Recycled Knowledge

Well, it seems I've made Slashdot, quite unintentionally. The article there references an eWeek article about how I proposed that the Open Source Initiative approve two Microsoft licenses, the Microsoft Permissive License and the Microsoft Community License. Here's a FAQ:

1. Why is this story news in August 2006? Ya got me. Groklaw reported on it back in December 2005, when it was in fact news.
2. Do you speak for Slashdot, eWeek, Microsoft, the OSI, Groklaw, or any of your past or present employers? No, only for myself.
3. Is what the eWeek story says about you true? Yes, except that I no longer volunteer for ccil.org; I did some work for them in the past.
4. Why did you propose the licenses for OSI approval? Because I believe they meet the elements of the Open Source Definition.
5. Are the licenses basically similar to other OSI-approved licenses? Yes.
6. Then why ask OSI to approve them? Because I want to encourage Microsoft to release software under an OSI-approved license, even if they feel it necessary to use their own license
7. Microsoft release anything under an Open Source license? Surely you jest. No, actually. Microsoft released WiX under the Common Public License, an OSI-approved license. And there have been other such releases.
8. Why did you withdraw the request for OSI approval? For a number of reasons, it's awkward for OSI to approve licenses that are not proposed by the author of the license. The OSI wants to keep all approved licenses on its site, and may not have copyright permission to do so. Furthermore, if the OSI wants to request changes, only the author can make them.
9. Does that mean you have changed your mind about the licenses? No, only about the suitability of OSI approving them.
10. Are you a shill/astroturfer for Microsoft? No.
11. What's your view on open-source software? I use a lot of it and have released my own code and other stuff under several different open-source licenses.
12. What do you want to do with your fifteen minutes of fame? Wait for it to pass.
13. Can I leave a comment? Yes. However, as Le Guin says, I can take a little inaccuracy or a little accusation, but the combination is poison. I reserve the right to remove comments I think are poisonous.

I've added a slide presentation/rant on RELAX NG to my home page.

"But this is terrible!" cried Frodo. "Far worse than the worst that I imagined from your hints and warnings. O Gandalf, best of friends, what am I to do? For now I am really afraid. What am I to do? What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!"

"Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need."

--J.R.R. Tolkien

This is a villanelle, a very special verse form that I have taken some liberties with. I had always wanted to write one, but I never could come up with a couplet strong enough to support all the required repetitions. It finally dawned on me that the couplet didn't have to be original with me, if I was clever enough about it.

Even if you don't click on all the links, be sure to mouse over them: they provide a first-level commentary on the poem.

"Go and tell the Spartans, passerby,"
   The man of Keos sings in lines that soar,
"That here, obedient to their laws, we lie."

The king of Lakedaimon will not fly,
   Though "Kill them all!" the hordes of Persia roar:
Go and tell the Spartans, passerby.

The news is carried of their terse goodbye
   From Hot Gates to far Atlantic shore
That there, obedient to their laws, they lie.

The law of nations ready to defy,
   Atlan tis rising plots aggressive war --
Go and tell the Persians, passerby.

The Arch on smiles, and smiles: real men don't cry.
   His friends sell not reality but lore
As here, obedient to his will, they lie.

Boxed in flags, the dead all verse deny.
   They cannot serve their country any more.
"Go and tell our people, passerby,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie."

Jonathan Swift in the "Drapier's Letters" back in 1724, writing on what is now called distributed denial of service:

It is true, indeed, that, within the memory of man, the parliaments of England have sometimes assumed the power of binding this kingdom [Ireland] by laws enacted there; wherein they were at first openly opposed (as far as truth, reason, and justice are capable of opposing) by the famous Mr. Molyneux, an English gentleman born here, as well as by several of the greatest patriots and best whigs in England; but the love and torrent of power prevailed.

Indeed the arguments on both sides were invincible. For, in reason, all government without the consent of the governed, is the very definition of slavery: but, in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly subdue one single man in his shirt. But I have done; for those who have used power to cramp liberty, have gone so far as to resent even the liberty of complaining: although a man upon the rack was never known to be refused the liberty of roaring as loud as he thought fit.

Historical note: it was on this precedent that the American colonies founded their claim not to be governed by the English Parliament; they gave evidence of their refusal by dumping taxable tea into Boston Harbor.

First, go read Tim Bray's post. What follows will make no sense without it. (I originally sent it as an email to Tim.)

Hey, wonderful! I'm all for it.

