Adam Bosworth’s Weblog

This latest article in the BBC highlights why I no longer vote Republican since the Republican Party has become the creature of irrational know nothings who, if we had always listened to their ilk, would have us all still living in caves without fire. It is sad because I’m not a big believer in big government and government’s innate ability to solve problems (compare Walmart to the Federal Government in Katrina) nor in government’s good judgement or common sense and it would be nice to have a choice. But right now the Republican party is catering to a group that no one who believes in the canons of western civilization should countenance.

I finally posted an entry that I’ve been sitting on for 3 months. I should have posted it 3 months ago.

It has been a long time since I posted. I find that most of what I want to post these days would rile a fair number of people and then Google would get the blame even though these are my personal opinions, so I chose to keep my thoughts to myself. The last thing I want to do is hurt a company that has been very good to me and fun to work at. However, I gave a public speech at the latest Salesforce conference where 3,000 of the faithful were there to celebrate and chat about ideas. Salesforce recorded it and kindly let me link to it so here it is and my thanks to Marc Benioff for letting me give it and generally being a good friend.

As usual these days, let me preface this post by reminding people that I’m speaking for me, not for Google, in this post. As some of the readers of this blog know, I’ve been a die-hard Blackberry user for a very long time (I actually talked to a TV station about how cool Blackberry was in early 2001). I strongly suggested to Nokia that they could learn from the Blackberry in 2002/3. I’ll never switch. Until last week that is. I bought a SideKick to use for my month off (August) and became an instant addict. First of all, it is fun! The graphics are engaging, the camera works well enough for trivial shots and then it is totally easy to email the shots to someone or make them the default picture for a contact meaning that if that contact calls you, the picture shows up on your screen. The IM to both AOL and Yahoo work really well and they let you change your status easily. It is amazing to be walking down the street and using IM with your friends. The SMS is really well built in as is the email so you can see from the main screen if you have new SMS or mail messages from people as well as if your friends are logged onto IM. The tasks UI is so intuitive that my daughter is instantly becoming organized. The phone is so cleverly managed that you can call call people you usually talk to without ever using the keyboad and like a cell phone it has a green phone icon on the spinner to connect and a red one to hang up. The browser is the best browser I’ve seen on a mobile device. It is well organized. It is reasonably fast. Multitasking is a breeze. There is a key on the lowerleft called the jumpkey which will instantly bring you from any app to anyother without stopping the call you’re making or the mail you’re writing or the chat session or the page you’re browsing. You can completely customize the rings when people call you to play the music appropriate to each one and the sound is OK. This is the social version of the Blackberry. It is the Blackberry for the rest of us (well it would be if the price went down a bit). All the keys you really need for email addresses are separate non-shift keys at the bottom of the keyboard! It is the Mac of mobile devices. I gave one to my daughter for her graduation and she loves it.

To you guys who built the Sidekick II, first thanks and kudos. I love this machine.

Secondly some suggestions. I should be able to use pictures anywhere meaning what if I receive one in email, I can add it to my gallery and I can send them over IM and I can set my status profile in IM to show them and make them a background to the main screen. Alt and the spinner for editing text within text needs to be more clearly explained since fixing typos is a common need. Blackberry’s editing has two features you really need, holding a key down should shift it, not repeat it, and the spinner should go through the international versions of it. Also two spaces should put a period after the prior word. You need to beef up your spell correction. “youl” ought to become you’ll without me having to tell the machine. When looking at long pages or messages, “t” should take me to the top and “b” to the bottom. There should be some trivial way to add entries to the address book over email. These days, storage space is really cheap. I have 1gb on my Canon camera for $80. Let me do this here and store ALL my mail and a lot more photos and some MP3’s please. 100 mail messages isn’t enough. Build a decent calculator for school kids with sin and cos and so on. This can be the killer phone for the IM generation. And again, take advantage of pictures. Let me put the pictures people mail me into my gallery and, with 2 clicks add to a person or to my IM status or as the background for the home screen or send to someone over IM. Give me a replaceable battery and a way to charge from Firewire or USB.

