This is a transcript of the SitePoint Podcast #14. For full details and to listen to this episode, visit http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/05/01/podcast-cyberdyne-bill/ The SitePoint Podcast. Episode 14 for Friday, May 1st, 2009: The Cyberdyne Bill. Hi there, and welcome back to the SitePoint Podcast – news, opinion and fresh thinking for web developers and designers. I’m your host, Kevin Yank, coming to you from SitePoint headquarters in Melbourne, Australia and I am joined by my panel of co-hosts. BRAD WILLIAMS: Brad Williams from WebDevStudios. PATRICK O’KEEFE: Patrick O’Keefe from the iFroggy Network. STEPHAN SEGRAVES: Stephan Segraves from Houston, Texas. KEVIN: Welcome back to the SitePoint podcast for another episode. It’s a packed week, so I think we’re just going to dive right in. We’ve got Obama can shut down the Internet, we’ve got fresh debates on fonts and web browsers, we’ve got GeoCities shutting down and Opera’s 15th anniversary, but the big story of course is Oracle acquiring Sun Microsystems; we’ll talk about all of that, but our first story this week is an update on the DiggBar. Obviously someone was listening to our last episode because Digg has backed down. I say someone was listening but in fact, Digg did make this move just the day before we published our last episode. They went ahead and did what everyone was telling them they had to do and made their URL redirection service work just like every other URL redirection service, unless you happen to be a Digg user who has logged in and then you get the DiggBar. Guys, I think that settles it, right? I don’t think there’s any other problems with it now. PATRICK: Not for me, but I didn’t really care to begin with… KEVIN: You were happy with it all along, Patrick. PATRICK: I wouldn’t say happy, but I was okay with it, it didn’t bother me, I’m just not that sensitive to it, I guess. To me it’s, hey, if people are logged in and they want to have it, they can turn it off. I turned it off as soon as it launched day one, because I didn’t see a use for it, I’m not a heavy Digg user; but now you have to be logged in and you have to have it on and it’s easy to turn off. So, I don’t see any problem with it. KEVIN: So yeah, I had some pretty harsh words for them in the last episode, but they’ve done the right thing here and I just definitely have to give them credit for that. They did the right thing in the end. PATRICK: Adam Ostrow of Mashable wrote an article on this as well and he felt that – just to present another side – that he felt that it was a loss for users and a win for a few very vocal critics, to quote him exactly, he felt that “It’s too swiftly to answer a few critics at the cost of users who could actually benefit from their product.” I’m not saying that they shouldn’t have made this change; I think it’s a good change, but I do think that with this web development circle we’re in and the circle of people we listen to and talk to, it is a small percentage of people and you get a couple of loud people and people start yelling… we have to realize it’s not a majority of users who were complaining, it’s a very small percentage. That doesn’t invalidate it, but at the same time, it can seem like everyone is saying one thing when really it’s the few people who want to weigh in who are saying it. KEVIN: Well let’s move on because that was last episode’s story. This episode, we’ve got a new cybersecurity bill in the United States that’s been introduced. Stephan, you’re on top of this one; what’s going on? STEPHAN: It’s kind of a vague bill that’s kind of saying in an emergency, the President would have the authority to basically cut the United States off from the Internet and control the network as it were. And I think there is a good reason to this, and there’s some really good arguments for why they would want to do this, and there’s a lot of language in the bill that’s vague but some of the stuff is really good. I think that they’re trying to say that we’re trying to protect our public sector and the private sector from harmful traffic. It’s just a really interesting bill that I think the people are kind of getting worked up over and this bill hasn’t been revised or anything yet; it hasn’t gone through both areas of congress, and so I think it’s going to change. It’s a really interesting bill and it’s a really interesting read, if you want to read the whole thing, it’s posted in the show notes, it’s got the whole bill listed there. BRAD: I think something like this is a little bit scary. Obviously, the President is going to have power to do certain things in the name of national security, but being able to hit a button and basically turn off the entire Internet or access for the US, is pretty scary in my opinion. And this isn’t just government networks; this is private networks they’re talking about. If they deem YouTube to be a security threat, they could just shut it off with absolutely no notice. You're right, they do mention that it’s at the starting point and not a finished product, but