Good chuckle

Because I was one of the editors of the HTML 4 specification my name and former email address are in the related HTML4 DTD files.

The DTD files are the files containing the formal definition of the HTML language used for web pages. As such they often are referenced from web pages and, although it’s normally completely transparent to users, occasionally people ran into one of these files. When they see my name in there some of them assume I have something to do with the page they are dealing with.

Usually, the consequences are rather mundane. The most common case is when they are facing some technical difficulty and they just send me (and my co-editors) an email asking for help. I’m used to that and these messages don’t surprise me anymore.

On the other hand, I was not prepared for the one I recently received. Below is the top portion of it.

From: Nancy ****

To: ‘RITA’; ‘sales@ ****’; ‘lehors@w3.org’

Cc: ‘robert@ ****’; ‘dsr@w3.org’; ‘ij@w3.org’

Subject: RE: status call this morning

Dave Raggett, Arnaud Le Hors, Ian Jacobs , RITA, ROBERT,

ATTACHED IS A COPY OF MY BANK STATEMENT PROVING THAT I PAID FOR THE MIRROR 38917***.VIA PAYPAL . I STILL HAVE NOT RECEVED IT AND IT HAS SINCE BEEN 7 MONTHS. BELOW IS E-MAILS REGARDING THE MIRROR I PAID FOR.
IS THERE NOT ONE HONEST PERSON AMONGT ALL OF YOU? HOW IS THAT YOU STEAL FROM PEOPLE AND NOT HAVE A CONSCIENCE? I WILL KEEP REPORTING THIS INFORMATION UNTIL I GET SOME SATIFACTION.

Out of sympathy for “Nancy” and respect for the company this involved -which may very well be at fault but I’m not here to judge – I anonymized it a bit. Amazingly enough Nancy took the time to hide the balance amount from her attached bank statement but not her account number, address, etc.

This definitely beats every email I have ever received related to my involvement in HTML. 🙂

CDF and interoperability

Andy Updegrove published an enlightening piece on why the recent claims from the founders of the OpenDocument Foundation regarding the W3C Compound Document Format (CDF) have been puzzling many of us. I just want to add a tidbit of information regarding CDF which is in line with my previous post on XML vs Open.

CDF is just another piece of technology that helps raising the level of interoperability achievable between software components exchanging XML data. It provides us with a formal way of describing how various XML vocabularies are being used together. This is definitely useful and that’s why IBM, for one, has been participating in its development. Yet, this is no magic bullet either.

CDF is merely a framework, a container. As such, CDF itself does not ensure interoperability. Interoperability can only be achieved with regard to a specific “CDF profile”. A CDF profile lists a specific set of XML vocabularies and how they are to be mixed. Interoperability is only achieved between applications that support the same CDF profile(s).

This is applications that not only support CDF but also support every one of the XML vocabularies being used in that particular profile as well as the particular way they are being used together (CDF supports various combination models).

I’m sure you’ve had the same experience as I have with video files you can open but your media player won’t play because it doesn’t have the right codec. That’s the exact same problem. The MPEG video format is a container that lets the player discover what video compression is used in a standard way. This is nice but, as experience shows, it doesn’t guarantee that your player will be able to render all videos, merely that it can figure out what’s in the file and whether it can render it or not.

So, again, let’s be careful not to jump to conclusions too fast. Just like XML itself and many other technologies, CDF is useful but it does not in and of itself guarantee interoperability.