I’ve been sitting on this post for 3 months because I didn’t want to hurt Google. But Google has given me permission to post this, and in any case, it speaks for me and not Google.

Unlike many of my peers in the computer industry, I was a history major in college and have loved and read history ever since. I studied, in particular, the progressive era in history, an era when the industrial revolution evolved from the grim satanic mills of England into the modern industrial world. But the understanding I always had was that none of this would or could have been possible without the renaisaance and without the slow but sure rise of secular humanism and the spirit of scientific and intellectual inquiry that started at that time. After the fall of the Roman empire, in many ways the lights went out and, in the 14th century particularly, life in Europe hit a new low stroke the the terrible plague, the start of the mini ice age, and the wars between France and England. In the 15th century we saw the Spanish inquisition and the reconquista, but really, it was the last gasp of intolerant religious fanaticism and the spirit of inquiry and discovery from art to music to science was everywhere. The lights had been turned back on. As a child, growing up in New York City, I took for granted that mankind had learned these lessons. I assumed that mankind understood that freedom to think, to reason, and to experiment were paramount and that any irrational intolerant irrational beliefs that threatened these freedoms or, even worse, abused or injured people in the name of some mystical or fanatic cause were horrific reminders of the past.

I fear now for my children growing up into a world where the leaders turn their backs on the spirit of reason and inquiry. Where the new cardinals of the church deny evolution not on any grounds of empirical reason or evidence, but rather like children having a temper tantrum because they want it not to be so. Where the leaders of this country try to take Terry Shiavo’s husband to court not because of any evidence, but because they are angry to have been proven wrong by science. Where cowardly murderers kill innocent men, women, and children and claim to do it in the name of a religion, meaning something that no one can possibly argue with from a rational point of view. Where the education board of Kansas makes the state a mockery by demanding that irrationality be held to be as valid as science. Where 1.2 billion people consider it acceptable for some man with a vision to utter a Fatwa ordering some person killed simply because he doesn’t like what the other person chooses to believe in or even just disapproves of his line of inquiry. Where political correctness means that if some lines of inquiry are pursued, others feel free to harass and abuse and even threaten the people trying to find out the facts. Where people believe that they have the right to tell others what to believe, what to wear, what to eat, what to say, and what to think.

I fear because today, so many seem to fear to speak out. So many seem to fear to say that any “faith” which presumes to dictate to others not because there is some clear fair process that led to the dictates (laws voted on by people whose individual rights are protected by a constitution) or because they are clearly preventing bodily harm to others (preventing rape, robbery, murder, or abuse), but rather simply because people of that faith believe that they have the “right” to dictate to others is wrong. Those who believe otherwise are trying to drag us back to the 14th century because they fear and hate a world in which the facts trump irrational belief and where, therefore, inquiry may always show that their “obvious truths” are just obsolete shiboleths.

It is wrong. The belief that some imam has that he has the right to snuff out someone’s life through a Fatwa because of their apostasy or heresy is wrong. The belief that terrorists have that they have the right to kill and maim and burn innocent people because they are angry at injustice is wrong. The belief that some governments have that they have the right to kill and wound their own citizens when they protest peaceably is wrong. The belief that some Catholic prelates have that they can dictate what people believe about science is wrong.

It is all akin to letting a child’s tantrum dictate the judgement of an adult. It promotes irrationality over reason and faith over facts. The reason that homicidal madmen are so frightening is that one cannot reason with them. No more can one reason with the people who rule on the school boards in Kansas, the people who bomb innocent people in buildings and subways, the people who shoot their own citizens for protesting, or the prelates who presume to tells others how to live rather than simply choosing that way for themselves and hoping it acts as an example for others.

It is time to speak up. It is time to say that facts are what matter, not faith, that human progress is accomplished through unfettered use of reason and inquiry and tolerance and discussion and debate, not through intolerant and irrational acts of terror or edicts. For all of our children and for the future, speak up against this wave of intolerance and irrationalism washing over the world.