I think something like this really needs to be looked at and scrutinized by a lot more people, hopefully before it gets anywhere near passing. PATRICK: Yeah, one of the senators who introduced the bill was John Rockefeller of West Virginia and he said that the bill was loosely based on recommendations made by a panel from the Center for Strategic International Studies. The director and fellow at that group, Jim Lewis, he said that basically the bill is purposefully vague to kind of get people talking and then it will get refined and either rejected or approved. KEVIN: The fear is that when something vague comes out of the government like this, the fear is that it’s going to create this blanket power because it’s not specific, they can do whatever they want. BRAD: If it’s not specific and it slips through and does get passed then yes, it could be very scary. I mean that’s a lot of what’s been happening lately anyways with these very kind of vague layouts of spending tons of money. It’s scary. So it definitely needs to be detailed out and they need to bring in a lot more people to kind of advise on the proper way to handle something like this. STEPHAN: Government networks are already trafficked or patrolled by the FBI, the NSA, CIA, I think the State Department has some play in it, so it’s not like it’s just a free for all out there. And so I think that by doing this, they’re kind of saying this is going to be this one agency, and I’m not sure we necessarily need a single agency to protect the Internet in the United States. I’m all for the government protecting their entities but at some point, people can just unplug their computers from the Internet if a virus is out there taking over the country. So the vagueness worries me a little bit, some of the stuff that they’re saying like to have a cybersecurity strategy in place in 12 months, I think it’s actually kind of a good goal. KEVIN: Obviously none of us on this podcast are experts on cyber security or terrorism or any of those things. I guess some of the things that are vague that I would be interested in hearing how they sort them out are things like are they talking about actually shutting down Internet services within the US, or are they just sort of cutting the cables between the United States and the rest of the world. Both of those scenarios are interesting. If you think of the Internet as modern day telephone, you know, if something big and scary is going on in the world, there’s going to be a lot of people with friends and family overseas trying to get in touch with each other and they’ll be using the Internet for that as much as anything else, and having the Internet shut down in a moment of crisis, it makes me wonder if the panic that it would cause would be worse than the problem they’re trying to resolve, which I can only assume is preventing the “bad guys” from communicating with each other. PATRICK: You shut my Internet down and oh yeah baby, martial law … it’s on!  BRAD: Yeah, if this bill gets anywhere close to being passed, they definitely should rename it to the Cyberdyne Bill. KEVIN: So our next story is Oracle acquiring Sun Microsystems. Oracle, of course, the database and enterprise software giant. They do consulting mostly and have wonderful, expensive products that big companies can rely on. Sun Microsystems – they’re a bit of a hodgepodge these days. Not only, of course, do they have Java and their Solaris open source operating system; they have a thriving hardware business where they have enterprise server hardware. In fact, they sell a lot of the boxes that software from Oracle and other enterprise software giants, like IBM, run on. Sun was … everyone sort of knew they were in negotiations with IBM to be acquired, and those negotiations fell through and almost immediately it was announced that actually Oracle will be taking over Sun Microsystems. Also under the Sun Microsystems umbrella is Java and MySQL (or “my sequel”), the open source database that many, many, many small sites run on. I think certainly for our audience, this is going to be one of the biggest concerns. What does this acquisition mean to MySQL? So guys, what do you think? STEPHAN: Don’t they already own InnoDB? KEVIN: Yes, Oracle did acquire InnoDB, which is the database engine that you can choose in MySQL if you need transaction support. So already we were relying on something that was owned by Oracle. I guess this same sort of panic came out when Oracle acquired InnoDB, and eventually everyone realized that even though they do own it, it’s open source and so if they ever do anything that people don’t like with it, it can be forked or you can just stick with the last version that you were happy with. I guess the same will be true of MySQL going forward now. BRAD: Yeah, doing research on this and when the news broke, they came out with very kind of basic statements that they were going to buy Sun and there’s not a whole lot of information that’s been released as far as what’s going to happen. There’s plenty of speculation out there and