Those of you who pay attention to such things may have noticed that this weblog is syndicated in three different formats: RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom 0.3. Those of you who don’t pay attention to such things may very well have no idea what I am talking about; if you want to know more about what syndication is, and why you might find it useful, you can find a gentle introduction to Atom syndication–and links to tools and services that use it–at AtomEnabled.org, and a gentle introduction to RSS syndication–and links to tools and services that use it–at What Is RSS?. Mark Pilgrim sums it up like this: Smart bookmarks that tell you when your favorite sites change. There’s actually a lot more to it than that–as Mark knows, and points out–but that’s far and away the most popular end-user application for syndication at the moment.)

The reason, in any case, that I am bringing this up at all is in order to let you know that I’m deprecating the RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds for Geekery Today. Why? Well, there are a variety of reasons. Some of them are purely selfish, having to do with slow performance from MovableType due to the number of indexes it has to update whenever I add or update an entry. But there are good reasons to deprecate RSS quite apart from my own provincial concerns. One of the main ones is that RSS is a big, fat mess, and tools that are based on it face a huge interoperability nightmare in trying to deal with its maddening array of quirks. Atom is also better designed and better suited for use in weblogs. Thus, the RSS feeds are deprecated; if you use them, you’d be much better off switching to the Atom 0.3 feed at your earliest convenience.

Since I am deprecating the RSS feeds rather than discontinuing them, you’ll still be able to use same old URIs that you have in the past. However, I will be dropping the visible links to RSS feeds from the website, and–somewhat more importantly–RSS feeds will no longer be instantaneously updated to reflect new posts. They will be updated eventually; I’ve set up an automated script to rebuild the RSS 1.0 feed once a day, and the RSS 2.0 feed once every other day. I settled on this solution because I didn’t want to tax the server too much, and I figure that RSS 2.0 is about twice as much of a mess as RSS 1.0. The Atom 0.3 feed is still updated instantaneously, so if you want the up-to-the-minute news (and if you want to support open standards and non-lame technology) that will be the best one for you to use.

Another matter of little importance concerns the format in which Geekery Today is written and revised. XHTML is a great output language for documents on the web, but I hate writing in it. Fortunately, there are lots of humane text markup formats for the web; one of the best is John Gruber’s Markdown. I’m now using Markdown, which through a brilliant bit of Web voodoo can plug directly into MovableType, to write more or less all the content on Rad Geek People’s Daily. That doesn’t mean very much to you, since the Markdown is translated into XHTML before you ever see it. But it does have an interesting side effect: you can now use Markdown syntax to comments you post in the Talk Back section, which provides simple, intuitive ways to create *emphasis* (= emphasis), **strong emphasis** (= strong emphasis), [inline links](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#link) (= inline links), block quotes, ordered lists, unordered lists, and more. (If you know how to write an e-mail, you already know most of what you need to know about Markdown.)

Like all things in this fallen world, the system is not altogether flawless: Markdown is technically designed to be used along with inline XHTML, but you can’t use XHTML in the comments section. (If you try it, I’ve set MovableType to strip the tags out.) Still, nearly anything you could conceivably need to format a comment is available. Also, a couple of unfortunate side effects have fallen out of the way that MovableType formats comment text: (1) if you insert a URI in the text of a comment, it is no longer automatically linked–I had to disable this to keep MovableType from screwing up Markdown link formatting; (2) you can’t use the convenient angle-bracket Markdown <http://www.uri.com> syntax for linking to a URI either, because MovableType mistakes that for an XHTML tag and strips it out. That doesn’t mean that you can’t link anything from your comments; it just means that to do it you’ll have to use one of the explicit link syntaxes to do it.

(If you have a weird urge to experiment with Markdown syntax right now, you can try out the Markdown Dingus.)

–The Management

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

— George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946

(recommended in an excellent post by Billmon)

According to Salon, some Democratic Party media flacks are wringing their hands over ads from MoveOn, the Media Fund, and others. The fear? No centralized command-and-control. Thus, they worry, Liberal group ads may muddy Kerry message:

Liberal interest groups are running television ads meant to hurt President Bush and, in effect, help Democratic rival John Kerry. But some media strategists say such efforts could backfire by muddying Kerry’s message of the moment with the electorate.

Interest groups can’t legally coordinate advertising with political campaigns. That means their ads could address different issues than Kerry’s commercials, be nastier than his advisers prefer, clutter the airwaves, stray from obvious themes — the economy and national security — or politicize issues Kerry would rather leave alone.

[N.B.: issues Kerry would rather leave alone is short for the war —Ed.]

If I were Kerry’s folks, I’d be up nights worrying about this, said Bill Carrick, a veteran Democratic media consultant.