It got me to thinking about symbolism for the Federation. How 'bout we use the Maple Leaf Flag, but with the red bars changed to blue? This would keep the "red, white, and blue" symbolism important to Unitedstatesians, but the outline would be that of Canada's flag.

Then we could use America the Beautiful as the national anthem (far better than either official anthem both in lyrics and melody, in my opinion). I think verses 1, 2, 7, and 4 of the final 1913 version, in that order, are the keepers, and the blue bars in the new flag would resonate with "from sea to shining sea".

Politically, the Federation keeps a prime-ministerial system with an elected but ceremonial head of state, like all sensible democratic countries. We'd have 16 states, 10 provinces, 2 commonwealths (Massachusetts and Pennsylvania), 3 territories, and one free city (Washington City). We'd also of course have New York City, the financial capital of the planet Earth.

As for the Republic wanting access to the Pacific, let them buy a border province or two from Mexico. "How many Texans does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" "Texans don't screw in lightbulbs; they go to Mexico."

On a more serious note, this map is interesting. Back in 1981, a Washington Post writer named Joel Garreau (of Quebecker descent) wrote a fascinating book called The Nine Nations of North America, showing how the continent naturally fell into nine distinct regions (with a few outliers like Manhattan, D.C., and Hawai'i). There's a main web site where the whole book is available online; it's back in print, too.

This post does not represent the views of my employer or anyone else but me.

Using secure transmission channels involves two main issues: content security and end-to-end authentication. Consider the case of someone who provides news to a variety of paying customers. Does it make sense to use something stronger than just ordinary FTP or HTTP with usernames and passwords sent in the clear? Maybe not. Communications security isn't free, after all; it costs the provider for certificates, bandwidth, and computer cycles, and it costs the client likewise, plus the extra programming effort if the news is to be automatically processed.

The information in news is essentially all public knowledge: its value resides in its timeliness and reliability. Typical customers for news pay by an annual contract, not per download, so they have nothing to lose if the content is stolen by some third party. Does the news provider? Probably not, unless the theft happens on a truly massive scale. Occasional freeloaders are simply no big deal.

As for reverse authentication (is the customer getting its news from the real news provider?), a successful DNS spoof would be far more effectively employed against some e-business site that actually passes around credit card details or the like. News just isn't in that category.

Finally, why would anyone pay to get news in the first place that is available on many websites for free? For one thing, news changes, by definition; this tends to improve the stickiness of sites that display it; when users return to the site, they will find that things have changed at least somewhat. For another, the client may believe that the news provider's credibility (a non-credible news provider doesn't last long) will rub off on him.

Lots of people lately have been denouncing Powerpoint presentations, a term I am here using generically for slides full of bullet-point text. If you want to make or view such presentations, use OpenOffice.org, and if you have numbers to show, use proper graphs instead of textual representations.

But I want to talk about a different point. When you look at a Powerpoint, you find that quite frequently you can't understand it without the talk that went with it; it's just a collection of phrases with no indication of what they might refer to. But I've been told by several people that the four technical presentations on my website are quite intelligible from the slides alone even without my actual talk.

I have a theory about why this might be so. The bullet points on my slides are headlines, whereas the points in this wonderful parody of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (via Language Log) are simply captions. The difference is that a headline is a complete sentences, possibly with a few omitted words, whereas a caption is just a noun phrase.

Newspapers have been around for a long time, but headlines are just over a century old: the Hearst papers pretty much invented them as part of hyping the Spanish-American War. Before that, in the Civil War, for example, war news was typically headed "The War" or some equally nondescript caption. It wasn't until early in the 20th century that the principle "The headline tells the story" was fully adopted.

Headlinese, at least English-language headlinese, isn't quite grammatically equivalent to ordinary English. Articles are often left out, and so is the copula is: headlines have to fit into a confined space across the column. It's always straightforward, though, to supply the missing words in order to reconstruct the original. When it isn't, you get the broken headlines that appear on the lower left corner of the Columbia Journalism Review home page.

One entirely modern newspaper headline did appear as long ago as 1781, however, announcing the outcome of the battle of Yorktown, the last major battle of the American Revolution. Two words told the story: CORNWALLIS TAKEN!

People tend to be skeptical that the 17 * 65536 = 1,114,112 character codes provided by Unicode will be big enough. After all, we have moved from 8-bit to 64-bit computers, both in word size and in address size; in general, most finite limits have been repeatedly shown to be insufficient. The maximum normal memory on MS-DOS-based PCs was 640K, ten times as big as the 64K limit on the 8-bit systems that preceded them: after all, as Bill Gates supposedly said back in 1981, 640K of memory ought to be enough for anybody!