I’m just like everybody else, I want to know what’s going to happen with MySQL because I have a lot of websites that run on it, I develop on it. I’m not really too worried about it, I’m not scared but like you said, at any point if they get crazy, you can just fork it and start something new. KEVIN: Reading the sitepoint.com blog post on this, it seems like that Michael Widenius, founder and original developer of the database has announced that he will hire all core MySQL personnel and fork the project to create an independent and true open source entity. I’m not sure if that’s something he is doing or he is threatening to do if anything goes wrong. BRAD: Then why didn’t he do that when Sun bought MySQL? I remember all the same conversations happened back when Sun purchased MySQL, then they’re all fired up again because it does raise a question when a new company comes in and picks something up. You know, exactly, if something goes bad, it’ll be forked and everybody will move onto a new database. KEVIN: The analysis I’ve seen and if we take Oracle at their word, their main reason for buying Sun was the hardware, because all of Oracle solutions run on, in most cases, this hardware provided by Sun, everyone that they did business with had to buy the hardware from Sun and then buy the software from Oracle, and Oracle wanted to be able to provide this all in one solution. They show up on Friday with their big boxes under their arms and by Monday morning, you’ve got it all installed and you only had to talk to one person about it. So if that’s the truth, then things like MySQL and Java (although Oracle has plenty of products that rely on the Java platform), those software aspects of Sun’s business may not be of any interest to Oracle and we may see them stagnate or even get sold off. BRAD: Well, the CEO actually did say that Java was the single, most important software asset they have ever acquired. So just from that statement, it makes you sound like they do obviously value it and chances are, they have plans for it. KEVIN: But I think this is another step away from us ever seeing Java being competitive on the desktop again. I think this is another step towards Java as an enterprise platform, and these efforts that we see every few years to revive Java on the desktop or Java in the browser, these things like JavaFX, which was supposed to make Java competitive with things like Flash again, and even Java on mobile phones… Java is in a lot of places other than the servers at the moment, but it seems like every time we hear news about Java, it’s another step away from that stuff. So yeah, I’m sure Java has a long and happy life ahead of it for building web applications, but for all the other things it can do, I don’t think Oracle is the best company for chasing those. Let’s move on to the font debate. This is something that we’ve mentioned a few times on this podcast before. The last one we had Chris Wilson on, and we asked him about his take on the font debate. This debate is one that gets people angry and gets people calling each other names at times. The latest development is Mark Pilgrim, a name that most people will know from his book “Dive into Python”. He is a Google employee these days, although he did post this on his personal blog and it’s his own opinion and no one else’s. The title of his post – I’m not sure I can actually read it out without losing our rating on iTunes, but it’s “F The Foundries” in short. {gasp} Yeah, exactly. Essentially, he’s defending this notion that it shouldn’t be up to browsers to worry about the business models of the foundries, the companies that make fonts. This is what Microsoft’s standpoint has been all along, that we should not make browsers able to link to standard OpenType font files because if we do that then people will be able to copy font files willy-nilly when they’re hosted on websites and use them without ever paying for licenses, and this is a good way to make an enemy out of the font foundries that we really want to have as our friend as web developers. There have been a few other things surrounding this story lately. Jeremy Keith has posted his opinion on this following a recording of a South by Southwest panel – the “Browser Wars” panel at South by Southwest. The recordings now available, and I’ll certainly link to that in the show notes. It’s a one hour recording, and the last five minutes are where it gets really interesting, because Jeremy Keith steps up to the microphone and asks, should browsers be defending obsolete business models or should they just be providing the tools and let the Internet and the font foundries work it out for themselves? It degenerates into a bit of a shouting match. So guys, what do you think? Is it the place of browsers to take a stand one way or the other on this? PATRICK: Now I read an article by a gentleman named Kevin Yank on SitePoint and that’s a lot of my knowledge of this comes from that article. But when you’re describing it, you talk about how it’s Microsoft’s position that they shouldn’t