Not Everyday News

The Revolution is Being Typed Out All Over the Internet

It may seem odd to say this, but for the first time web sites can start to use various typefaces/fonts. And this is potentially a huge development in how the Internet can be used. Currently HTML pages cannot refer to fonts that do not already exist on viewers’ computers. For this reason, almost all the text in HTML pages are shown in New Times Roman, Arial, Verdana, Georgia, Courier, and, the big fave, Comic Sans typefaces. To some that believe that this restriction is positive, because it keeps web pages from being filled with funky fonts that diminish readability, this misses a more important point that is not well understood. That point is that the lack of usable fonts has led to worse practices including: burying text in graphics which rarely reflected in HTML (such as in the <img> tag’s alt text), using PDF™  produce documents for WYSIWYG printing (what you see is what you get), burying text in Flash objects, and not being able to have better designed web pages that uses better headline typefaces or more expressive ones. The most obvious stupidity of not allowing more fonts is the lack of the great typeface, Helvetica, and the use of the poor cousins Arial and Verdana instead. For example, see the wonderful documentary, Helvetica, and note that the PBS companion site chose to bury the typeface in graphics, http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/helvetica/ . (even the part of the site that is in text assumes that Arial is the typeface that will be seen by the viewer: the CSS for text is “arial,helvetica,sans-serif;”)

The real revolution is that the web can start to meet what I believe should be a major goal, that all web documents/pages should be both human readable and machine readable/process-able. As long as text is beyond the reach of software, such as screen reading software, search engines, and the new mash-up software systems, a significant promise of the Internet will be stifled. And at the same time opening up the HTML pages to having more typefaces will make pages more accessible for readers. In some cases, the ability to mimic the look of the printed version of official documents, such as legislation, makes the web page more usable. Quite often official documents are locked inside PDF™  versions that can inhibit machine processing. Although PDF™  documents can include a version that is accessible to software/machine processing, this is not always done, and more importantly it detracts from the native version that can be seen in a web browser. And as design can sometimes convey more than the words themselves express, opening up the ability to use any typeface will help. In that case, the software may not always “get” the meaning, but hints can be revealed by the use of different HTML tags and attributes.

The change that is happening is tied up in the move to the CSS3 compliance. Although proprietary methods to use typefaces in some web browsers have been possible for a decade, the poor implementation and lack of an industry wide standard have kept us truly limited to the handful mentioned previously. And there has been resistance from those that market typefaces which fear a loss of revenue from the licensing of typefaces. But I believe that there has been a confluence of two reasons that helped to stifle this advance, lack of the awareness of the importance of this capability for the continued success of the World Wide Web/HTML and the competition of alternate proprietary formats including Adobe’s PDF™ and Flash™, as well as Microsoft’s Silverlight™.

In other areas of competition, HTML has been very successful in holding its own, but its soft underbelly has been its reliance on typefaces. Typefaces have been available for all of the proprietary formats to a much greater extent. However, most web designers just accept the situation and find workarounds to satisfy their clients. And to be fair, sometimes the tools to develop web content that overlaps text and images necessitates using graphics or Flash™. In this case, the use of another standard, SVG might solve this and other design issues. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is dragging in its support for SVG (although it is working hard on its competing, proprietary Silverlight™ format).

There is an exception to my belief that the web can start using various typefaces, and that is the current lack of completed support for CSS3 in the Microsoft Internet Explorer. Whereas, the web browsers, Safari, Chrome and beta versions of Firefox, have adopted the ability to use typefaces through its compliance with the CCS3 standard, Internet Explorer may drag down adoption of fonts. I am hoping that Microsoft will be forced to catch up as web designers start to expand their use of typefaces in actual web sites. I am hoping that Opera’s web browsers will catch up soon too.

Related links:

• Minutes of a discussion of the main players discussing the effort. Note the attempt to make the Microsoft EOT proprietary typeface standard accepted, and the implications of that.
  http://www.w3.org/Fonts/Misc/minutes-2008-10
• Wonderful article about the use of typefaces in CSS3
  http://www.alistapart.com/articles/cssatten
• The SVG standard
  http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/
• The CSS, CSS2 and CSS3 standards
  http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/
• ACID3 Browser CSS3 Test
  http://acid3.acidtests.org/
• Ongoing effort to perfect Firefox use of CSS3 and typefaces
  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70132

The Tyranny of Free: Copyright, the Internet and Their Clash

Who said there is no free lunch? And do they have a copyright on it?