Several people have commented on my most recent post arguing that what is really required is more fundamental than Ajax and needs to be XML based. Despite having been part of XML pretty much since the beginning (late 96) I have a very pragmatic point of view about this. Engineers should use the best tool for the job. For example, sometimes the best way to send data from the server to a running page isn’t XML. It is a Javascript fragment that when “eval’ed” on the client turns into a set of js arrays or values which can then be used within the page. This can be faster and easier to program. If so, why not use it? More generally, I actually agree that Ajax is somewhat transitional, as I hinted at the end of my last post. It makes pages richer and more interactive which is a good thing when appropriate (again the right tool for the job), but it doesn’t solve the issue of creating content for mobile devices or many other issues. That being said, this idea that XML is the “answer” arouses my skepticism. I think it can be a useful tool and it can be a religious mistake. For example, in the early days, Xpaths weren’t expressed as they are now, e.g. as expressions. Instead they were expressed as big chunks of XML, a sort of XML infix parse tree for the expression. It was awful and we fixed it. Similarly, XML turns out to be a very cumbersome way to encode procedural logic compared to, say, script. What is really useful about XML is that the parsing/tokenization comes for free and that it can represent a very rich set of data models and it is relatively self-describing and that, at this point, it is standard. So when the problem calls for a tool which requires sharing data between applications or encoding state of an application (e.g. the new Office announcements from Microsoft) it seems reasonable. But when describing the procedural logic within an application or even the expressions, in my experience, it usually is not.

One clear limitation of XML is that there isn’t an easy way to update it. If you already have some XML and want to alter it in some way, there is simply no standard right now for doing this and the DOM code is usally both hideous to write and relatively fragile since there are no guaranteed ID’s on elements or checksums. Another obvious limitation is moving binary data about. One of the XML founders tells a hair-raising story of a company telling him how they plan to move video around by encoding it and including it in the XML itself. Because of all this, I’ve recently been spending a lot more time working with ATOM and RSS 2.0. These are XML, but they are more. They have the idea of sets which means that one can understand how to insert or replace items and ATOM has a protocol for this. It also means that some very low tech ways can be described to get subsets out of them. They support the idea of LastUpdated and ID so that replacing an item within the document can make sense. And they have explicit and very sensible ways to point to binary data which describes where it is, what type it is, and how big it is and then leaves it to the client to use normal ways to subsequently fetch in this data.

Anyway, I don’t mean to argue to strongly with the thoughtful comments on the previous post, but to caution that this is all engineering, not religion, and pragmatism should rule.

I’ve been thinking about why Ajax is taking off these days and creating great excitement when, at the time we originally built it in 1997 (DHTML) and 1997 (the XML over HTTP control) it had almost no take up. In 1997 I spent a month just chatting with customers about DHTML and what they liked/disliked. In general, they were not fans. They saw the web as a two edged sword. One the one hand it offered instant and universal access to all their customers which was an opportunity they couldn’t afford to resist. On the other hand, they were terrified by the support costs of having millions or tens of millions of customers using their software. Accordingly, they wanted applications (aka web sites) that were as simple to figure out how to use as possible. Unlike productivity applications which Microsoft at least flatters itself that its customers use everyday, these were applications (web sites) which might be used only once or at most once a week (except for the brief insanity of day-trading). There is a trade-off between ease of learning and richness of UI. Toolbar icons and right clicks and drag/drop and so on are often great accelerators, but they aren’t necessarily obvious. Filling in fields and clicking on URL’s usually are. The customers, worrying about support for their customers, were emphatically not in favor of rich internet applications. They wanted reach, not rich. So why has this changed? I think that there are three reasons.

First, the applications that are taking off today in Ajax aren’t customer support applications per se. They are more personal applications like mail or maps or schedules which often are used daily. Also people are a lot more familiar with the web and so slowly extending the idiom for things like expand/collapse is a lot less threatening than it was then. Google Maps for example uses panning to move around the map and people seem to love it.

