USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20010717.1450 (On Screen): There are web designers who have something of a control fetish, often to the point of believing that they should be able to control what is seen to the level of a pixel. I've even seen web pages which use special commands to control the size of the browser window and to prevent it from being resized by the user. And as we've recently seen, there is a much larger body of control freaks who are willing to grant some semblance of local control but still want to keep most of it (so they'll graciously permit you to resize your window but not to choose the font size or which actual font gets used, let along anything more important).

One of the earliest gargoyles to haunt these people was the ill-fated "Third Voice", which went OOB last year (being one of many, many ill-conceived .COMs with a cool concept but no business plan). While it operated, the screams went up of "They're EDITING my page and CHANGING it." No, not exactly. What Third Voice did was permit you to install a plugin in your browser, and if you did so, then whenever you loaded a page your browser would then consult Third Voice's server to see if anyone had added any stickies to that page. If so then your browser also loaded those stickies and permitted you to see them. And you could add your own stickies. And since none of this had anything whatever to do with your initial connection to the original server, there was nothing that could be done about it by the control freaks (which is why they were so incensed about it). But Third Voice is dead, and the control freaks heaved a sigh of relief.

Not so fast, bucko! W3C has now implemented the Third Voice as a distributed system, with all code being open source. No mere ill-conceived-business-model can slay it; from now on it will be progressively more widespread. And if I understand this properly, then the way it will be implemented is on a subscription model. Instead of getting all or nothing, you'll choose specific sources that you think are worth listening to, and then you'll see their additions without being inundated with irrelevant advertising or inarticulate profanity.

Which means that soon, perhaps within a year, you might be able to subscribe to the Winerlog RDF stream (presumably hosted on a non-Userland server) and see commentary on top of Scripting News. (discuss)