When the Nazi-woman-on-a-tram video came out, I was one of the twitter-chattering classes who bemoaned what she was saying.
In case you haven’t seen it, here’s the foul-mouthed and utterly inarticulate rant by a woman with her toddler on her lap bemoaning that “my Britain is fuck all” because of immigration, asking other passengers where they come from, telling them to go back (one person is told to go back to “Nicaraguaberra”)
It’s horrible, but it represents the views of many, many people who don’t yell it in public and who aren’t daft enough to do it in front of a camera.
But then I read that “Emma West (34) of New Addington was charged with Racially Aggravated Section 4a on Monday. She was remanded in custody overnight.”
It makes me uncomfortable that she was arrested and spent the night in a police cell. Before you call me a racist, let’s be clear: I disagree with everything she said, and the manner in which she said it. And, had she and a few of her friends surrounded a black person and started shouting at him, they would be obviously threatening and should be arrested.
But Ms West wasn’t threatening anyone. She remained seated, with her child on her lap. While her words are abhorrent, they’re only words. No-one was physically threatened. She wasn’t inciting anyone else to violence. So what’s her crime? Being a horrible idiot isn’t a crime. She’s offensive, but being offensive isn’t a crime. And no-one has the right to be protected by law from being offended.
It seems to me that those of us who believe in free speech must support the right for people to spout offensive nonsense.
Yay! The first, the original, the sexiest, the motherflippin’ brownest book on HTML5, Introducing HTML5 is out in second edition!
What’s new?
It’s bigger, baby – having swollen from 223 pages to a tumescent 295 pages – for less than the cover price of the original. Apart from a photo of the snogtabulous uberhunks™ that are its authors on the front cover, and the inner colour changing from orange to blue, what are the highlights?
Errors are corrected and it’s all re-read and updated
It’s been fully re-edited, re-proofed and re-indexed
Bruce has changed his mind about the <nav> element and now advises you don’t use it bloody everywhere
The multimedia chapter has added information on <track>, getUserMedia, webRTC
Even more detail about how to get more out of geolocation
More storage methods and techniques, including the new IndexedDB storage API
We now have full examples on how to use Server Sent Events
Updated detail on offline applications, gotchas and debugging tips
A full new chapter on polyfills, what they are, how they work and how to use them
Updated launch photos?
You bet!
So buy the book already, or we’re coming round your house dressed like this to ask why you haven’t. And don’t forget to join in the fun by sending a photo of you with a copy of the book, doing your O-face, or wearing in mankini for inclusion in the HTML5 gallery of gorgeous guys and groovy gals.
Thanks to Krijn Hoetmer for the mankini. Next time I’m turning the heating on.
When we were clearing my deceased Grandmother‘s house for sale, we found a four-volume set of books that I had loved as a child, called The World of the Children by Stuart Miall (1903-1977). They were designed for children to read with parents, and covered subjects as diverse as a death in the family, algebra, how to measure the speed of light, how electric lights work and foreign travel.
They were originally published in 1948 (although these are a 1952 reprint) and show just what a different country the past was.
In one chapter, a small boy and girl swim naked together, allowing the Marjorie, the girl, to ask her mother why boys and girls are made differently. (The precise physical nature of the differences is never discussed.)
Mother sums up the differences:
The big strong man enjoys being a big strong man, and the pretty girl who has won a husband and a home and lots of babies finds that there is plenty of work to do to keep all her treasures sweet and nice. God is very fair, darling.
Something that hasn’t changed – and which surprised me – is the chapter on “We have to decide whether a stranger is nice or nasty”. I can recall being told never to talk to strangers when I was at school in the early 1970s, but was never told why. Although old people and right-wingers would have you believe that pre-immigration and pre-sexual revolution, everyone was lovely and polite and everyone left their doors unlocked all the time, it appears that’s not the case.
The book is rooted in the colonial era, even though by this time the colonies were beginning to dwindle. The author, Stuart Miall, tries to be an enlightened imperialist:
The people of India are dark, almost black, but many have fine distinguished-looking faces and many are exceedingly clever.
(Notice the word “but”.)
On the Middle East, Miall writes
It is probable that if they were allowed to grow up together in friendship, little Arab children and little Jewish children would most surely mke a happy as well as a holy land of poor, stricken Palestine, but the tribal beliefs of Arabs and Jews have not the virtues of Christian values, which exhort men to brotherly love and peace.