Copyright is one of the most important types of wealth made possible mainly by government regulations. U.S. copyright is a regulatory system run by the Library of Congress (ironically a place where one can read books including mine for free). Copyright has been an important tool from keeping publishers who did not have contracts with writers and artists from publishing the works of others. And for awhile it worked to some degree to help those artists and writers in their fiduciary battles with publishers. But today everyone can be a publisher and copying content and distributing it is practically free and copyright is difficult to police. And most brilliant of all, any fence put up to control access to content on the Internet limits the ability of the potential viewer to find it and obversely makes it more likely that the viewer will find the same or related content elsewhere. I would also argue that copyright in its present form is destructive to creativity, as a high percentage of works are synthesized.

And so now the world is saturated with the old and new content to the point where a person can listen to or read a lifetime's worth of content all through their connection to the Internet without paying anything to anyone except for the connection and equipment and sometimes not even that. How will new artists, writers and their publishers ever make enough to support themselves? The answer so far has been to depend on a mix of control, ease of use, non-Internet revenue streams and advertising. And, oh yes, voluntary donations. But the use of government copyright regulations and civil and criminal enforcement is quickly becoming impossible as a means for collecting revenue (sorry RIAA).

Every day we hear of newspapers bleeding red ink, book and album sales decreasing and whispers of the movie and television industry losing control of their markets through the flood of free competitors and chinks in the DCMA armor. Is there a solution?

Potential Solution

Once one realizes that most copied content is valued based on copyright, a straightforward and accepted government regulation. And to be clear, I am using the word "value" in a strictly economic sense. However, I would posit that the more important measure of content is harder to explain. Does entertainment, education other attributes of content have objective and measurable value? And if more content is available to all citizens than they could consume in their lifetimes, why waste effort in creating more (putting aside ephemeral art that cannot be captured and therefore not copied successfully)? The answer is as obvious as it is ineffable.

One solution has been advertising and can continue to the answer. However, advertising will not support much eventually if content itself loses economic value as well as loss of control of venue. And, in my opinion, advertising has a corrupting influence, especially as other revenue streams become scarcer; that limits a creator's, editor's and audience's ability to affect the content. Another solution is for voluntary payments which is sort of working, but will be insufficient to sustain much (despite Kachingle's and Amazon's best efforts). And there is patron and government philanthropy which mixed with voluntary donations has made NPR an important, although not a sustainable model for most media in our "market" economy.

But there is one system that has so far played only a small roll in the United States, direct government enforced license fees on media. Indirectly though, this has played a major role in content in television. Cable franchises have been created that enforce a tiered licensing system, where customers pay a flat fee that pays for a wide spectrum of content (admittedly of varying quality). Due to collusion between municipalities and cable companies, cable fees are essentially opaque license fees for access that have been used to sustain a great deal of content. This is unlike the British model that is is transparent and obvious.

One problem in selling this solution in the United States is the odd belief in the market system where we should all individually choose to buy content and let the purchases be the sole determinant of who is allowed to create content. The reality has been that massive government participation has propped up the current system through the copyright system, civil courts (and thanks to DCMA criminal as well), municipal monopoly franchises, tax breaks and subsidies for content creation, and overseeing the ownership and distribution of content using the airwaves and wires. And, oh yes, the government's direct payment in the form of advertising for public notice which has been an important means of support for local newspapers. 

So I propose a tiered license fee for access to the Internet. The revenue could support a huge swath of content that, although is hard to value in dollar terms, would be invaluable to the quality of life and to the culture. Which is not to say that individual bloggers and artists should get a cut for clicks (a method of measuring interest), but that the funds could support peer reviewed and hybrid controlled organizations that find a multitude of ways to support content creation. Advertising, donor support, and amateur content can continue to thrive in this environment. However, continued government regulation through copyright should be curtailed as counterproductive to culture post-Internet and being generally ineffective. And for those who think that government's influence can only be destructive, please stop using web browsers, the World Wide Web and the Internet, all three technologies created initially by the government and each won a fair fight in the marketplace (note, on the Internet, all things being close to equal, the free one will likely win--sorry patent holders).

