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.

Right. Who’s first to call me a racist?

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.

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.

Web Development

• That clever Doug Schepers of the W3C has a cunning plan to make html5 <canvas> more accessible:
  

  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!”
• Make-super-CSS3-Gradients-o-matic! Super tool for making gradients with all the lovely vendor prefixes
• Some links on writing HTML5 games
• Dr Oli Boblet has done research in how blockquotes are attributed in the print world
• 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.
• PDF.js: rendering PDF with JavaScript

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:

Web Retardation

• Apple’s new multitouch patent
• The W3C seeks info about access control systems available before October 2005 and content distribution systems before April 2006 that offer a viable solution that may apply to the use of access requests policy in Widgets (Our Good Friends at Apple claim to have patents which they say apply to Web Application WG’s Widget Access Request Policy specification)

Opera

• Opera Desktp 11.50 released
• Opera Mobile 11.1 released
• Shwetank has getUserMedia and Device Orientation adventures

Misc

• Need to get from Bell End to Fisting Roughly? Here’s the rude Tube map (NSFW)
• Awkward girl in pink in Rebecca Black’s ‘Friday’ video uses sudden fame to raise money for charity and shows herself to be Queen of Internet

However, the license for that page is CC Share Alike:

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.

(Full speech in Hansard)

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.

Mr Davis believes criticism of his remarks is “leftwing hysteria”.

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.