We are shown pictures of the industrious “dark-skinned natives” of India and “dusky children of Jamaica”:
He slips a little when discussing Gracie “a dark little half-caste girl, with a rather fine little face”:
Where white people live side-by-side with native people of a different colour, it sometimes happens that white man takes a black or brown or yellow woman for his wife. Then the childrem are called half-caste…Gracie looked as though she might be intelligent like her father, though having the dark skin of her mother. The life of a half-caste is usually a very sad one, because neither the white people nor the black people really care for him.
Here Miall seems to be sympathetic to the apartheid system, which began in South Africa in 1948, the same year the book was published.
What’s shocking is how mainstream such racism seems to be in 1940s England. Take, for example, the page of common words for teaching children to read and write: “an, as, at, be, big, collar, daughter, fat, fish” and so on, until we get to N: “neck, niece, nigger”.
This book was printed a mere 14 years before I was born. Amazing.
Here are some links I’ve tweeted recently, for those without time, inclination or access to read them on Twitter. And why would you, when I’ve categorised them here for you?
a simple graphics API that will allow either 2D Canvas (immediate-mode) or SVG (retained-mode) images with the same set of methods and parameters, with the only difference being which “mode” the author selects to have as the instantiated form. If the author draws a circle to the canvas context, it would simply be drawn to the screen with no structure; if the author draws that same circle to the SVG context, it creates a element with the appropriate attribute values and style and inserts it into the DOM
This would allow authors to learn only one API for 2D graphics for the Open Web Platform. With this ease of learning and use, the author could decide on a case-by-case basis, even within the same application, which mode works best.
WebRTC is real-time communication in the browser (think: video-conferencing). Google open-sourced their code. “we expect to see WebRTC support in Firefox, Opera, and Chrome soon!”
Trygve Lie has some cool Orientation API demos: Using a mobile phone as a remte conrtrol for a video on a desktop, and a remote / receiver demo that captures the orientation events from a device and transfers these over a WebSocket to the receiver to create a rotating image in the receiver. The image in the receiver will rotate depending upon how the remote is rotated.
What’s the opposite of “to develop”? That’s right – “to inhibit” or “to retard”. So after the “Web Development” section, stuff that inhibits the Open Web:
As part of tarting up Introducing HTML5 for its second edition, I’m discussing the very useful -moz-ui-invalid pseudo-class. The documentation at Mozila Developer Centre is a paragon of clarity and succinctness, so much so that my instinct is to quote the 4 lines “The result is that .. unchanged valid value” with attribution, rather than rephrase it and reduce its clarity.
Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.
Now, I don’t know whether quoting within a chapter is “building upon” or not. I can’t release the book under a similar license as neither Remy nor I own the intellectual property (we tried to persuade the publishers to release it but they were… somewhat antipathetic (ahem) to that idea).
Twitter chums advised that quoting 4 lines was OK as “fair use”. But I’m in the UK and as far as I can tell, we don’t have that concept here. Wikipedia says of UK “fair dealing”:
Under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA), fair dealing is limited to the following purposes: research and private study (both must be non-commercial), criticism, review, and news reporting (sections 29, 30, 178). Although not actually defined as a fair dealing, incidental inclusion of a copyrighted work in an artistic work, sound recording, film, broadcast or cable programme doesn’t infringe copyright.
But our book is a commercial project. It’s not criticism, review or news.
So I’ve emailed the MDC to ask them to waive their rights. I’m writing this book as a private individual, and the derisory royalties that technical books produce don’t make me willing to accept personal legal risks: no way am I risking my house, which is the only thing of value I own. (Hiring a lawyer would use up all my royalties.)
This emphatically is not a criticism of Mozilla – they’ve always had an excellent track record of openness and I’m certain they’d be delighted to be quoted in a chapter that praises them.
It’s a criticism of UK copyright law and the Share Alike license which doesn’t define “build upon” or “non-commercial” in any useful way.
Naturally, because he’s caring-and-sharing, he only has those people’s best interests at heart:
My concern about it is it prevents those people from being given the opportunity to get the first rung on the employment ladder.
But he’s not just caring-and-sharing. He’s also a True Blue Tory who lives in The Real World of laisez-faire economics:
The point is that if an employer is considering two candidates, one who has disabilities and one who does not, and if they have to pay them both the same rate, which is the employer more likely to take on? Whether that is right or wrong and whether my hon. Friend would or would not do that, that is to me the real world in which we operate.