In fact, though, there just aren't any huge and complicated writing systems hiding in some remote ravine. We have a pretty good map of all the writing systems on the planet; a few may have been overlooked by accident, but none of them are going to be huge. The biggest remaining ones are Egyptian hieroglyphics and ancient Chinese characters, and neither of them will require anything like a million character codes.

There are other ceilings in computing that aren't likely to be broken through either. Consider the number of different assembly-language op codes. Does anyone foresee computer chips with 65,536 different opcodes? How about 4,294,967,296 distinct opcodes? I don't think so.

Or consider IP version 6 network addresses. There are 2¹²⁸ = 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 of them. They won't be assigned densely, according to current plans, but they could be, and that would be enough IP addresses to have a few billion addresses for every soil bacterium in every square centimeter of soil on the planet. Does anybody really believe we are going to "break through" that?

Really. The GNU GPL violates the Debian Tentacles of Evil test, because it is a bare license, and (with proper notice) a licensor can revoke a bare license at any time. At most the people already relying on the license may be able to use the legally tricky doctrine of promissory estoppel to go on relying on it. Everyone else is SOL.

In a post on WS-* last year, Tim Bray used the phrase "Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition", saying:

The idea is, they Oppose the Government but are Loyal in that they promise not to lead a mob with pitchforks to string them up; and they stand ready to provide an alternative.

Historically, the Opposition was the Loyal opposition not because it was against overthrowing the monarchy, but because in George III's day there were the "King's friends" and then there were the others, who most certainly did not want to be thought of as the "King's enemies". The term "Loyal Opposition" served to deflect the antagonism of the Crown to those who did not support its policies, whatever they happened to be. Later, when the Crown became a captive of whoever won the elections, the sense of the term shifted a bit.

But hang in there loyally opposing. Those who take pleasure in common sense and sound design support you.

Anything that is actually implemented and deployed is by definition legacy. Googling for "legacy Java code" (exact phrase) today produced 444 hits, "legacy Java" by itself almost 30,000, and even "legacy XML" 619.

As usual, Frederick Brooks called it correctly thirty years ago in The Mythical Man-Month, chapter 1

[T]he product over which one has labored so long appears to be obsolete upon (or before) completion. Already colleagues and competitors are in hot pursuit of new and better ideas. Already the displacement of one's thought-child is not only conceived, but scheduled. [...] As soon as one freezes a design, it becomes obsolete in terms of its concepts.

Of course, he also says, with understatement that is less than usual in our profession:

The new and better product is generally not available when one completes his own: it is only talked about [...]. The real tiger is never a match for the paper one, unless actual use is wanted. Then the virtues of reality have a satisfaction all their own.

The words of Galgacus the Briton, as reported (and in fact invented, according to the practice of ancient historians) by Tacitus in his Histories:

Whenever I consider the origin of this war and the necessities of our position, I have a sure confidence that this day, and this union of yours, will be the beginning of freedom to the whole of Britain. To all of us slavery is a thing unknown; there are no lands beyond us, and even the sea is not safe, menaced as we are by a Roman fleet. And thus in war and battle, in which the brave find glory, even the coward will find safety.

Former contests, in which, with varying fortune, the Romans were resisted, still left in us a last hope of succour, inasmuch as being the most renowned nation of Britain, dwelling in the very heart of the country, and out of sight of the shores of the conquered, we could keep even our eyes unpolluted by the contagion of slavery. To us who dwell on the uttermost confines of the earth and of freedom, this remote sanctuary of Britain's glory has up to this time been a defence.

Now, however, the furthest limits of Britain are thrown open, and the unknown always passes for the marvellous.But there are no tribes beyond us, nothing indeed but waves and rocks, and the yet more terrible Romans, from whose oppression escape is vainly sought by obedience and submission. Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace.

The Britons (what today we call the Welsh) lost, of course, first to the Romans, then to the Anglicized Normans who ruled England (and mostly still do).

There was a man named Henry George
Of land monop'ly quite the scourge.
Wealth, said he, is what we make
For profit or consumption's sake:
Stone axe, print book, or Jedi saber,
We make them with Capital, Land, and Labor.

