hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0498.txt

Episode: 498
Title: HPR0498: Talk Geek To Me Ep 02
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0498/hpr0498.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 21:47:24

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music
Hello and welcome to today's episode of Talk Geek to me.
This will be the third episode episode number 02.
Today in Talk Geek to me upgrading HTML to modernize HTML.
I will be a feature presentation, also a new segment, free and open source news,
focusing particularly on Latin America.
I'll tell you why when I start that segment.
And the usual round up with viewer responses and feedback and a closing song.
Stay tuned, let's get going.
Alright, here's a short story.
It is a tiny history of HTML, the Hypertext mockup language,
which is the language that the web pages are written in.
The early years of the World Wide Web, before the image tag was created,
was about two decades ago.
Hypertext mockup language was simple as anything.
You could create a web page with a simple text editor,
if you had the knowledge of about half a dozen mockup tags,
and you could have a simple web page that worked.
This was simplicity.
I can do this with a text editor, it's so easy.
Many people fell in love with web pages at this point.
You may ask, what made this so easy?
It was made this easy because web browsers were programmed to be astoundingly forgiving.
The basic task of a web browser is to display a web page, as best it can.
Even if the HTML it is given is malformed in some way.
As you can imagine, when you have people making stuff off the top of their heads,
they can forget things, like closing a paragraph, etc.
The other thing that made people fall in love with the web,
was that the web was meant to be platform independent.
That is to say, that it was never supposed to matter what kind of computer a person was using,
as he used the interweb.
Other things that were not to matter, was which browser he chose,
which OS system he ran.
It was always intended to be strictly democratic form of media,
serving all who came to it.
This is an important point we'll come back to later.
As we all know, technology moves forward, and standards change.
After the first version of HTML came the browser wars,
where NetScape and Internet Explorer bowled it out, trying to change things,
so that what browser you used mattered.
They did this by creating so-called extensions to HTML,
which were nothing else but special tags that only one web browser or another understood.
The real loser in the browser wars was the web page author,
who, all of a sudden, against the founding principles of the World Wide Web,
had to create two sets of web pages for all his documents.
The browser war error eventually drew to a close,
in the meantime, HTML went through several revisions,
and HTML is now at version 4.01.
An argument can be made that people should move to keep up with technology,
and should use the latest technology available.
But the argument lacks having a pressing nature.
That is to say, if I can write a web page with only a few memorized tags,
why should I do something more complex, like write it an HTML 4.01,
or even its sister, XHTML 1.01?
After all, these browsers are so forgiving,
they will just figure out a way to figure out what I mean
and flesh out what I want them to display.
Well, that is a true counter-argument,
and one I recently went through registering a new domain recently
and writing out its web page,
but I want to come back to a certain point I made before,
that the design of the web depends on browser independence,
and modernizing HTML is about this independence.
Back in the day, we were all using desktop systems to view the web,
and our desktop system had lots of memory,
but we are now in 2009,
and many folks like to forget about the important change that took place on the interweb.
And the name of that important change is mobile web.
We are not just browsing with desktop computers anymore.
The day of the mobile browser is upon us,
and if we are to keep the interweb as a truly democratic medium,
we need to remember that some people are logging onto our web pages with mobile devices.
The new HTML is ready for it.
If somebody says, your web page is tough to navigate with my cell phone,
the wrong answer is, get a cell phone with a better browser.
The new HTML is ready to help us create an interweb
where a web address yields a web page tailored to the both the desktop browsers
and the mobile phone browsers.
From the standpoint of the mobile browser,
the desktop browser looks like an opulent mansion with its large memory,
strong CPU, Java and Flash capabilities, broadband connections,
and those great big, high-resolution screens.
Let's discuss theory.
Theory is a great way to hammer the big ideas that will enable us to pull this off.
First off, I already simplified one concept and hit it from you.
Not only are we moving to platform independence in the web,
we are also moving away from an interweb that has met exclusively for human consumption.
That's right, the old sci-fi cliche, not just human readable, has come to pass.
I did not mean for this episode to be a member of a mini-series,
but it has.
I'm referring to my recent hacker public radio number 330 on Listgarden.
In HPR number 330, I explained how I was using Listgarden to generate web pages,
while it also generate RSS feeds.
Well, this is an important conceptualization.
You separate the content from the presentation.
And if you want, you can have software reading the web pages for you.
That is RSS feed in a nutshell.