Rather stupidly, I had assumed that the role of Members of Parliament was to enact legislation that protected the vulnerable by promoting equality, redistributing wealth from the very rich to the disadvantaged and ensure that people aren’t exploited in the workplace.
I realise now that, because inequality and exploitation exists in the real world, we should accept it and encourage it by exempting groups of people from laws designed to protect them.
So let’s have an army of ultra-low paid people doing menial tasks without legal protection of any sort. In the capitalist real world, there is no need to price those people out of the market with statutory maximum working hours, or the requirement for safety equipment as they go down mines or up chimneys.
The disabed are analagous to former prisoners, says Mr Davis:
The only way the former prisoner would be given a chance by the employer is if the employer was able to say, “I’ll give you a smaller amount for a certain period of time and we’ll see how it goes. If you prove yourself, I’ll move you up.”
From his voting record, I see that Mr Davis voted against equal gay rights, presumably so we can have minimum wage-exempt homosexuals staffing up hairdressing salons or kd lang tribute acts. I’m surprised that he voted for a stricter asylum system, given the opportunity it gives us to import squadrons of highly-trained professionals from war-torn areas of the world who could work as doctors for £3 an hour in the cash-strapped NHS.
I’m not hysterical at all. In fact, if Mr Davis would care to attend my kickboxing class next Saturday, I will kick his arse for 60 minutes and not invoice him £5.93 for that hour at all. As someone with a disability (multiple sclerosis), I’ll happily do it for free. To prove myself.
I’m watching the UK news about President Obama producing his birth certificate, with increasing incredulity. The problem appears to be that he hasn’t satifactorily demonstrated that he was born in the USA. But to whom has he failed to demonstrate it? I find it hard to believe that he’s never shown a birth certificate before when standing as a governor or senator (or whatever it is).
A further question occurs to me. Why can’t someone born outside the USA become President? Given that the USA is basically a nation of recent immigrants, why couldn’t a naturalised citizen become the leader? Why the discrimination?
And, while we’re on the subject, how come a country that separates religion and state has Christmas as a national holiday, but not Hannukah or Eid or Diwali? And “In God We Trust” as a motto?
I should add that I love visiting the USA and am not snarking. I’m genuinely interested.
There are times when even as a seasoned traveller you can feel pretty vulnerable. For example, breakfast: I’m as happy to tuck into raw mackeral as an evening meal, but there’s something about it for breakfast that is so unexpected that it takes you aback.
I’ve had similar double-takes with Japanese toilets. I went to Satoshi and Akane’s house for a lovely meal and, as you do after lots of soup and beer, felt the natural urge to micturate. Although they have a lavish toilet control panel (all of them do) I couldn’t work out how to flush.
After asking my gracious hosts, I learned that it was activated by infra-red. This is in contrast with the toilet in my hotel room, whose control panel had English language controls, and squirted water up my bum and around my bum at user-selectable strength (below), but didn’t seem to have a flush button.
I eventually located a traditional manual flush on the opposite side of the toilet bowl, and satisfactorily dismissed my ablutions.
Most Japanese toilets have heated seats, which is a bit of a win but odd when alone in a hotel room as you can’t help but wonder who has snuck in to poo while you were cleaning your teeth. Many flush for an inordinately long time automatically the instant you sit down; I’m told so that this means you’re unable to hear the sound of ladies urinating, as it’s masked by the flushing sound. I suppose that if you’re bashful about exposing the fact that ladies pee (they do, you know!) this would be a useful solution in a traditional thin-walled Japanese house in which sound would travel easily.
This theory might be borne out by the testimony of a lady attendee of the Web Directions East conference who told me that each ladies’ loo in the conference venue (consequent apologies for lack of photo) has a button marked “flushing sound” that played a loud recording of the sound of flushing, presumably to conserve water.
Talking of water conservation, the apotheosis of lavatorial environmental responsibility was witnessed in my colleague Daniel’s apartment. On flushing the toilet (a laudably easily accomplished action, I might add), the tap on a small sink mounted above the cistern started automatically. I washed my hands and wondered how to turn the tap off. Then the brilliance of the design hit me: instead of re-filling a closed cistern, the washbasin drained the soapy water into the reservoir below, thereby flushing the toilet with the grey water that the previous visitor had washed his/ her hands in while simultaneously saving space in the compact Tokyo dwelling.