The natural world, you understand,
Is what economists mean by "Land";
Including sea and sky and soil,
And iron, forests, coal, and oil.
"Capital"'s wealth used for production;
On "Labor" we need no instruction.
The return on Labor we call "Wages"
(All this is written on many pages,
Paper and Web; I can barely tap it all);
"Interest" is what's paid to Capital.
And those who by some accident
Own Land, we pay them what's called "Rent".

This maxim Henry carved in stone:
Ourselves, ourselves are what we own.
The products of our mind and hand
Are at no other man's command.
But what is not of our own making
Is anyone's at all for taking,
Provided (this point is due to Locke)
They leave enough so as not to block
Others from taking Land as good
That still is free, it's understood.

If this is so, then why endure
So many who are so very poor?
Simple: we've decided to pay
All Rent to those who (as we say)
By hook or crook have gotten hold
By being there first and being bold.

Then they, or their heirs, get to collect
(Waking or sleeping) what they expect
The traffic will bear. The rest of us
Must pay what they ask, without any fuss,
Or else go scratch -- for without Land
There is no scope for mind or hand.
The amount of Land is fixed, you know,
Higher prices won't make it grow.
(The self-same law we can construe
Of those who own ideas too.)

Why should the rest of us pay Rents
To their current recipients?
Their title's not one we should endorse,
It is commonly based on force.
Instead, community Rent collection
(The so-called "Single Tax") based on inspection
And assessment, would be just
And pay for services that we must
Have, like national defense,
Safe water, protection of innocence.

What's this to do with XML?
Quite a bit. You see, Ideas as well
As Land belong to all mankind.
If we technologists allow the blind
And greedy to enclose this space,
A commons of the human race,
We and our children will be paying
Forevermore (it goes without saying)
To Concept-owners, past all praying.

So by this maxim be impressed:
Use the tools that work the best.
Do not yield your sovereign judgement,
To any sort of political fudgement.
The criterion of sound design
Should be, must be, your guideline.
And if you're designing documents,
Try RNG. We charge no rents.

As a resident of New York City, I think it worth pointing out that many homeless people are quite suspicious of gifts of unwrapped food, as there are sickos out there who try to hand out food that they have contaminated with something that will make the homeless person sick (ipecac and laxatives seem to be popular).

In my opinion, the better approach, if you want to give a homeless person food, is to offer to take them into a deli (they are all over the place here) and have them order a sandwich for which you pay. In addition to eliminating the above issue, and making sure that your money actually goes toward food and not something else, this also allows the person the dignity of choosing their own food.

Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing.
     —Ursula K. LeGuin, Steering the Craft

From Roughing It , Mark Twain's 1872 fictionalized account of his life out West. The applicability of this is up to you.

The Admiral seldom read newspapers; and when he did he never believed anything they said. He read nothing, and believed in nothing, but "The Old Guard," a secession periodical published in New York. He carried a dozen copies of it with him, always, and referred to them for all required information. If it was not there, he supplied it himself, out of a bountiful fancy, inventing history, names, dates, and every thing else necessary to make his point good in an argument. Consequently he was a formidable antagonist in a dispute.

Whenever he swung clear of the record and began to create history, the enemy was helpless and had to surrender. Indeed, the enemy could not keep from betraying some little spark of indignation at his manufactured history — and when it came to indignation, that was the Admiral's very "best hold." He was always ready for a political argument, and if nobody started one he would do it himself. With his third retort his temper would begin to rise, and within five minutes he would be blowing a gale, and within fifteen his smoking-room audience would be utterly stormed away and the old man left solitary and alone, banging the table with his fist, kicking the chairs, and roaring a hurricane of profanity. It got so, after a while, that whenever the Admiral approached, with politics in his eye, the passengers would drop out with quiet accord, afraid to meet him; and he would camp on a deserted field.

But he found his match at last, and before a full company. At one time or another, everybody had entered the lists against him and been routed, except the quiet passenger Williams. He had never been able to get an expression of opinion out of him on politics. But now, just as the Admiral drew near the door and the company were about to slip out, Williams said:

"Admiral, are you certain about that circumstance concerning the clergymen you mentioned the other day?" — referring to a piece of the Admiral's manufactured history.

Every one was amazed at the man's rashness. The idea of deliberately inviting annihilation was a thing incomprehensible. The retreat came to a halt; then everybody sat down again wondering, to await the upshot of it. The Admiral himself was as surprised as any one. He paused in the door, with his red handkerchief half raised to his sweating face, and contemplated the daring reptile in the corner.