Secondly, the physics didn’t work in 1997. A lot of Ajax applications have a lot of script (often 10 or 20,000 lines) and without broadband, the download of this can be extremely painful. With broadband and standard tricks for compressing the script, it is a breeze. Even if you could download this much script in 1997, it ran too slowly. Javascript wasn’t fast enough to respond in real time to user actions let alone to fetch some related data over HTTP. But Moore’s law has come to its rescue and what was sluggish in 1997 is often lightning quick today.

Finally, in 1997 or even in 1999 there wasn’t a practical way to write these applications to run on all browsers. Today, with work, this is doable. It would be nice if the same code ran identically on Firefox, IE, Opera, and Safari, and in fact, even when it does, it doesn’t run optimally on all of them requiring some custom coding for each one. This isn’t ideal, but it is manageable.

My son (Alex Bosworth) posted a popular post a week ago on the pitfalls of Ajax applications but he left out some of the features still missing from Ajax applications:

First, printing is still hard. The browser has never grown up to enable the page author to easily describe an alternate layout for printing which is a shame. Why isn’t there an “HTML” for printing which can describe rotation, freeze column or row headers, and so on?

Secondly, the browser isn’t a good listener to external events. If you want to build an application, for example, to show you instantly when someone bids or a price changes, it is hard. You can poll, but poll too frequently and the application starts to feel sluggish and it isn’t easy to do this. What you really want is an event driven model where in addition to the events like typing the page can describe events like an XMPP message or a VOIP request or a data-changed post for an ATOM feed.

Third, if you want the application to run offline, you are essentially out of luck. I’ve written about this at length before in this blog and don’t need to repeat what is required in detail. To summarize what I said earlier, a local cache, a smart template model, and a synchronization protocol are required to build applications that run equally well connected and disconnected and the way that the Blackberry works is a role model for all of us here.

In fact, I’ve written about all these outages before (see Evolution in Action), but in the context of the current excitement around Ajax, it seems reasonable to describe not only what is different and making it work, but what is still missing. Obviously, these things are fixable from a technical point of view. This isn’t rocket science. But if only one browser fixes them, it is unlikely to help at this point. We have a sort of deadly embrace. It is hard to predict how this will play out. History has shown that when innovation is stifled, sooner or later some one runs around it who has nothing to lose and changes the rules of the game completely. I’m confident that this will happen here as well. But I honestly don’t know when.

What I predict will drive this change is the advent of truly mobile computing on mobile devices. This is going to force the game to change. It is way too expensive to build solutions for mobile on J2ME and often too poor a customer experience when they are built using WAP (except for super simple things). I think that we’re going to rethink browsing around a model which has pub/sub, events, and caching built in and which doesn’t have the problems with re-layout. More on this in a subsequent post.

Warning to the techies. This is really a family entry. I’ve been in Rome with my family on holiday for the last week. As someone whose children are now doing more interesting things than I am (a natural cause of being on the edge of turning 50 I think) time with my family is increasingly important. Rome is a surpassingly lovely city. One of the advantages of holidays is time to think about things other than work and this trip we’ve been primarily thinking about how beautifully made things were, how astonishing the art is. Everywhere you turn there are beautiful palaces, squares, houses, churches, fountains, and statues. Even the statues on the bridges here are magnificent. My daughter just wrote some poems about this on her blog which I, as a proud father, think are spectacular. Feel free to comment as she likes comments.

My son and I have actually stopped our normal give and take on RSS and open source (his blog) and hacking and DRM and instead been talking about baroque versus classic, Gianlorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini and Michaelangelo Buonarroti and how amazing it is that they could sustain the energy and vision to complete the Basilica de San Pietro over a 120 year period, ten generations or more. It makes the sustained 1-2 year efforts we sometimes put into software seem so insignificant and the the fact that we sometimes don’t put enough effort into making it really beautiful even more criminal. I return with rededicated desire and hope to work on things that last, that matter, and that are as well designed for humans as they can be.