be able to link to a font in that way so that people don’t copy willy-nilly and without paying for it. If I’m a font foundry, isn’t that a good thing for me in some way that you can’t just link to my fonts – I mean that’s not all bad, is it? I mean would they prefer that it was open where people could just link to any font… I’m kind of confused there. KEVIN: All of the browser makers, except Microsoft and most web developers who have a strong opinion on this is that we already have file formats for fonts and browsers should just be able to link to them the same way they link to cascading style sheet files, to images, and even commercial images. If you buy a piece of stock photography from a stock photo site, you don’t have to get a special protected version that says it’s only for use on this site. You get a JPEG file that you can put on your website, and if another site happens to link to it and they’re not allowed to, well that’s when you get the lawyers involved; it’s not the place of the browser makers to prevent these sorts of breaches of license. The font makers have been unwilling to sell licenses for these open font formats that say you’re allowed to put this on your web server. They all tend to be sold with licenses that say you have to pay for a separate license for each designer who’s going to use it. Often it says you have to pay for each CPU upon which it runs and these licenses are starting to get a bit outdated and vague, because if you’ve got a four CPU system on your desktop, does that mean you have to buy four copies of the license? By some readings it does, but of course, no one does. So the question here is and all the other browsers seem to be going, look, we’re going to support this format because developers want it, and if the font foundries have a problem with it, they can take it up with the developers who are breaching the licenses; it’s not our problem as browser makers. But Microsoft is saying, why would we support a format that no one is selling legally? PATRICK: How would this be different from, say, linking to an MP3 on somebody else’s website? It sounds like the same thing to me. KEVIN: Some people say an MP3 is a finished product, whereas a font is an element that you can use in creating finished products, but I think that distinction is somewhat artificial. PATRICK: {laughing} Yeah, I think so too. In fact, that’s exactly what came to mind. Obviously browsers don’t prevent people from linking to MP3s and there’s no verification of legality there. A font is just another file, so it would seem like browsers shouldn’t really be involved, but at the same time, we do have people making partnerships, not just browsers but other businesses that don’t really, let’s say, have a natural interest in defending the rights of the music industry or of a content creator, where they’re working together to help protect their rights. I mean, I’m all about protecting people’s rights, so if there is a legitimate way that it can be done that’s not cumbersome or doesn’t create more headaches than it solves, I’d be all for it but otherwise, it just seems like any other file format to me. STEPHAN: Is the inverse of this then that like okay, so there’s like MP3 files and those are everyone can use them, but is the inverse then AAC files made by Apple, they’re DRM’d and people still buy them. So does that apply to this do you think, Kevin, or is this so limited to web developers that there is not a mass market out there for these things that it’s the very focused effort to get this DRM removed? KEVIN: As Patrick mentioned, I did write a story about this on SitePoint, and I did list a couple of things that everyone seems to agree on. One of those things is that we don’t want DRM for fonts. Although some people disagree what DRM means, at least they all say DRM is bad and we don’t want to go down that road. What some people are suggesting is that the file format would be obfuscated, which is a little different than DRM. So you would have this font format that imbedded in the font it says this file should only be used on the domain sitepoint.com, that it was purchased and licensed for that domain. And the font file would differ from a standard font file, let’s say Microsoft Windows would read, only by flipping certain bits that are well-documented. And that anyone who really wanted to go to the trouble of pirating this font could easily read the specification of this font format, flip those bits back to the way they were and they would have a standard font file. So in that sense, it’s not copy protection, it’s not a DRM, but it’s making explicit what this file was intended for and standard web browsers that supported this format would make sure that the fonts were only used where they were supposed to be. Again, it’s a gray area and certain people disagree over whether or not that does constitute DRM. But I think we can all agree that that is way better than the draconian methods that the music and movie studios have taken to try and protect their formats. I think there are