"Certain of it? Am I certain of it? Do you think I've been lying about it? What do you take me for? Anybody that don't know that circumstance, don't know anything; a child ought to know it. Read up your history! Read it up ―, and don't come asking a man if he's certain about a bit of ABC stuff that the very southern [epithet]s know all about."

Here the Admiral's fires began to wax hot, the atmosphere thickened, the coming earthquake rumbled, he began to thunder and lighten. Within three minutes his volcano was in full irruption and he was discharging flames and ashes of indignation, belching black volumes of foul history aloft, and vomiting red-hot torrents of profanity from his crater. Meantime Williams sat silent, and apparently deeply and earnestly interested in what the old man was saying. By and by, when the lull came, he said in the most deferential way, and with the gratified air of a man who has had a mystery cleared up which had been puzzling him uncomfortably:

"Now I understand it. I always thought I knew that piece of history well enough, but was still afraid to trust it, because there was not that convincing particularity about it that one likes to have in history; but when you mentioned every name, the other day, and every date, and every little circumstance, in their just order and sequence, I said to myself, this sounds something like — this is history — this is putting it in a shape that gives a man confidence; and I said to myself afterward, I will just ask the Admiral if he is perfectly certain about the details, and if he is I will come out and thank him for clearing this matter up for me. And that is what I want to do now — for until you set that matter right it was nothing but just a confusion in my mind, without head or tail to it."

Nobody ever saw the Admiral look so mollified before, and so pleased. Nobody had ever received his bogus history as gospel before; its genuineness had always been called in question either by words or looks; but here was a man that not only swallowed it all down, but was grateful for the dose. He was taken a back; he hardly knew what to say; even his profanity failed him. Now, Williams continued, modestly and earnestly:

"But Admiral, in saying that this was the first stone thrown, and that this precipitated the war, you have overlooked a circumstance which you are perfectly familiar with, but which has escaped your memory. Now I grant you that what you have stated is correct in every detail — to wit: that on the 16th of October, 1860, two Massachusetts clergymen, named Waite and Granger, went in disguise to the house of John Moody, in Rockport, at dead of night, and dragged forth two southern women and their two little children, and after tarring and feathering them conveyed them to Boston and burned them alive in the State House square; and I also grant your proposition that this deed is what led to the secession of South Carolina on the 20th of December following. Very well."

Here the company were pleasantly surprised to hear Williams proceed to come back at the Admiral with his own invincible weapon — clean, pure, manufactured history, without a word of truth in it.

"Very well, I say. But Admiral, why overlook the Willis and Morgan case in South Carolina? You are too well informed a man not to know all about that circumstance. Your arguments and your conversations have shown you to be intimately conversant with every detail of this national quarrel. You develop matters of history every day that show plainly that you are no smatterer in it, content to nibble about the surface, but a man who has searched the depths and possessed yourself of everything that has a bearing upon the great question. Therefore, let me just recall to your mind that Willis and Morgan case — though I see by your face that the whole thing is already passing through your memory at this moment.

"On the 12th of August, 1860, two months before the Waite and Granger affair, two South Carolina clergymen, named John H. Morgan and Winthrop L. Willis, one a Methodist and the other an Old School Baptist, disguised themselves, and went at midnight to the house of a planter named Thompson — Archibald F. Thompson, Vice President under Thomas Jefferson, — and took thence, at midnight, his widowed aunt, (a Northern woman,) and her adopted child, an orphan — named Mortimer Highie, afflicted with epilepsy and suffering at the time from white swelling on one of his legs, and compelled to walk on crutches in consequence; and the two ministers, in spite of the pleadings of the victims, dragged them to the bush, tarred and feathered them, and afterward burned them at the stake in the city of Charleston. You remember perfectly well what a stir it made; you remember perfectly well that even the Charleston Courier stigmatized the act as being unpleasant, of questionable propriety, and scarcely justifiable, and likewise that it would not be matter of surprise if retaliation ensued. And you remember also, that this thing was the cause of the Massachusetts outrage. Who, indeed, were the two Massachusetts ministers? and who were the two Southern women they burned?

"I do not need to remind you, Admiral, with your intimate knowledge of history, that Waite was the nephew of the woman burned in Charleston; that Granger was her cousin in the second degree, and that the woman they burned in Boston was the wife of John H. Morgan, and the still loved but divorced wife of Winthrop L. Willis. Now, Admiral, it is only fair that you should acknowledge that the first provocation came from the Southern preachers and that the Northern ones were justified in retaliating. In your arguments you never yet have shown the least disposition to withhold a just verdict or be in anywise unfair, when authoritative history condemned your position, and therefore I have no hesitation in asking you to take the original blame from the Massachusetts ministers, in this matter, and transfer it to the South Carolina clergymen where it justly belongs."

