CSSquirrel A look at web development and web design by Kyle Weems

Gruber says: “It’s not that Google is worse on net neutrality than other companies with a stake in the mobile phone game. It’s that they made such a show of being better, of being on the side of the public interest — before they had a big stake in the game.”

Word.

This is in reference to this piece by Ryan Singel on Wired, entitled Why Google Became A Carrier-Humping, Net Neutrality Surrender Monkey.

Gruber’s response is short, sweet and quotable. Ryan’s piece is worth the read. Both manage to say, eloquently, reasons that Google’s behavior is poor behavior.

Cat’s out of the bag, Google. No more free passes for being the “people’s champion”.

I’m not always comfortable with labeling technology-related positions as “evil” or “good” considering the difficulties of applying morality to anything in the 21st century without being told that it’s all subjective. However, considering the importance of the Internet and equal access to its content in today’s society, I think I’ll ask you all to excuse me when I say that net neutrality is a good thing.

Unless you’re a greedy content provider corporation interested in your bottom line. Then it might be a pain in your ass.

But since I’m not a greedy content provider, I’m going to go ahead and say that the recent joint proposal for an “open Internet” that Google and Verizon have made public is them knowingly abusing terminology, trying to falsely claim support for a neutrality their actions oppose, and are therefore being “evil”.

Today’s comic provides a desert-themed metaphor to my opinion on the topic, featuring Faruk Ateş and Manu Sporny, who stumble through the dunes with the Squirrel before encountering a familiar-seeming water merchant.

Let’s break down the timeline

• The New York Times publishes an article claiming Google and Verizon are nearing a web tier deal, which Manu Sporny tweets about here, tying it into a threat to net neutrality.
• Web citizens share their thoughts. Faruk’s pretty clear on his opinion here, which I think sums up how a lot of us feel.
• Google and Verizon jointly announce a proposal for the “open Internet”… sort of. An open Internet for those with wired connections.
• Web citizens share their thoughts. This blog post by Jeff Sayre indicates some serious problems with it, specifically in their fifth and sixth elements of the proposal. In particular, they feel that “additional, differentiated online services” should be exempt, and explicitly are stating that net neutrality shouldn’t apply to the wireless Internet, but only the wired one. Other people, like Faruk, are more brief but share their thoughts clearly like he does here.

I’m aware there’s plenty of idiots on the Internet. But it’s absurd, and childish, to claim you’re not threatening net neutrality when you’re in fact doing that exact thing and actually expect us to buy into the lie. They can try to pretend that how you access your water matters, but the fact is that water is water, regardless of whether you’re drinking with a straw or a spoon.

The op-ed piece that Google and Verizon put in the Washington Post today is just more attempts at obfuscation, claiming without any effort at being convincing that somehow the wireless access to the Internet makes it somehow a different Internet that should be subject to unique rules (or, better yet for them, no rules.)

I’m willing to say that manipulating the public through intentional deception (aka lying), especially on an issue as important as net neutrality, is evil. And it’s clear that Google and Verizon are (badly) attempting to do this for a mutual financial gain.

Welcome to being evil, Google.

Google has presented us with yet another gilded offering meant to enhance the web experience for the masses (which appears to be a web experience involving their rendering engine): Google Chrome Frame. If you want to get the sales pitch then watch Alex Russell, one of Google’s engineers, explain it here.

I’ll sum it up for you: Google Chrome Frame is a plug-in for Internet Explorer, that makes it act like Google Chrome. Why would we want this? Well, mainly because IE (especially the older versions), is a wee bit (or a lot) behind on standards and features implementation.

The stated reasons by Google for this act of charity are summed up with making websites cooler for users, and making lives easier for website creators who often have to do some bizarre things (which only rarely involve goats, mayonnaise or unbuttoning pants) to make a website look proper on Internet Explorer. This is especially true with the older versions 6 & 7, which persists on too many people’s computers like relatives that just don’t know when to get the hell out after a holiday celebration. So with this plug-in, users have fun and developers save money. Hooray!

Well, in an ideal world. But in an ideal world I’d be typing this post from my veranda overlooking my palatial, lakeside estate.

The fact is, there’s a reason that IE6 and 7 still exist in the wild in such large numbers. It’s not because Microsoft is attempting to keep them going. Quite the opposite, in fact. They’ve even had programs where they offered to feed people for every download of IE8 they had.

The reason for these legacy browsers is that your grandmother is scared of pop-ups, so hasn’t upgraded a program since the mid-nineties. Also, and more culpably, there’s apparently a large number of major corporations that have IT departments that are unwilling or unable to upgrade from IE6 to something made in the last ten years.

When you think of these misanthropic individuals, claiming to be tech experts while clinging to the halcyon days of FORTRAN, you have to ask yourself this question: are these the sort of people that will let office drone Mr. Smith load a plug-in on the computer in his cubicle?

I’m going to bet that more often than not, the answer is no. Today’s comic explores the conundrum of facing a Luddite at the helm of your corporation’s IT department, guest starring a frustrated Alex Russell. (For fun, watch his Google Chrome Frame video again, and look at his facial expressions. Jeremy Keith sums up what you see here.)

Assuming that somehow you could get the IT departments of America to reverse course, the second requirement for Google Chrome Frame to work is adding a meta-tag to your web pages to support it.

Really.

Didn’t Microsoft try to sell us this a while back, with a resulting mob of violence? Why yes, yes they did. As it doesn’t seem to be widely adopted, I’m not sure I see any reason to expert website creators to flock to Google’s banner to do the same thing. I know I won’t bother.