several things that can break the deadlock that exists right now, and I’m not sure which one is going to happen, and until one of them does, there’s just going to be a lot of people shouting about it. One thing that could happen is that a lot of the font foundries get together and agree on a format and start selling it and then it’ll be up to browsers to support that format. Something else that could happen is that a huge movement of people creating free fonts that are able to be used legally on any site, no matter what. Mark Pilgrim links to a site that makes free fonts available; it’s the openfontlibrary.fontly.org, and not only does this site have a dozen or so fonts that you can use for free wherever you want, it also has a lot of reading material on this debate and their take on it. Something else that could happen is a small font foundry could decide you know what, we’re never going to agree on a file format and even if we do, it’s going to take ages for it to get standardized and put into browsers. We just want to sell our fonts so here you go, you can buy licenses to use this standard font format. If one font foundry does that, it’ll make it slightly easier for a second to do it and you know what, it may just end up taking the world by storm. That could happen, but right now nothing’s happening and everyone’s upset about it. PATRICK: One thing that strikes me about fonts and how they differ from music, for example, is font selling has always been like – at least to me, my perspective of it is it’s really a niche industry of people who buy fonts and who want to have that protection, that assurance, who need that license. People who work for ad agencies and people who design ads for major corporations and might need a font or might want to be able to say, okay I bought this font, we have a license for it. I mean the average designer I don’t think buys fonts. I mean I think there’s plenty of free fonts out there already, and I’m sure there’ll be more people who create them now and, you know, font buying just isn’t something that’s required, so it’s not something that people do. You can usually find a good free alternative and in this economy especially, if you don’t have to buy something, you’re not going to buy it. So it would then stand to reason that maybe the people who buy fonts all along will still continue to buy fonts because that’s just who they are and how their business operates, where everyone else will just keep doing what they’ve already been doing. KEVIN: I don’t think anyone sees this as an opportunity for the font designers to get rich. “If we launch fonts on the web just right, everyone will buy them and we’ll make a fortune!” I’m not sure anyone is actually thinking that way. There are designers out there who put a lot of time into designing really professional fonts, and I guess everyone wants to make sure that they don’t make any less money than they do now. Let’s move on to our next story because we’re not going to solve the font debate any time soon. GeoCities is shutting down. Hands up guys, who’s ever had a site on GeoCities? BRAD: My hand’s up. PATRICK: My first site was actually on Angelfire, but my second one was on GeoCities. I can remember the URL, the site I spent the most time on to this day, even though I haven’t typed it in years, it was geocities.com/coliseum/arena/8884 and I have that memorized by heart. BRAD: Alright self-promotion. PATRICK: It’s dead now. BRAD: Suuuurre… it probably forwards right to your site. {laughing} PATRICK: Yeah, sure it does. KEVIN: Brad, what was it like building sites for GeoCities? BRAD: It was as awesome as you can expect. I was the same way. I was Angelfire actually. I did a few GeoCities sites but I remember a lot more Angelfire sites. I mean it’s really surprising to see that they’re shutting down. Yahoo! has this great ability to take sites that are doing really well and just run them into the ground, and I’m not sure why they do that. I’m sure that’s not their plan, but it’s too bad it happened here. It’s been interesting to see some of the reactions by people, because I think probably most people listening to this podcast right now have had at least one site on GeoCities in their lifetime and chances are, it was one of the first sites that they did, if not the first. PATRICK: When I started using GeoCities – and this was back in like 1996 I want to say - ’97-98 – I didn’t know anything about … I didn’t install a forum. I didn’t have any kind of PHP, MySQL driven script; it was just static web pages. They had a web-based manager that you could upload files from, and I did that. The reason I moved away from GeoCities – or one of the reasons I did – besides just having my own domain name, was to be able to install scripts, and that was something that from my perception, they didn’t adapt to. And as the web became more dynamically driven, they didn’t make that adjustment and people looked for other options, free services that allowed them to have a MySQL database, or to install phpBB or whatever script they