The content is presented in a form that is a data form separate from the human presentation,
so that all those feed readers and aggregators can go to work on it for us.
And before you can say deja vu, you can see where this leads.
You keep on separating the content, not just from the human medium,
but from the presentation itself.
A modern informational web page you see delivers its content in a variety of ways.
The one I talked about in HPR number 330 was the information in the web page separate form,
web page read by a person.
This freed us not to have to view a web page with a browser.
We could then view it through an add-on to our favorite email client.
We could then use an aggregator to just use an RSS feed to figure out if a new podcast was released,
and then quickly fetch it.
If you like Yahoo's now famous custom homepage with its news headlines customized to your taste and news.
You can now integrate and obscure RSS into your news ticker and have a homepage on Yahoo
that had the BBC World News next to some computer security RSS feed.
The separation of the content from the presentation is what made this possible.
Well, let's repeat the process with what is called cascading style sheets.
I load the guys who named this one because it sounds horrible to me, so I will just call it style sheet.
I do this also because I believe it will be easier on you, dear listeners.
When you talk about the human readable portion of the web, you have the content,
which is the file that ends with .html.
Then you have the style sheet, which is a text file that has all the information on presenting the content.
Okay, don't beat me up.
I told you that simplicity in web pages was for another error, didn't I?
After writing web pages the old way, it sounds convoluted.
We are up to now at least three files, the content for machines in the RSS file,
the content for humans in the HTML file, and the style in a CSS file.
This does not include images or multimedia elements.
We may want in our web page.
This is just a basic web page.
But when you abstract to this layer, you get the big benefit.
Once you have the style sheet separate, you can have several style sheets, don't have a connection fit.
You are almost out of the woods.
Now, you can have a style sheet for mobile browsers, to tell the browser how to make the thing look good on a small screen.
A style sheet for desktop browsers, to tell the browser how to make the thing look good on a big screen,
and a style sheet for printers, so the thing looks good on paper.
To top it off, if you are using a mobile browser and the author was not kind enough to set things up for you,
you can have Yahoo take the RSS form of the information and display it for you on the small screen.
Very complete.
Now we can have content in a variety of forms.
This is an excellent place to move form theory to practice.
Surely you wonder, how does having a second style sheet for mobile's help?
And the HTML is simple.
You denote the two style sheets with the keyword media, one for the media type handheld, one for the media type screen.
Think about the differences.
In text mode, a desktop usually has 80 columns by 24 lines.
Maybe a mobile screen has 20 columns there?
The orientation is typically different also, the mobile typically being with photographers call portrait,
while the screen is what photographers call landscape.
The LCDs on mobile certainly don't support millions of colors,
and a few hundred pixels across, as opposed to a desktop having usually 800 or 1024 pixels across.
So you get into a situation where what looks good on the big screen looks bad in the small screen and vice versa.
Paragraph after paragraph of text looks dull on the big screen,
and really calls for navigation bars, side bars, two, sometimes three column presentations.
On the other hand, the small screen just isn't big enough to handle multi column support,
and this is usually rendered by placing columns on top of each other on the small screen.
If one of those columns is a navigation bar with many links,
your mobile user could end up waiting through dozens of links to get to the information he needs.
Style sheets to the rescue.
I'm not going to make this into a how-to on website building,
but I need to give some examples to give you a clear idea of how this helps.
In the HTML, you can define classes of elements,
so you can have a sidebar, and images in the HTML in different resolutions,
and even maybe a special shorted kinder nav bar for mobiles.
Then, in the style sheets, you can turn different classes of elements on or off.
Thus, for the mobile, the sidebar is suppressed.
While on the desktop version, the mobile navigation is suppressed.
Suppressed are big images for the mobile.
Suppressed are small images for the desktop.
One HTML, but each type of browser gets tailored content.
Let's start wrapping it up.
Handling malformed HTML.
Code bloat for this function is really that 50%.
That means that half the code in Firefox is there to handle non-standard HTML.
What makes this fact interesting is that the micro-browser on many mobiles
simply can't store a big browser program.
To reconsider the size constraints of the micro-browser,
if the screen is too small to handle multiple columns,
why have the code to render them in the micro-browser?
Putting the many old web pages out there,
and non-standard HTML, leads to a need to make a differentiation
into the DTD statement for declaring document types.
An old web page won't have this,
so a desktop browser will go into what is known as the quirks mode
to handle all the non-standard things that can go wrong.
If a mobile tries to access these,
there is some kind of front end for the mobile company that converts the page
to something the mobile can't handle,
but there are no guarantees about how it comes out.