But frankly, I’d rather serve IE6 a “gracefully” degraded experience anyhow.

Ultimately, for this plug-in to save the world, or at least the web, it needs two very unlikely scenarios to occur. IT departments need to lose their fear of upgrades, and website creators need to start adding tags to their markup to serve a single browser (well, a single plug-in on a single browser). That’s easy… right?

Google, thanks for your honest effort. But I don’t see any compelling evidence that will lead me to believe that you’ll succeed  in turning stubborn people around where Microsoft failed. You can lead a horse to water, but…

Today’s comic portrays my misgivings about HTML5 through the lens of L. Frank Baum, imagining a world where Chris Wilson, Manu Sporny and John Foliot were my companions through a standards-creating journey roadblocked by a guy in a purple coat with a big curtain.

Let’s review the facts.

Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML5 spec and top dog of the WHAT WG, is an employee of Google. He also adheres to a policy when dealing with people that can be summed up as: Deny, Delay, Too Late.

It can be argued that HTML5 is an important upgrade to one of the most vital technologies of the 21st century. Billions of people are using the Internet to facilitate communication and business, share their culture, access otherwise censored information when living under harsh regimes, and so forth. Most of the sites they use for these purposes are built in some fashion upon HTML.

At the currently accelerating rate of content creation, it’s safe to say that billions of pages will be built with HTML5. How these pages are designed, and how they’ll meet the needs of people both in the present and in the future rest upon how this standard is outlined. Everything from preserving the portability of microdata, ensuring the accessibility of web users with special needs, and finding ways to share media without the hassle of brand-specific plugin wars (anyone seen a flash site on an iPhone yet?) are determined by this effort.

So why is it that the person who is the center of this process is allowed to be a man who rejects consensus, actively denies issues (based on his own admitted policy) and substitutes expert advice in important areas like accessibility with analyzing data from the Google Index and parsing numbers? Numbers that we cannot have a third party confirm because every request to do just this is ignored?

There is no doubt in my mind that Ian is brilliant. However no man, no matter how brilliant, should be allowed to be so influential on a spec when he is bringing all this baggage to the table with him.

The biggest problem for me is as follows: Google. Ian’s work is highly influenced by data harvested by Google. I am positive Google has some spectacular views of the web, resulting in some highly accurate views of the current state of the Internet. I’m also sure that this doesn’t matter one bit if we have to take their word for it, because we can’t view it ourselves.

Most people search the web through Google. I get mail through Google, site analytics through Google, news through Google, and sometimes even browse with a browser used by Google. It’s impossible to throw a rock at the Internet and not somehow hit Google. It’s to the point where even the US government is getting a bit itchy and considering taking antitrust actions against them.

I don’t want to sound paranoid, but perhaps we shouldn’t craft HTML5 solely on Google’s say-so. If the data-harvesting Ian performs can’t be independently verified, then perhaps we shouldn’t accept it as fact. It’s just not prudent. We definitely shouldn’t use it as a substitute for actual experts in discussions like accessibility (which I spoke about last week). If Ian can’t accept that limitation or provide access to the raw data, then we need to consider whether a conflict of interests exists and whether he should remain as the editor. With him doing such a poor job of playing well with others (whether they be individuals, experts, or other WC3 working groups) while relying on private information from his employer, how can he be expected to create a HTML5 that meets not just his needs, or Google’s needs, but everyone’s needs?

I’m not convinced he can.

It’s been a really busy week for microdata. So busy that I haven’t personally had a chance to read up on all the details of the various announcements. That won’t stop me from trying to summarize it all for you, though.

First, Ian Hickson (HTML5 editor, Google employee, cat lover) finally made a concrete move on the long-simmering microdata in HTML5 issue. Instead of backing either Microformats (which works in HTML5 as-is due to its methodology) or RDFa (which Ian seems to be stating is a poor solution to the use cases it’s made to address), he decided to make his own new microdata syntax “based on RDFa”. I’ll leave it to the audience to determine whether this is a side-effect of the WhatWG’s NIH mentality or whether it’s genuinely a better tool than RDFa. Here’s Ian’s WhatWG annoucement, and here’s the new section in the HTML5 draft. For another perspective on it, the always fiery Shelley Powers gives us her two cents (adjusting for inflation) on the matter.

You would think a move like this might spell certain doom (cue dramatic music) for RDFa’s future in HTML5. However, at the same time Ian is trying to move us away from RDFa, his company makes a very concrete move towards adopting it. Google, during their big Searchology event, introduced Rich Snippets, wherein webmasters marking up relevant data in either RDFa or Microformats will have the possibility of Google making extra use of that information when their site is displayed in search results. Here’s the official Google blog post about the topic, including a delicious FAQ.

I’m not trying to be snide here, but if Ian’s own company is supporting RDFa extraction, as well as Yahoo’s Search Monkey, there’s little reason to believe that RDFa won’t somehow get adopted into HTML5.

In case Google’s Searchology event took up all your attention, on the same day the Microformats community made an annoucement about officially adopting the value-class pattern. Here’s their news post about the topic. If you’re already using Microformats, they suggest you get busy updating your syntax. If you don’t, this might be a good jumping point to look into what Microformats can offer your site.

If you’ve somehow gotten this far in the post without knowing what microdata is, I’d suggest you take a look at both the RDFa and Microformats websites. Marking up data so it’s both human-readable and machine-readable is an important step towards the semantic web, which Google’s recent annoucements have indicated they’re supporting as we move forward. So dig in, and see what use you can make of either solution in your own websites. Also feel free to check out Sam Ruby’s recent microdata blog post about the recent developments.