The Admiral was conquered. This sweet spoken creature who swallowed his fraudulent history as if it were the bread of life; basked in his furious blasphemy as if it were generous sunshine; found only calm, even-handed justice in his rampart partisanship; and flooded him with invented history so sugarcoated with flattery and deference that there was no rejecting it, was "too many" for him. He stammered some awkward, profane sentences about the ― Willis and Morgan business having escaped his memory, but that he "remembered it now," and then, under pretence of giving Fan [his dog —JC] some medicine for an imaginary cough, drew out of the battle and went away, a vanquished man.

Then cheers and laughter went up, and Williams, the ship's benefactor was a hero. The news went about the vessel, champagne was ordered, and enthusiastic reception instituted in the smoking room, and everybody flocked thither to shake hands with the conqueror. The wheelman said afterward, that the Admiral stood up behind the pilot house and "ripped and cursed all to himself" till he loosened the smokestack guys and becalmed the mainsail.

See also "The Person Sitting in Darkness", a 1901 account of U.S. imperialism.

When you buy a book, you have the right to read the book silently or out loud (but not to an audience), you can act on the information it gives you, you can study it to see how it is written in the hope of writing a better book yourself, you can even write a different book based on the same facts expressed differently, and scurvily give the author no credit whatever. You may write and publish a review praising or condemning the book in almost unlimited terms.

On a less intellectual plane, you may set the book on fire, or use it to insulate your basement or to check erosion in a gully. You may give or sell it to anyone you please, or leave it around in public (absent littering laws) for the delectation of the next person to pick it up. You may lend it to your friends or the public, though you may have problems if you take money for this.

All of this applies equally to movies, sound recordings, sculptures, magazines, computer programs, and any other copyrightable works. For computer programs, you also have the (U.S.) statutory right to make copies reasonably necessary for the use of the program or for backup.

Copyright gives the author five and only five rights:

• to control the making of copies
• to control the making of derivative works
• to control the distributing of copies and derivative works
• to control the public performance of the work
• to control the public display of the work

(There may also be "moral rights" that depend on the country.)

Let's keep it that way.

As the chief cook and former chief bottle-washer (my daughter has replaced me at that function) in my house, I love Le Guin's term for drudge-work: "the art of making order where people live". We are now paying someone once a week to do the physical order part, since Gale's not physically up to it any more (back troubles), but she still does all the organization and strawbossing.

I long ago devised the following classification of males into four grades:

• Grade 1: Will not do housework, period.
• Grade 2: Still will not do housework: feels guilty over it.
• Grade 3: Does anything you (fem.) ask, more or less cheerfully.
• Grade 4: Sees what needs to be done and does it.

Most men are still 1s or 2s, I am a 3 to a 4, depending on what's going on.

Posted to the XML Core Working Group mailing list before XML 1.1 became a W3C Recommendation:

There are two kinds of people who didn't want to make XML 1.1 require normalization checking: the Lazy Document Generators and the Lazy Parser Programmers.

Lazy Document Generators want to be able to spew their random Unicode cruft straight into XML documents without worrying about what semantics it might have, and recreate said cruft at the receiver exactly as sent. The fact that the document might contain one million consecutive COMBINING CIRCUMFLEX ACCENTs bothers them not in the least. It's someone else's problem.

Lazy Parser Programmers don't want to bother to put together the necessary few lines of code, according to a well-documented algorithm, to check that documents do not contain gratuitous decompositions like LATIN SMALL LETTER A followed by COMBINING CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT, when obviously LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX is what everyone has in their Latin-1 fonts and keyboards, and so is likely to expect. What do they care if their users go blind poring over hex dumps of their documents, trying to figure out where the discrepancy comes from? It's someone else's problem.

LDGs don't want it to be the case that "it is an error" (not necessarily detected) for a document to violate normalization. LPPs don't want to require parsers to check normalization at user option, since then they have to write the code even if it is not used much of the time. The Core WG will have to decide whether to p*ss off one group, both, or neither.

Of course, there are also XML 1.0 Forever types, who sit on xml-dev and chant "No Change! No Change!". X1Fs demand to be paid only in paper money.

The upshot was that XML 1.1 parsers SHOULD check for normalization but don't have to.