When it comes to different document types,
you can often hear terms such as transitional and strict.
Transitional includes all the old tags that need to be dropped
while strict adheres to the modern standard.
You may also hear of HTML versus XHTML.
XHTML is the marriage of HTML and XML,
but is more well defined.
Most professional web page designers are working in XHTML these days,
but HTML is fine too.
The last term when it comes to HTML flavors,
I need to mention is XHTML Basic.
XHTML Basic is a minimalist version of XHTML,
made for mobiles.
Basically, many of the things to handle columns and frames are not in it.
That and its tight definition cause you to need a much smaller browser.
At the time of writing this presentation,
Firefox has partial support for mobile forms of HTML
while Opera promises complete support for viewing mobile-only web pages on the desktop.
But remember, the idea is to have one web page that renders right for different browsers.
So to finish our conclusion, I come here not to give your tutorial on modern HTML,
but rather to explain why you may want to learn it,
which involves getting your stuff out to a much wider audience.
You now have the theory.
But to get the feel for it, I want to leave you with one tidbit,
a website to check out.
www.csszengarden.com is a website that has one HTML and many CSS.
There you can click through many designs of the same page,
thus seeing how powerful this separation between style and content can be.
And please don't think that my example of mobile-verse desktop is the end goal of web pages.
The future holds exciting web page authoring methods for different devices
to access the worldwide web.
There are CSS standards being developed to address specific accessibility needs,
such as audio-only browsers for the visually impaired into web user.
The thing to walk away with is this.
Street compliance checked out with validation tools such as tidy
or the free HTML validation service at w3.org.
It's the best way you have a future proofing any web pages you maintain,
as well as opening your web page up to future technologies down the road.
Okay, let's have a new segment here on Talk Geek to Me.
Open Source News.
Well, I'm sure you've had many podcasts that have featured open source news.
But I recently found out that there is a continent where there's hundreds of emerging economies
and for purposes of economic reasons, as well as not having the data held hostage by companies and foreign countries.
They all use free and open source software.
That's right, I'm talking about our neighbors to the south of us in Latin America.
So I ran out, I heard about this, I ran out, and I found a news page,
and I thought I'd read a few stories about what's happening in open source in Latin America for you.
So this is an experiment.
We'll see if everyone likes it and if I like it and if you like it and see where it goes.
April 25, 2009, access to telecommunications declared a human right by Alba.
Alba, the Bolivian alternative for the Americas,
is an organization designed to foster cooperation amongst Latin-American countries
and currently includes Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Cuba, Honduras, and Dominica as Latin's member states.
In response to the controversial organization of American states,
which is viewed by many in Latin America as a way for the United States to apply economic and political pressure against countries in the region,
Alba has released a statement which strongly condemns the recent OAS summit and pronounces their worldview.
In their statement, which covers a broad range of issues, Alba calls for universal access to telecommunications, phone internet, etc. as a human right.
In a world which increasingly relies on network communications, quote,
basic education, health, water, energy, and telecommunications services should be declared human rights and cannot be subject to private deal or marketed by the World Trade Organization.
These services are and should be essentially public utilities of universal access, unquote.
This ideal has driven many of the policies of Latin America countries inside and outside of Alba, including Brazil.
April 24. Flicel, 2009, hundreds of cities in 18 Latin American countries, two host install fests.
Flicel, the Latin American festivals of installation of free software, are install fest organized by the regional free software community since 2005.
The event is the largest distributed free software event in the world.
Last year, there were install fest in more than 200 cities in 18 countries in Latin America.
The goal of the event is to promote the use of free software so the general public can know its philosophy, install GNU Linux on their computers, learn about the applications and understand how they are developed by volunteer communities.
Every install fests is free of charge in every location and they also include lectures, presentations, and workshops.
April 21, 2009, cheveses gift causes book written in 1971 to skyrocket to top of Amazon bestseller list.
Open Veins of Latin America, a book originally written in 1971 by your great journalist Eduardo Galliano, with a revised edition released in 1997, was given to President Obama by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez during the summit of the Americas this past weekend and, as a result, has shot to the top of Amazon's bestseller list.
Yesterday, it incredibly went all the way to the number two spot on Amazon's list.
At the time of this writing, the book is now number seven on the bestseller list.
Before President Chavez gave the book to Obama, it was the 54,295th most popular book on Amazon.
While this news is a little off topic for this website, we thought it was interesting enough to share.
