Tag: Dave Winer

Dave Winer Doesn’t Get It Either

Another person misreading the Appeals Court ruling is Dave Winer, but Winer has to go on and make one of his typically loopy suggestions,

Now it seems the next step is for a new trial, and although I’m not a lawyer it seems only reasonable, given the number of violations of antitrust law that Microsoft has been found guilty of, that some protections be put in place immediately to stop Microsoft from doing more harm while the new trial is proceeding.

Let me get this straight. The government needs to conduct a legal proceeding to come up with a more realistic penalty for Microsft, but it should go ahead and institute a penalty before it actually gets around to instituting a penalty.

Besides which, there isn’t going to be another trial. One thing I forgot to add before is that a settlement is also in the Justice Department’s interest. Given the unanimous verdict by the appellate court, any judge named to oversee a new penalty phase is going to be looking over his or her shoulder. There is always the possibility that Microsoft could wind up with a lighter penalty than it might be willing to agree to in a settlement.

Double Quotes for Glossary Entries

I wasn’t going to say anything when David Winer pointed out on Scripting News that you can use double quotes around words or phrases for Glossary entries, but then Winer posted a second message,

5/15/96: “Some people have objected to the use of double-quotes, saying it interferes with a writer’s process. But I’m a writer, and I love it! I’ve never heard a prose writer complain about this, just script writers. If you quote something that isn’t in the glossary, the renderer leaves it alone. Sometimes it enables text that I wasn’t expecting it to. I usually chuckle, and then put a backslash before the double-quote, which turns rendering off for the term. But often it surprises me by doing exactly the right thing. I laugh even louder when this happens!”

Bottom line: using double quotes for this is stupid. Imagine you have a couple dozen of these things and trying to remember which ones you have to put a backslash in front of and which ones you don’t. Why not just use a different, more rarely used character such as the pipe — | — character, or better yet let individual users choose which character to use.

I can tell you exactly what would happen if my web site were set up to use quote marks for this sort of function. Inevitably one of the people who posts to my site would use quote marks around a word, find it hyperlinked, and have a raging fit about me altering their content. And then I have to explain to them that for certain words they have to put a backslash before the quotes?

No thank you.

Microsoft Employee Steps In It

I’ve been very critical of Dave Winer’s comments about Smart Tags on Scripting.Com, but off some Microsoft employee goes to help make Winer’s case for him. Winer posted an e-mail from an MS employee defending Smart Tags. I almost stopped reading after the first paragraph,

I come at this from a non-involved end-user, basing my opinion on my experience to date, as just a “reader” , and as such, an end-user, I love smart-tags. I find it is one of the most user friendly, productive tool we have create since “auto-complete”.

Frankly, Microsoft’s implementation of auto-complete sucks. Its the first thing I disable when forced to use Word. My wife absolutely detests Microsoft because of auto-complete because to truly disable it you have to muddle your way through a long set of menu options, and then hope and pray that Word gets the message.

On the other hand, a later paragraph is downright scary assuming this is not some spoofed e-mail,

To suggest that the author knows best how to write effectively to each individual reader is silly, yet that’s what I understand of you position. When you write a piece, when any author writes a piece, he or she is always at a tremendous advantage over the reader. Theoretically at lease, you have at least familiarity if not command of the topic about which you write. The reader most likely does not. That’s why they are reading, to learn something, to be exposed to new ideas that you do not yet have or understand.

That sort of arrogance is just amazing. This is pretty much what Winer’s been arguing all along — that Microsoft wants to alter people’s content, and along comes this person to say “you’re absolutely right, and that’s a good thing! You should thank us for altering your content.”

On the other hand, the MS employee does add something which was interesting,

Many articles, including yours, accuse smart tags as “re-editing” the work?? I don’t get this, they do no such thing, The orginal work remains unchanged, no new links, no removed links. Smart tags do add “Meta-context” , and hopefully over time, our software will get even smarter so that the “Meta-Context” smart tags evolve with me, learning and tracking my “knowledge” quotient, thus getting more and more specific about what they call out and what they don’t, either based upon what it knows about the things I’m interested in, or what it knows about the things I don’t know a lot about.

Isn’t this the sort of thing that Winer’s been urging? That we’ll put these streams of XML data out there and let the end user mix, match, slice and dice information how he or she wants? Isn’t MS just bringing its weight to bear on a variation of what Winer has been championing all along?

What About A Frontier Free Friday?

Can you imagine the flames that would issue forth from Dave Winer if some executive at Microsoft suggested a Frontier Free Friday to protest Winer’s constant abuse of his customers and innocent bystanders? You know, something like:

What if every Friday were a Frontier-free day for the Web? You can use Frontier any day but Friday. To give something back to the Web, if you want to use my browser you would have to use Apache, Vignette, etc. — anything but Userland’s software. One day a week.

The more I read Scripting News the more I become convinced that “The Two Way Web” is every bit as much an empty marketing slogan as anything Microsoft ever comes up with.

The Smart Tag Debate, Part II

As I mentioned over the weekend, Dave Winer and others are freaking out over Microsoft’s Smart Tag feature with Winer writing,

I told a reporter yesterday that I would support Smart Tags if they allowed me to hack my links into Microsoft.Com, instead of the other way around.

Well, gee Dave — Microsoft has an entire web site devoted to helping third party developers create their own Smart Tags. See OfficeSmartTags.Com.

Which of course doesn’t solve the main problem with the feature. I don’t want to have to rely on developers to provide me with their Smart Tags, I want to be able to define my own personal set easily and on the fly.

For example, suppose I’m doing research on a topic such as musket rifles. Why not, for example, allow me to highlight a word or phrase, right click, and then select an “Add Smart Tag” option. Selecting this would bring a dialogue box allowing me to quickly specify where I want this Smart Tag to take me.

I should also be able to create simple generic rules or templates for Smart Tags. I’d probably route most of the Smart Tags to Google searches on the terms, so why not allow me to create a generic Google search rule and then simply create a Smart Tag that would submit the word or phrase to Google with just a couple clicks?

Now that would be interesting.

Winer Spreads Misinformation

As much as I dislike Microsoft’s Smart Tags idea, you’d think that with all the discussion about it that David Winer would be able to avoid making this nonsensical statement about the technology,

I told a reporter yesterday that I would support Smart Tags if they allowed me to hack my links into Microsoft.Com, instead of the other way around. If you think this feature would gain support from independent Web developers, think again. (What a humiliating idea, for the Web, to even be talking about our independence from Microsoft.)

In fact, Winer will have the ability to make his own Smart Tags that will work with IE and could be used so that visitors to Microsoft.Com would be routed to his site via Smart Tags. Microsoft has been very clear that outside developers would be able to develop Smart Tags and that web masters will be able to include a meta tag header field in web pages to disable the feature (though realistically, whose going to download and install third party Smart Tag files?)

Microsoft’s idea still stinks in my mind, but they’ve addressed the concerns of web masters a lot better than the many other companies who came out with similar services that overlayed their own content on top of web pages.

How about a corporate death penalty for developers who make statements that are contradicted by the very articles they link to? Oy.