.
[image: dividing line] Bogus Contest: Net clichés
These days, instead of saying "If you look up 'miserable failure' in the
dictionary, there's a picture of George Bush there," you'd more likely say,
"If you google 'miserable failure,' George Bush is the first return."
Can we come up with more clichés transposed to the world of tech? For
example:
The more things are upgraded, the more they stay the same
A watched IPO never boils
It takes two to flame
A woman needs a man the way a fish needs a C compiler
There's more than one way to skin a Firefox
When the net nanny's away, the mice will play
Your turn! (To enter — which is, remember, functionally the same as not
entering — post your updated clichés
here<http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2008/02/04/doep-daily-intermittent-open-ended-puzzle-web-cliches/>
.
------------------------------
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------------------------------
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