want to install. That’s one area where I think GeoCities just kind of fell back and where other free providers took hold and you have providers that run their own remotely hosted scripts, like Ning or a service like that, where people just sign up with that and then they use it. There’s not the static website thing anymore, and that’s where they got left behind I think. KEVIN: Yeah. Well for the benefit of our listeners who may be younger, may not have heard of GeoCities, it was another one of these free hosting services that would plaster ads around the sites that you built in order to pay for the hosting bills. Yahoo! acquired GeoCities at the peak of the dot.com era – so somewhere around 2000, 2001 maybe – and they paid more than $3 billion according to Mashable.com for that acquisition at the time. Does anyone think Yahoo! got $3 billion of value out of GeoCities? BRAD: No, not even close. KEVIN: I’d be surprised if they got $3 of value out of GeoCities. BRAD: They were still marketing as a free service, but I think ultimately their goal was to kind of force these people into their paid hosting. PATRICK: Right, I mean they had their advertising on pages and there’s obviously a lot of page views there where they generated ads from. I think some of the – maybe the early Yahoo! Publisher Network stuff maybe got started on GeoCities in a way. And like Brad says, there was the upsell of web hosting. So it’s hard to say, but I don’t know… I would like to hope they got some value out of it as a Yahoo! shareholder. BRAD: Yeah, they definitely sold at the right time. PATRICK: Yeah, but for those of us who are old timers, you know I’m 24 (that’s old), it does bring back not just GeoCities, but also like Angelfire, Tripod, Xoom.com, and some of these other ones. KEVIN: Yeah, we spoke about Tripod when they folded. To be fair, GeoCities is still up, they’re just not taking new sign ups at the moment, but they have announced that they’re going to be shutting it down. Every time this comes up, there’s a debate over whether it’s right to take down this kind of service. If what you provide as a service is free hosting, should there be a best before date on free hosting or as Jeremy Keith – to mention his name again for the second time this podcast – (Jeremy, hi, how’s it going) … PATRICK: Please plug us. KEVIN: … he believes that URLs should be forever, and that if you provide a service for people to put content up at a URL, then it is your responsibility to make sure that those URLs are permanent and last forever. Is this realistic? The last time we talked about this we decided it wasn’t realistic. BRAD: No. I mean it’s a free service, how can you expect a free service that some website I built in ’95 is still going to be up today, almost 15 years later. Obviously if it’s a paid service it’s a different story, but if you’re working on a free service, I don’t think there should be any expectations of what you get out of that service. KEVIN: Is it really free though? If what you’re doing is creating content that you then allow Yahoo to plaster ads on, in a way you’re paying them. BRAD: It’s a good argument, you’re right. But I think ultimately, if the user that’s using the service is not paying anything to use it, regardless of how that service is generating an income, I don’t really think you can have any expectations on that. That’s my opinion. PATRICK: Yeah, I agree with Brad. When the service is dead, Yahoo !is not having ads on it anyway, so it’s not like they keep making money from it. It goes back to I guess my parents, when I was growing up before I was online – and I found this to be true in my own experience online – is that if you pay for something, you have the right to expect it. If you don’t, you don’t have the right to expect it, and I think that’s true. I think if something’s free, the expectation there has to be minimal; where if I’m paying for web hosting, then obviously I expect to receive what I paid for. And that’s the difference. KEVIN: Jeremy Keith in his post points to an effort that’s underway and it’s being lead by Jason Scott, who heads up Archiveteam.org. It seems like this is a loose group of people who take it upon themselves to rescue abandoned web content. So they are hard at work in an IRC channel coordinating an effort to download and archive a copy of everything that’s on GeoCities. I wonder if there’s someone who might do this for them. Like, you look at the web archive (web.archive.org) they, as a nonprofit, spend all day archiving the web and keeping a copy of it. I wonder if when someone like Yahoo! decides it’s no longer profitable to keep GeoCities up, whether archive.org would be willing to host their domain name. So Yahoo! bequeaths the geocities.com domain to archive.org and suddenly, all of those old URLs just point to the most recent version of those pages on archive.org and voila, the site lives forever. BRAD: It’s a nice idea, but I can’t imagine Yahoo is just going to give up the GeoCities domain. It’s still going to get traffic for years to come