Genius. If I could work out a way to import them and sell them in the UK I’d make a million.
If you’re British, it’s not “awesome”. That’s an American word, like “sidewalk”, “gas” for petrol, “critter”, “varmint”, “tarnation” and “gotten” as the third form of the verb. Americans, you’re welcome to use them; they’re your words, but they are not English.
If you want knee-jerk circle-jerk response to mediocre design, the term is “Brendan Dawesome“.
If you want to express actual approbation for something, the English terms are “spiffing”, “top-hole”, “wizard” or “ticketyboo”.
My anger management has been going well, thank you very much. Even christmas music doesn’t rile me. Only one thing of late has disturbed my legendary seasonal bonhomie and general goodwill-to-all-bastards demeanour.
And that is obviously-hyperbolic advertising. We all understand the tropes of advertising so, of course, tell me that what you’re peddling is better than your competitors’ offerings while it’s actually identical; naturally, I understand that your product is consumed by pants-moisteningly attractive people and that, if I use it too, I will be considered to be attractive. That’s all fair enough.
No, I’m talking about the ludicrously unrelated association of mundane products with high concepts: imagine if toilet paper were marketed as preserving democracy, that kind of thing.
Exhibit one, the televisual rectal cyst that roused me from my semi-pissed slumber last night to begin foaming at the mouth, is the £3m ‘freedom’ ad campaign for LG (watch it if you really need to).
Cue a film of a small baby swimming in water (all very Nevermind); “the day we are born is the last day we are truly free” intones SeriousVoiceoverMan. “Before you know it, we’re boxed in; held back; constrained” he continues over images of cubicle farms, ranks of desks. Tantalisingly he asks “What if we knew we were free to go further?” over sunny visuals of flowers opening, wide open vistas, and a gratuitous pretty women in a bikini being hosed down.
So, that’s the set-up. We can see by this point that whatever it is they want you to buy is inextricably linked with the concept of “freedom”. Never mind that the ad agency’s idea of freedom is being submerged insensible in warm amniotic fluid and strapped immobile to a placenta (all very The Matrix with a dash of Oedipus complex: rather sinister, if you think about it).
In Adland, freedom usually means cars or tampons. Tampons because, as Mrs Pankhurst would have told you, women never feel truly free unless they’re swimming or wearing white trousers while simultaneously menstruating and risking toxic shock syndrome. The way to advertise cars is to remind us of the single USP of the car (you can go where you want whenever you want) that is shared by every motor vehicle, while insinuating that flooring the accelerator of the Audi Mingé is the act of an eco-warrior that does the planet a favour.
Back to the product. Tampon or Motor? Neither. Our advert is for an LG television. Now, I have nothing against televisions. I was recently persuaded by my family to purchase one the size of Luxembourg and I spend many an hour balefully peering at it. During those periods of stupefaction, I have concluded that TV has three primary purposes:
It’s the best way to find out who the government requires us to hate at the moment.
When used in conjunction with a games console, it’s invaluable for stimulating endorphins and adrenaline in your children without them having to go anywhere. This negates the risk of their being touched up by one or all of the 4.9 million rampant paedophiles who are roaming YOUR TOWN right now. It also means they never need move, accumulating body mass until they die aged 50 of diabetes and obesity thereby saving the nation a fortune in medical care.
It’s perfect for married couples to avoid speaking to each other. Instead, they can watch Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks pretending to be in love, just like they thought they were before transient sexual attraction cooled to become festering resentment and then crusted into mutual contempt.
I’m a coward. I wouldn’t have opposed fascism, put a flower down the barrel of a soldier’s gun and certainly wouldn’t have mustered up the courage to stand in front of a Tienanmen tank. But even a happy Epsilon minus like me understands that a big TV does not equate to the concept of liberty.
In fact, the ad is like Orwell for lazy people. Freedom isn’t slavery in this hyperbolic hyperbollocks, but Freedom is passivity. Be free! Be free to absorb more advertising like this! The obsequious marketing media reports (seemingly without irony) some lovely doublethink from George Mead, the LG brand manager who says
the TV, print and online campaign aims to promote LG Electronics as ‘refreshing and sophisticated’ … Mead said LG was trying to ‘dumb down its marketing’ to make it simple and educate consumers.
In other words: advertising people are clever. Consumers are stupid. TV=freedom.