Personally, if I were Kerry’s folks, I’d be up nights worrying about the logically prior question: doesn’t Kerry need to have a message before anyone could count as muddying it?

Besides doing the good deed of using his web space at Austro-Athenian Empire to support the GoogleBombing for objective, sane information in searches for Jew, Roderick Long also reports a facet of the site that shan’t be linked which I hadn’t noticed before. Not only is it a raving anti-Semitic conspiracy site, but it also lists the following devilries as Jewish Mind Control: anarchism, unionism, civil rights, and homosexuality. (Feminism is not explicitly listed here, but it is described elsewhere as a cultural concoction of the ADL (!)–which I guess amounts to reproach beyond any possible appeal in Nazi Bizarro World.) So by supporting the GoogleBombing you are not only striking a blow against anti-Semitism; you’re also striking a blow against its kith and kin–patriarchy, homophobia, racism, statism, and the oppression of workers.

So fie on fascism, and here’s to Jewish Mind Control!

Let’s say you pass a blind person walking down a busy sidewalk, tapping a cane in front of her. Now let’s say that someone sneaks up on her and sticks out a leg to trip her up, putting it between the cane and her legs so that it will not be detected before the unfortunate victim has fallen face-first onto a concrete sidewalk. Let’s say that you ask the assailant why the hell she indulged in such a senseless act of cruelty, and her baffled reply is, Jesus! I was just playing a practical joke. I didn’t realize that people walking down the sidewalk might not be able to see!

Unfortunately, this is not very different from how many Web designers treat the blind on a regular basis. Sites are frequently designed without any thought at all for how people who don’t have normal sight might be able to access them. I’m not saying this to be preachy; bad, inaccessible web design is a sin I’ve certainly been guilty of in the past, and one that I have to make a conscious effort to overcome. It’s not easy just to sit down and produce a website that will be accessible to people with radically different ways of browsing the web. But even when the right thing to do is hard, it’s still the right thing to do, and accessibility is something that we should all seriously think about, and act on, starting right now.

Most of the sins against accessibility on the web, though, are sins of omission; people fail to make use of web design features (such as proper semantic markup or alt text for <img> tags) that make things easier on the blind. There are, however, those who do worse than that: who indulge in sins of commission by breaking standard web features and actively making their sites unpleasant, or simply impossible to use, for people who don’t have normal sight. Sometimes they do this by implementing important sections of their website with glitzy and completely inaccessible technologies like Flash. And sometimes they do it because they think they have legitimate business reasons for trodding all over basic Web standards.

As much as I love Google, it looks like they have decided to put themselves in that latter camp with their proposed free e-mail service. Google, apparently, is worried that people might reverse-engineer their webmail interface and use it in unauthorized ways; in order to get around this they have apparently decided to override basic web conventions (such as, you know, using <a href="..."> for links) and implement the interface through scripting hacks. Mark Pilgrim discusses the astonishing number of usability landmines in his demolition-review of the Gmail interface:

Gmail is the least web-like web application I have ever seen. It requires both Javascript and cookies in order to load at all. It uses frames in such a way that prevents bookmarking and breaks the back button, and frames can not be loaded in isolation because every frame relies on scripts defined in other frames. The entire application appears to have been designed to thwart reverse engineering (of the YahooPops and Hotmail Popper variety).

Furthermore, the most innovative feature of Gmail—the global keyboard shortcuts—appears to have been designed by vi users (j moves down, k moves up, and we are expected to memorize multi-key sequences for navigation). Yet by using fake links everywhere, Gmail throws away the most basic web feature, breaks useful browser-level innovations like Mozilla’s “Find as you type”, and breaks third-party products like JAWS and WindowEyes. So the target market for Gmail appears to be vi users who use Internet Explorer, and have a working pair of eyes.

In short, the only way to use Gmail is the way that the Gmail designers use Gmail. The only way Gmail could be less accessible is if the entire site were built in Flash.

Lots of people have raised privacy concerns about Gmail (see, for example, CultureCat’s remarks on Gmail and the recent Slashdot thread); I think these concerns are understandable, and worth raising, but more than a little overblown. I’ll have more to say on that in coming days, but for now I want to say that this ought to be considered a complete show-stopper. There is no excuse for interfaces that discriminate against the blind like Gmail’s planned interface does. No-one with a conscience could allow their company to go forward with a service like this. I can only hope that Sergey Brin and his compatriots will prove that they have one–by thoroughly rethinking what they are doing, and fixing their interface so that it does not needlessly make life harder for the visually disabled.

For further reading:

• Rad Geek People’s Daily accessibility statement
• An excellent resource on accessible design is Mark Pilgrim‘s web book, Dive Into Accessibility: 30 days to a more accessible website.