even if nothing exists. KEVIN: What are they going to do with it though? BRAD: Probably just forward it to some other new site they’ve launched or promoting, I would imagine. KEVIN: I guess you're right. BRAD: It’s a pretty valuable domain just to hand over. KEVIN: The next story we’re looking at today is that Adobe, or at least a blogger at Adobe, is writing about a trend he’s seeing in a few other bloggers. This is John Dowdell who works at Adobe, and he’s written about a couple of stories from Dave Shea and Jason Grant. The gist here is discussing the nature of standards on the web. First we have Dave Shea who has announced recently – he’s this high profile designer, a front end designer, and he’s best known for the CSS Zen Garden. He’s announced that he’s giving up on XHTML, he’s removing all of the slashes from his tags and moving towards HTML 5 because he believes there is no future in XHTML. The XHTML 2 standards effort is doomed to failure and HTML 5 is where it’s at, so he is changing his markup, or at least the new markup he’s writing, in preparation for that. The interesting thing is that as things stand right now, browsers don’t have any more support for the HTML 5 features that Dave Shea’s embracing then they have for the XHTML features that he’s leaving behind. So this entire move is based on what standards browsers will, in the future, be supporting and is that a reasonable thing for developers to be doing today? What do you think, Brad? BRAD: It’s a scary move. I mean he’s switching over to HTML 5 and if for whatever reason that doesn’t become the standard, then he’s just wasted a lot of time. I mean that’s like buying up all the Betamaxes and saying and this is it, it’s gone, the next thing you know and you’ve got this collection that’s worthless. PATRICK: Or more recently, HD-DVD. BRAD: Yeah, that’s a more relevant one. PATRICK: For the young people. BRAD: It’s an interesting read. It is a little high level, I had to read it through a couple of times to really grasp what was going on. It definitely is an interesting approach to handling this issue, but I wouldn’t do something like this, no. But people like him that are a little more well known in the industry and enough people kind of go this route, then maybe it could make a difference. That’s very possible, but it does take those first few people to stand up and say this is what we’re doing for anything to happen. KEVIN: Also along these lines, in this same story, he cites this tendency among developers like us, like me, I’ll admit it, to want to dump support for Internet Explorer 6 and so here’s a case of something that is a standard as much as anything is a standard in browser usage. Internet Explorer 6 was the browser that over 80% of users on the Internet used at one time. So if we’ve ever had a browser that could be considered the standard in the real world, it was Internet Explorer 6, and here we are wanting to throw it away in favor of newer options. I know why I want to throw it away, but maybe there’s a point here that we’re living in this imaginary better future and we’re doing it at the expense of our users who live in the real world right now. PATRICK: You mean I can’t keep my Jet car? KEVIN: This is an Adobe post and you can tell by the way it ends, which is a sales pitch for Flash where he says, you know what, you can talk all you want about web standards and the bright, brilliant future but Flash is here today and it does everything that we want our web standards to do in the future, and it’s a real standard because users have it. I guess he’s trying to argue that web standards are dwindling in relevance if what you do is design websites for the real world. Something to think about. STEPHAN: Until you want your Flash site listed on Google, right? KEVIN: Yeah, exactly. {laughing} Well, if we’re talking about pie in the sky standards, there’s no bigger holy grail than the CSS 3 Template Layout module, which is the one piece of CSS 3 that I think a lot of designers, myself included, would like to see implemented before anything else. It’s this way of doing web page layout that frees you from all the problems that you have today of source order and complicated negative margins and floats and things like that. The CSS 3 Template Layout module lets you basically define a grid on your page. You say I want three cells wide by five cells high and then you can say, alright this div – no matter where it appears in my document source order – it should occupy the three cells across the top and then this one should go along the side and be four cells high. You can lay out your page entirely independently from the HTML markup that sits underneath it. So it’s this holy grail of layout. And of course, the only problem with it, it’s a small detail, no browser supports it. So what’s happened now is that this developer has implemented it in JavaScript. So, you can use it and then run this piece of JavaScript code on your site and it parses your CSS, it’s got a full CSS parser built into it, this library, reads your