Mark Pilgrim posts an interesting article entitled XML on the Web Has Failed and he’s right to some degree. Character sets remain a huge mess on the internet, but I think he’s pinning the failure on the wrong technology. It’s not XML that’s failed, but RFC3023 which specifies a set of rules for detecting the XML charset when combined with HTTP. The reason RFC3023 fails is because noone likes the way it works and it’s just not implemented anywhere. The one part of the specification that causes problems is what to do when XML is transferred over HTTP with no Charset header and a Content-Type of text/xml. The one reason that rule is so screwed up (it says to ignore the charset in the XML file) is because a bunch of proxies translate the character encoding without knowing anything about the content being transferred (except that it’s text/something). So what’s the solution? Put some common sense back into the mix, if there’s no charset in the HTTP headers and a charset declared in the XML file, use the charset from the XML file, then fix the proxies that are destroying content – they’re probably destroying a lot of HTML files as well since they wouldn’t pay attention to the content type specified in a meta tag. Claiming that XML has failed is throwing the baby out with the bath water, the problem is just that there’s some stupid proxies doing things that, while currently allowed, are pretty obviously going to destroy content at least some of the time. So I propose a very simple solution to this problem. Add one new rule to the HTTP spec:

During the week I wrote some documentation to help people write XSLTs that work really well with EditLive! for XML. Generally any given XSLT will work but there are some techniques you can use to make them work better with the augmentation process we use to add editable fields into your XSLT’s output. Our official document writing took exception to one sentence about where the best place to put “action buttons” is in an XSLT. Action buttons are clickable things that are a cross between a hyperlink and a button which perform operations like adding another element or attribute or moving things up and down in the document. The sentence was apparently too confusing but contained a subtle but important point which couldn’t just be removed. I still think the clearest way to phrase the sentence was as a haiku: most cases intuition used button works Sadly, they won’t let me put that in the docs. So now the challenge goes out – what is the subtle but important point that the haiku so eloquently reveals? Maybe if enough people get it I’ll be allowed to put it in….

Justen Erenkrantz comments on his day at the ball game and it reminded me of just how arrest happy the US police are. Police seem to be managed on a local level in the US so my experience with the San Francisco area police may not apply US wide. I’ve never seen so many people getting arrested in such a short time. For that matter I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone get arrested in real life before my trip to the US. While I was over there I was seeing at about two people a day getting handcuffed and carted away. Maybe I was just spending too much time with the wrong crowd.

Well after a being so excited about getting my ADSL connection, my ADSL modem decided to crap out. Every so often it would just lock up hard – all the lights off except the power light – and stay like that even when power cycled. So yesterday I ordered a Billion 7100S which arrived today. It seems to be working after a slight bit of worry that it wasn’t getting an IP (turned out I’d turned the DHCP client off instead of the DHCP server). So now I’m happily *and* reliably connected to the interweb thingy again. Yay for that.

Wireless Driver will definitely work on OS X 10.3 (Panther) and also claims to work for 10.2 (Jaguar) and 10.1 so it should cover all your needs. Simply run the installer then either kextload the extension or just reboot and specify the network to connect to in the new “Wireless Config” control panel and configure the new “Ethernet Interface” that will appear in the network control panel.

We finally have ADSL at our new place. The world has resumed revolving at normal speed.

When did this happen? Google doing image ads? This doesn’t bode well for the future of man kind. Fortunately:

We currently have no plans to show image ads on Google.com. But that “currently” still concerns me.

I try not to blog about stuff that comes through the Reuters Oddly Enough RSS feed because it’s easier to just get it straight from them but the last couple of days have seen some pretty odd stories about Germans come through. Today’s was a german man who was refused a passport because he was dead. Apparently his blind ex-wife had reported him as having died in an explosion but had to get her mother to identify the body due to her lack of sight. I guess the husband hadn’t spent enough time with his mother in law. I should also point out that the article doesn’t actually mention he was refused the passport but one would hope that he was at least initially…. And of course now that I reread it a little more carefully – he might have been russian instead of german. They’re both north of here and substantially colder so you can understand the mistake….

Well I figure if you’re going to do something you may as well do it properly and I’ve been getting into the whole PGP thing lately. The trouble is noone has signed my key making it pretty much worthless. I’m also a long way away from everyone I know who uses PGP and fate seems to work against me when I’m closer to them. Bertrand was in Australia recently and even in Brisbane, unfortunately I was over in San Francisco (btw Bertrand if you manage to read this, my old email is offline at the moment so I can’t find your contact details to let you know that I’m back in the country but I figure you’ve moved on from Brisbane anyway). Meanwhile, when I was in San Francisco I missed the train and didn’t make it to the first Apache gathering which had people present who used PGP. I made it to the second but I don’t think anyone there used PGP so there was no key signing done. So I figure I should check out a certificate authority and at least get them to sign my key. CACert is the new, free CA service and since I think it’s about time someone provided a free CA I wanted to support it by getting involved and if the service stacks up with money. It seems however, that there’s no trusted authorities in Brisbane yet. Fortunately they do have a more complex process involving faxing IDs around and finding a couple of lawyers, accountants or bank managers to verify your identity. Since I happen to know a few lawyers and accountants (oh, the company I keep….) that might just work out. So if you’re a lawyer and see me coming with a bunch of paper work, you know what it’s about. With all the viruses impersonating people these days, not to mention actual identify theft (which I’ve personally been a victim of before, though fortunately there were no serious consequences), it’s beginning to get more and more important that your identify can be accurately identified online. The first step is for lots of geeks to get involved, then for more email clients to have builtin support for PGP and make it easy, then we should see much more widespread adoption. Hopefully at some point it will be so ubiquitous that ISPs can refuse to relay email unless it’s signed with a registered PGP key and spam is no longer a problem (though email server resources would be under much higher load so it’s unlikely to actually be done). Client side filters would definitely be an option though.

Technology is wonderful sometimes but it can have serious drawbacks. Having recently moved house and finally managed to remember my new address and find out what my new phone number is I set out to send my new contact details around to friends and family. It occurred to me that attaching a vcard with all my details might make life easier for some people to get in sync with my new details. The trouble is if you attach a file to an email people inevitably think it’s important and just have to open it. So my email ends with the words:

Via Reuters:

A German man reported a female chat-line worker to police after facing a phone bill for $7,244 following an all-night flirt session with her She called him unsolicited and told him to call her back saying it would be “a cheap rate”. My favorite quote:

The man said they talked about far more than just sex Suuuure.

This is pretty scary. Read it, contemplate it and remember it when you next come to vote. UPDATE: It would help to format the HTML correctly on the link so that browsers actually pay attention to it…. Sorry about that and that’s to the anonymous commenter that pointed out the problem.