That concludes our new experimental segment of Latin American Free Software News.
My space user DeepGeek, who I've mentioned as having sent the print requests to in the last episode, writes,
I follow your podcasts for some time, feel free to promote them with my moniker as well.
I've been DeepGeek, note the lack of space since 1993. It's a CS thing.
Well, I got to make a little programming joke out of this. I'm glad we're humans and we can amically work out this handle licensing arrangement.
If we were computers, we'd have to write a whole bunch of code to handle nicknamed collisions.
Anthony writes, Good job on making the site mobile ready. I am listening to one of your podcasts now on my blackberry.
One thought would be not to alienate Windows users. I use Linux and Windows and it seems you have a vendetta against Windows.
The perfect environment is a diverse environment. Windows and Linux running side by side in perfect harmony.
I run Windows Server 2008 and a Suicy Enterprise Shop. I love Linux and Windows. They are both great.
I was very concerned when I got that one because I know I'm a little biased but vendetta.
Well, so I wrote back and said, Which episode? And he said, Linux at work was the podcast.
And I couldn't listen too long because my girl made me turn off a blackberry as we're taking a trip to Tennessee.
Well, I wrote back and pointed out that Linux at work was an episode, not by me, but by our friend in Belgium, Nightwise.
And I said, Watch out, Hacker Public Radio has many, many authors to which he said, OK, I'll have to be more careful with my listening.
Darren writes, Great Podcast. Talk geek to me. I will keep listening to future shows. Fantastic.
Thank you, Darren. Jessica writes, Deep Geek will be making some time to listen to your podcast soon.
Just want to drop by and say hi to my new friend, Myspace. Jessica, thank you so much. I think you might be lady listener number two from what I can tell.
Ken Fallon writes, Hi, DG. I'm really enjoying the shows.
Like I listened to your first show several times, largely because my kids kept mugging me. A very interesting topic. Keep them coming. Ken Fallon.
Ken, thank you so much. It's great to have you listening.
Lost in Bronx writes, I listened to a couple of your old HPRs yesterday. They are quite good and yet I must say you've come a long way.
You seem to have settled on a combination of scripted and unscripted material during the current shows and it works well. Take care. Thank you again.
Thank you, Lost in Bronx. I appreciate that so much. I think having scripted and you know these impromptu addresses to your listener feedback.
Is the best solution for my needs. Jim Z. Jim Z is a person who doesn't want to listen. However, he likes to read the scripts on my website.
And he has sent me kindly links on the web hosting episode. Jim Z. I will be adding those to the web page shortly on that particular episode.
A little press for time right now, but I will get to that. Jim is a member of the crew at the deli by breakfast in every morning.
So it's good to have face-to-face contact with at least somebody who's taking in the material.
And last in, this one's probably the best one of the batch. I need a little sip for this one.
Hmm. Plexi writes, hey, deep geek. You called me Enigma's boyfriend on your show instead of girlfriend. I just wanted to point out that I'm a hundred percent woman, both by birth and socialization, and Enigma is a hundred percent straight.
Hmm. Just giving you a hard time. I know you meant to say this sentence the other way around. I really like your second episode. Keep up the good work.
Plexi, I am so embarrassed, but I did say I'm better with scripted material. Of course, anyone who's met you and Enigma at a hacker convention would not make that mistake, and it's just a slip of the tongue. I'm so sorry, please accept my apology.
And that concludes the listener feedback portion of the show.
All right, that's just about wraps up this episode of Talk Geek to me. Today's closing music is from zero.com.
Many people know that my taste in tech podcast owes a lot to stank the ex-binary revolution radio. So I thought I'd go back to another artist who did the music theme song for that zero.
Zerl's a rapper. He's at zero.com. It's creative comments license. This is from the class war album. It's called No more war. Now, I gotta tell you, this stuff is Zerl's very radical and not safe for work,
may contain swear words, may contain various blasphemies, and politically incorrect things. So if you have a sense of constitution, you might want to push that skip button at the right moment.
But I have a pretty good constitution when it comes to what I listen to. So I enjoy it. So for those of you who can enjoy it too, I hope you enjoy it also. Thanks for listening. I'll see you at the next Talk Geek to me. Bye-bye.
No more war. Stop there killing. Fallen star. Justice willing. No more dead. No more bloodshed. No more bombs. No more class. No more top or bottom.
Getting too tired to be mad. I'm feeling my rage slipping to sand. Plastic people. Everybody got that screw face song.