CSS and then talks to your browser to lay out the boxes the way they are supposed to be according to that CSS code that the browser doesn’t support. It’s a delicate miracle. The question is can we rely on JavaScript to lay out our pages? Is that the right thing to do? BRAD: No, not in my opinion. I mean I like JavaScript, I use JavaScript, I’m always a little hesitant to do anything that’s mission critical on a website with JavaScript, just for fear that there’s always going to be a very, very, very small percentage of people who can’t do that. So if you’re entire web site layout is powered by it, I’m assuming you’re going to have to set some kind of backup in case JavaScript is disabled to lay it out using standard CSS or HTML or whatever you’d like to use. KEVIN: Either you set up a backup, a fallback style sheet of some kind or you just live with the mess that ends up on the screen, which will just be a bunch of boxes stacked on top of each other in the order that they appear in your document. Probably not very pretty, but I imagine it would still be usable. BRAD: Yeah, I mean it’s a really cool implementation of it, that’s for sure. I really like jQuery too, I’m a pretty big fan of that. So it’s definitely interesting … KEVIN: It’s implemented as a jQuery plugin or a jQuery library. So I guess if you are in the fortunate position that you happen to know all of your users have JavaScript turned on, your layout problems are solved but for everyone else and that includes us at SitePoint, we are going to be looking at this with interest. It’s a great peek into the future. Certainly if the browser makers wanted evidence that this was something practical to implement and something useful, this is a great way of demonstrating that. I don’t imagine that I will see this library in use on mission critical sites anytime soon. I’d like to wrap up this episode with a peek at the Opera website. The Opera browser is celebrating its 15th anniversary, 15 years since the first version of Opera was released. To celebrate, they’ve changed opera.com a little. They’ve made it look like it might have looked 15 years ago. So this looks a lot like a lot of those sites that the people on IRC will be rescuing from GeoCities…{laughing} So if you’re listening to this and it’s still the week of May 1, you’ll probably be able to head over to opera.com and catch this before they take it down. We’ll certainly have a link in our show notes but it’s just opera.com, so go check it out. Guys, which is your favorite animated GIF on this page? BRAD: I like anything that spins. PATRICK: Yeah the spinning computer is pretty hot. BRAD: If it spins I like it. I can’t believe there’s no dancing baby. You have to have a dancing baby. KEVIN: I don’t think the dancing baby was around 15 years ago. BRAD: That’s a good point. You're right. It was more end of the 90s. KEVIN: For me, the line of fire across the bottom of the page is really worth scrolling down for. BRAD: They need a spinning email or a spinning letter that says email. PATRICK: Exactly, I had that. Forget the GeoCities project, this is the website they need to archive before Opera takes it down. KEVIN: Yeah, exactly. And a nice little touch if you click the “Continue to the Opera website” link, you can check out the URL that says mode=forreals. So definitely some good senses of humor over at Opera.com. Opera, we salute you for changing your front page to be… BRAD: Happy birthday. KEVIN: Happy birthday, Opera. PATRICK: Happy birthday. KEVIN: So that brings another episode of the SitePoint podcast to an end. You can visit us at sitepoint.com/podcast to see all our previous episodes and listen to them and sign up to our podcast on iTunes. If you don’t happen to be an iTunes user, you can also sign up to our feed and get every episode for free. You can email us your feedback to podcast@sitepoint.com with your questions and comments. We’d love to read them out on the show and give you our advice. One last thing I’d like to mention is we would love to freshen up our intro music. We’ve had a few comments that it’s getting a bit stale and we would love if you are a listener of this podcast with any musical talent whatsoever, please do get in touch at podcast@sitepoint.com. We’d love to have you take a shot at freshening up our sound. PATRICK: Remix! KEVIN: So let’s go around the table guys. Who are you and where are you? BRAD: I’m Brad Williams from WebDev Studios and you can find me at my blog, strangework.com and Twitter is @williamsba. PATRICK: I am Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy network, on Twitter @ifroggy. STEPHAN: I’m Stephan Segraves. You can find me on Twitter @ssegraves and my blog is Badice.com. KEVIN: I, as always, am Kevin Yank. You can follow me on Twitter @sentience, and you can follow SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom. The SitePoint podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker. Carl, we love your genius work. I am Kevin Yank. Thanks for listening to another episode of the SitePoint podcast.