One example is the need to move away from copyright regulations for medical content. When my wife needed immediate and major medical help, I needed to learn as much as possible about a disease for which there is not yet a standard of care (i.e. clear guidelines for medical treatment). So I spent a great deal of time looking for the most up to date medical news on treatments. The best system was PubMed which is a government created search tool for most of the medical journals. But the system can only show the abstracts/summaries for journal articles that charge money for subscriptions or single articles. Without help from relatives in the medical field who have free access through their institutions, I might have had to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for this information, a potential impediment to quality care. In this case the fences built to protect copyright ironically are still successful in part, because most readers have free access subsidized often by government and government supported academic and medical institutions.

The Internet has been a major force for content distribution, multiplying the reach that the printing press brought and similarly fractionating the cost of publication. We need to be aware not only of the advantages, but also the dangers. We can not live by bread alone, but we do still need bread.*

*Deuteronomy 8: 2-3. Does God hold a copyright? Just checking.

On My Birthday

Fortunately, there won’t be screaming "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more,"* by all of the angered analog television owners who were going to lose their analog signal today. The day of screaming has been postponed to June (and someone else’s birthday). I was working in Congress during the time that the discussions about high resolution and changing from the old format to a new one took place. Back then the issue was over analog versus digital. Fortunately digital won which was a nod to computer monitors which were already using digital. Then the fight over progressive versus interlaced picture drawing. Unfortunately, interlaced won the premium level standard: this was a nod to the current practice of drawing every other horizontal line twice versus drawing every line once in one frame and a big no-no for computer monitors. On the other hand since then the best televisions use a yet higher standard, progressive a.k.a. 1080P.

So I buried the headline, as the real story should be how Congress has missed a major opportunity with the conversion to digital signals. Congress came up with a coupon system for those people who have analog receiving televisions who get over the air signals (as opposed to those that get their signals through a cable or satellite box). The coupons are for a box that attaches to a new antenna on one side and an old analog television on the other side. And Congress did not supply enough coupons (more are on their way). What I believe Congress should have done is to heavily subsidize the purchase of new, better, more energy efficient televisions that receive a digital signal. Instead, Congress is subsidizing another power draining device that will likely not improve the quality of the picture and make it less likely that a more energy efficient television is eventually purchased.

In the midst of the current downturn, having more televisions purchased would have been a great way to increase purchasing of new technology. And those new televisions could have been a way to ease a large computer monitor into the homes of those that might not otherwise have or use computers. And Congress could have subsidized the research into creating newer more efficient televisions and manufacturing technologies. Right now there is a golden opportunity to help U.S. firms manufacture the next generation of televisions/monitors using OLED and other breakthrough methods that vastly improve the quality of the image and lower the energy usage at the same time. Instead we are subsidizing staying stuck in an energy inefficient rut and refusing to kick start the U.S. manufacturing base.

May be for my next birthday, Obama will fix this situation. A special shout out for Obama and signing the recovery bill into law on my birthday. Although it continues the coupon program, it will spawn a revolution in energy efficiency in many other areas and will save peoples’ lives, homes and jobs.

Welcome to the Not Everyday News!

Welcome to my blog about new uses for technology, especially in the area of government, politics and open standards. As I come across innovations that might otherwise be overlooked or under-appreciated, I will post about them here (especially my own--yes this blog is biased). What won't be posted here is news that is ordinary, already known or "everyday." And there may not be postings "every day" either, though you might see more than one a day sometimes.

The postings will fall into the following areas:

• speculative - my musings on what might develop from recent developments and ideas
• workinprogress - potential new offerings that need more work (or less)
• prior_art - like work in progress, but hints at patent-like ideas
• implication - non-obvious impacts from new technology
• opinion - my opinion on the appropriate uses of a technology
• egov - industry specific ramblings
• advocacy - more industry specific ramblings

I hope that you find the site helpful and entertaining. Please feel free to comment, although trackbacks are preferred (this opinion will be explained in a post in the future).