In Pursuit of Mysteries

Painful Web Standard Decision from IE

January 22nd, 2008 | Comments | Posted in Mozilla, Technology

6430 people have read this post.

I feel like I should have titled this, “Painful Web Standards Decision from IE (surprise!)”, but that would be snarky, right?

The Internet Explorer team has detailed their implementation of the switch between different rendering standards over on the IEBlog. Previously, as seen in IE7 and IE6, Internet Explorer had two rendering modes, “Quirks” mode and “Standards” mode. As Chris Wilson states in the blog post, they will be changing this to the following modes:

“Quirks mode” remains the same, and compatible with current content.

“Standards mode” remains the same as IE7, and compatible with current content.

If you (the page developer) really want the best standards support IE8 can give, you can get it by inserting a simple element.

The way to trigger standards mode was with a well-formed DOCTYPE declaration, like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN” http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/DTD/strict.dtd”>

There is a wikipedia entry on this and an article on A List Apart on DOCTYPE as well (or you can read here) if you’ve managed to be blissfully unaware of this.

The meta element is detailed in a post on A List Apart, which goes into all of this in great detail. (I’m not sure why A List Apart is effectively the mouthpiece for announcing this for Microsoft though.) This new meta element looks like:

So, the net result is that there is an IE6 mode that is backwards compatible to pre-IE6, which is “quirks” mode and the the existing “standards” mode, which is now suddenly IE7’s rendering mode, and a new IE8 mode.

To be blunt, in my opinion, this is pretty !#@$!! stupid.

Now, I understand the idea that Chris Wilson has suggested in the past about versioning HTML and letting browsers know what kind of HTML with which a website says it is compatible. I’m somewhat sympathetic to the mantra of “Don’t Break the Web.” Unfortunately, this seems more like, as a comment on a blog mentioned, “Don’t Fix the Web.” What this sets up is that even when IE6 is finally dead and not simply resting (like a parrot), we’ll be stuck with sites declaring, “Hey, I’m coded for IE7!” by their use of standards mode, but only when rendered in IE. Suddenly, standards mode is not really about standards in any sense at all for IE (leaving aside previous criticisms) and IE diverges even farther from the rest of us. For the rest of us, like Firefox, this standards mode will be our latest and greatest, not some locked in the bowels of time older version of our browser.

I see no reason to expect that anyone else will implement this meta tag. Why would anyone bother? It isn’t part of any spec and it doesn’t help anyone but the IE team. The way it helps them is by allowing them to force compliance with older versions of their product. I’m sure that when IE9 comes out, the tag will have ‘content=”IE=9″‘ in it.

Forget it. If there is a quirks mode and a standards mode, fine, but there should only be these two, existing, modes, not an endless plethora of them until the end of time, constantly muddying the waters for everyone (including web developers working on IE). I also think that standards mode should be the default, not the other way around, but I may be in the minority there. The IE team making standards mode really be “IE7 mode” within IE is just damning and something that people don’t seem to be really thinking about in the comments I’ve seen.

If this is really a good decision, then the IE team should convince everyone in the HTML working group to add it to the new HTML5 standard. As an aside, I should mention that a draft of the HTML5 standard went live today, along with a document detailing differences from HTML4.

We, all of us concerned with the web outside of Microsoft, want people to update their sites to current specifications, whether of HTML or CSS, or what-have-you. The web is an evolving environment. We should not be encouraging people, in my opinion, to write sites like it is 1999 still, or even like it is 2006, when newer standards come out. Where will we and the web be in five or ten years if we do not encourage people to move forward?

This new mode, and the change to standards mode within IE, just enables IE to continue to hold back the improvement of the web. If this is implemented, I can only hope that web developers get so pissed off about it that they refuse to be co-opted this way by Microsoft. Without public outcry by people, there is very little chance that the IE team will reconsider shipping this.

Update: There is a well nuanced post on Just Browsing about this as well.

Prison Dharma

January 21st, 2008 | Comments | Posted in Buddhism, Society, Spirituality

1595 people have read this post.

In many ways, Buddhism seems to be a natural path for institutionalized prisoners who make the decision to grow spiritually while incarcerated. With training and some instruction on a regular basis, most inmates should have the time and space for a meditation practice (or other forms of contemplation).

When I volunteered to work with Wiccan inmates at a Washington state prison in the past, almost all of the inmates had chosen their path after they were incarcerated. I expect that this is true for most followers of non-mainstream (which, in America, means non-Christian or Jewish) faiths. I haven’t seen figures to really back this but this is what my Colbertian gut tells me.