Fucking cats. You're hanging Chad. Talking not how they're blah, blah, blah. I have no patience for you and your materialistic nature. You'll leave nothing behind. Your life's been wasted. What's money for your baby in a fucked world where everybody shady?
You don't have shit just face it. What you got but the cream. What you got when robbing you is everybody's dream. I have every tower living. Fuck millionaires, rock stars. Diamond isn't fancy cars.
Trap in the world with stakes and mice. I saw above it's a crow's life. Vegetarian living. Eat that tofu that me sow those green leafy vegetables and brown rice.
No more war. Stop there killing. Fallen star. Justice willing. No more dead. No more bloodshed. No more bomb. No more class. No more top or bottom. No more war. Nothing killing. Fallen star. Justice willing.
No time for play. Live for today. Portrayed like maniacs, liars and thieves. Impact. Feel that pain. We greed. System deceived. Rate like a prostitute. We poor like she. Never believed. This greed. This seed of need embedded in my soul. We gotta fight this. I don't want to be a rock star. My mission is righteousness. What you living for? Make yourself happy and fuck the world. To make that money.
You go to school and you're playing with cunning. We need a better place. No more killing. No more waste. No more running. No more getting chased. Raise the pace. Mighty women. Where you been? Where my comrades at? Bucks and fists. Are you out? Are you in? You're gonna stay or are you gonna pretend?
You ain't sinning. You know you're losing. Cause your show ain't winning. Cause your show ain't winning. No more war. Stop the killing. Fallen star. Justice willing. No more dead. No more bloodshed. No more bombs. No more class. No more top or bottom. No more war. Stop the killing. Fallen star. Justice willing. No more dead. No more bloodshed. No more bombs. No more class.
Fucking thieves. You stole my hope away. Yeah I got beef and it's steeped in misery. You motherfuckers gonna pay. Hating this bait that's been dangled in our face.
Steel what you want cause we create. We give you fist for taste. Graceless. Divide the world up in the race of spaces. Never had no childhood. Whether it was poverty.
Having no food or money or this revolution handed to me. At the age of three. Tales of lynching and John Henry. We were bread revolutionaries. Born with a clinch fist. Calls of revolution. Transitions of madness.
We got solutions. International and a solid program wipes away delusions. It's time to call it fragmented left. Who's left? What's next? Trust the old or build a new? By the masses we're protected. Defined dialectics. Work a never fail. Snake eats tail. Snake eats tail.
Snake eats tail. No more war. Stop the killing. Falling a star. Justice willing. No more dead. No more bloodshed. No more bombs. No more class. No more top of bottom. No more war. Stop the killing. Mall and star. Justice willing. No more dead. No more bloodshed. No more bombs. No more top of bottom. No more class. No more top of bottom.
No more war. Stop the killing. Falling a star. Justice willing. No more dead. No more bloodshed. No more bombs. No more class. No more top of bottom.
Today we're going to talk to Carl who is a subversive multimedia artist. He host cyberpunk radio, mental escher and hack btv as well as heading the plurry media group and the microcasting alliance.
Let's back up a little bit for the listeners who don't know what cyberpunk is. What are we going to a little bit of a background of what cyberpunk is and what it means to you?
Cyberpunk to me basically is the ghetto side of technology in the sense of a neuro-mancer and obviously that's where that term I think most people would think it comes from.
Just that you know punk is obviously someone who's counter culture or counter society or whatever and cyber is to me just anything electronic and of course going into bio electronics and transhumanist and all that stuff but you're not in the elite part.
You're down in the the bottles of it the mechanics of it kind of the street level of it and that's really what cyberpunk radio is and some people say cyberpunk is like it's just it doesn't exist.
It's an 80s thing but for me it's it's the cyber and the punk and that that's a timeless quality and so cyberpunk radio tries to reflect that a little bit in its attitude but its message is a lot to do with pushing alternative media.
Out there and actually one of the episodes that I really like is the incestuous amplification one where it's just a long mash of just how media really can brainwash you and amplifying a message within a certain click in that click like conservative liberal or independence or whatever they think that everybody's hearing the same message but really they're only hearing it.
And so cyberpunk is part of that but it's got the kind of the edgy ethos along with it so as you can probably tell us it encompasses lots of different things and cyberpunk is really just more of the tone of the podcast.
Thank you for listening to H.P.R. sponsored by Carol.net so head on over to C.A.R.O.N.C. for all of her team.
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