The environment in a prison is, frankly, horrid. I doubt anyone reading this would be surprised to learn that. The reality of what I saw, at a medium security facility, was both better and worse than what the media portrays, which is often a vision of maximum security prisons. That said, spending time in a prison was probably the greatest motivator that I’ve ever seen to not want to be incarcerated. This harsh prison environment has a corrosive effect on people in a variety of ways. The loss of control of anything to do with one’s self and of basic human dignity is toxic to people, who seem to respond in a variety of ways. That being case, this very harshness may also act as a motivator to practice and deal with one’s life, at least on a mental level. An inmate has nothing but time on their hands, often many years of it.

The biggest barrier to prison practice that I can see is a lack of training and resources. Inmates, by and large, do not come from the most educated end of society (though there are really obvious exceptions) and lack exposure to spirituality oftentimes except in the most basic of ways. Those that find an urge to develop spiritually may have come to this on their own or, if they are lucky, through exposure to some sort of practice group in prison. Some may have access to a library with a decent range of books (but this is pretty unlikely in many instances). If someone does have an urge to study Buddhism, he or she is not going to know where to start. There really does need to be both a supportive sangha, both inside and outside of a facility, to help people and to reinforce their path. Along with this, inmates need access to both training, in the form of a teacher, and materials to study. For most practicing spiritual groups in a prison, an outside person may only come in once a month or, at most, once a week. The rest of the time, the prisoners are on their own. In many facilities, they cannot even meet as a group without an outside facilitator present. This was the case of the group of people that I worked with years ago in a Wiccan context. This weights things in the favor of Christianity in most institutions since, if they have a chaplain present, the chaplain will almost always be a Christian. Additionally, chaplains have great discretion in what happens with spiritual organizations in a facility (almost dictatorial powers, in fact) and, all too often, are sometimes hostile to non-Christian faiths.

This means that inmates can often only meet if an outsider is present and, otherwise, they must practice alone or, if they are lucky enough to have a cellmate or compatriot in the same part of a facility, in a very small group. This makes it all the more important that inmates are given the tools necessary to practice when unsupervised or alone and the support on the occasions when someone does come in from outside. During the times outside of group meetings, study is possible but materials must be made available. Generally, these must be sponsored by an individual or group outside of a facility and can only be brought into a prison with the approval of the chaplain and other authorities (for obvious reasons, material flowing into and out of a prison is pretty controlled).

Since becoming an active Buddhist, I have no participated in prison work but it is something that I often think about doing. I can honestly say that I think about it with some uneasiness at times because the circumstances (and sometimes the system and individuals) can be so difficult and emotionally challenging. That being said, it is work that is necessary, especially in the United States where we incarcerate so much of our population.

I know of a number of Buddhist prison programs that stand out:

The Prison Dharma Network
The Transformative Justice program of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. (Zen)
The National Buddhist Prison Sangha of Zen Mountain Monastery (Zen)
The Prison Outreach Program of Upaya Institute and Zen Center (Zen)
The Engaged Zen Foundation (whose entire work is prison focused) (Zen)
The Shambhala Prison Community (Shambhala)
The Prison program of Chagdud Gonpa Amrita (Tibetan Buddhism) in my home town of Seattle - This is small in size but I’ve heard about it for a while now.
Vipassana Meditation Courses from the teachings of S.N. Goenka (Theravadan)
The Mind Body Awareness Project - This organization focuses on youths and teaches both meditation and yoga techniques.

The Prison Dharma Network has published the wonderful book, Sitting Inside, on Dharma practice in prisons.

As you can see, most of these programs in the United States are run by Zen groups. I’m not sure why this is except that Zen is fairly well established and is focused on a relatively specific sort of meditation practice (as is Vipassana meditation as taught by S.N. Goenka and his followers).

There has actually been a bit of media focus on Vipassana in prisons. There was a video made in the mid-90s about the introduction of Vipassana meditation into an Indian prison called, Doing Time, Doing Vipassana. You can actually watch this online (and I’ve embedded the first section below).

There was actually a movie made about a Vipassana meditation retreat done within an American prison in the South with maximum security prisoners. This movie is The Dhamma Brothers. You can read an article in the New York Times about it and see the trailer embedded below as well.

I hope that reading this post encourages fellow Buddhists to think about prisoners, working with prisoners, and the potential role of the Dharma in prisons.