I recently finished reading Race For The South Pole by Roland Huntford. Prior to reading the book I knew little of polar exploration, and was only vaguely aware of the Captain Scott legend via its permeation of British popular culture. I knew roughly that Scott had lead a failed antarctic expedition of some sort, and in particular that one member of the team, Captain Oates, had apparently given his life in an attempt to save his fellows; leaving the tent with the famous words “I am just going outside, and may be some time”, an act which was held up both as an example of noble sacrifice and, occasionally, for ridicule.

Beyond these fragments however, I knew little, and didn’t much care. Tales of arctic exploration and cold-weather derring-do have never really appealed to me. I think because of the horrific physical affects that seem to be part and parcel of them. As a child I remember seeing horrible photos of frostbitten limbs and noses, whose only fate was amputation, and wondering why anybody would risk such injury. Especially to explore parts of the world that, while possessing a sweeping beauty, are ultimately barren wastelands, hostile to life. Even those explorers and adventurers who escaped frostbite always seemed in TV and film footage to be withered and aged by the experience. Buffeted by winds, shrunken by the cold, worn down by the effort, and cooked by the glaring sun.

A few months ago though, I read a short interview with Roland Huntford in a magazine, I think it was New Scientist. He was promoting his new book, Race For The South Pole, and in particular expounding its thesis that Scott had been an incompetent leader, and that his men had died not through poor luck and the unbeatable savagery of the elements, but through a catalogue of errors that had been their own responsibility. Huntford explained how his book compared and contrasted Scotts leadership with that of Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian who lead a simultaneous, successful expedition to the South Pole.

While I can’t recall the details of the interview, I was intrigued by Huntford’s arguments and impressed by the clear and forensic way he expressed them. I must admit, in my ignorance I had never heard of the Norwegian polar expedition, but the idea of an unsentimental comparison between Scott’s failed expedition, and Amundsen’s successful one appealed to me. I decided to pick up a copy when the chance arose.

Acquiring a copy proved a little difficult. The next time I was in a branch of Waterstones I  hunted around for it, but without success. I was slightly baffled by where exactly it would be shelved: Travel? Biography? History? Eventually I discovered an extreme-travel and exploration section, hidden away on a single bookcase in the corner of the store, but alas, no Race For The South Pole. The till staff confirmed via their computer that they did sell it, but were out of stock.

At this point I could have ordered it online via Amazon.com, and probably should have done, but for no real reason I became determined that I would purchase a copy via a physical shop. I have no problem normally shopping for books or just about anything online, but in this case it became a point of bizarre pride. I think it was because, after wandering around the store for so long, trying to determine where the book would be shelved, attempting to use the appalling self-service computers that Waterstones have in store to help me, I was determined that the shop would not best me. I would return, and I would purchase a copy of Race for the South Pole.

I did return, on each of my occasional jaunts into town. I even tried a couple of smaller Waterstones branches, but no dice. The shelf was always empty, and the staff apologetic. Branches down South had it, they earnestly assured me, though whether this was an inscrutable joke at my expense, based on the title I was looking for, I could never be sure. After a couple of months, I have all but given up hope, and was close to giving in and purchasing it online, when one day I popped into Waterstones to find not one, but three copies sitting upon the shelf.

The physical reality of my prize was not quite as impressive as I had anticipated. I had imagined a mighty hard-backed tome, but instead found a thick paperback, with a slightly shoddy cover containing a composite of various grainy photos of polar explorers. It made it look oddly like Scott had hauled his sledge right past the Norweigan camp, while his competitors stood staring at them. Nevertheless, I was excited to finally have acquired and purchased it, and took it home to serve as bedtime reading.

As a nighttime book, it is suited and unsuited, as it was by turns both highly compelling, leading me to stay awake far too late ploughing through the pages, and also sometimes a slog, sending me quickly off into slumberland after a few passages. The latter should not however be taken as a slight on Huntford’s writing, or the book itself, but it is simply a consequence of the book’s central premise or gimmick, which is to present the complete expedition diaries of RF Scott, alongside Huntfords own translations of botth Amundsen’s diary, and that of another member of the Norwegian expedition, a champion skier named Bjaaland.

These diary entries run sequentially and simultaneously, so you can read what both Scott’s English expedition and Amundsen’s Norwegian expedition were doing on the same days in different parts of the pole. While they provide fascinating detail, the entries are rarely thrilling, and that is where they can become a slog. The overland journeys to the pole were clearly difficult and often highly dangerous, but they were also monotonous. Men and animals hauling sledges for hundreds of miles across a snowy and icy wilderness.

In such circumstances, Scott and Amundsen often have little to write about other than the type of snow and ice they encounter, the weather conditions, and the distance they have travelled. To an expert or an experienced polar explorer, such detail might be fascinating, but to a more casual reader like myself, it can become rather dry, and I will confess to skimming some of the larger entries. Particularly those by Scott, whose verbiage, combined with his pomposity, becomes tiring.

Huntford intersperses the diary entries with his own comments, providing context on their content and comparing the approaches of the two expeditions. He offers praise and criticism to both, though it is fair to say he has on the whole very little positive to say about Scott or his expedition. Huntford does not shy away from making his opinions clear, and in that regard he becomes almost as much a character in his book as does Scott, Amundsen or Bjaaland. That is not a criticism; his comments are invariably interesting, and I often found myself wishing there were more of them. It becomes a perverse joy to spot strange or illogical points in Scott’s narrative and anticipate what Huntford’s withering response will be.

The diary entries, which form the central section of the book, are preceded by a long introduction, where Huntford introduces the major players, relates a little of the history of polar exploration and the run-up to the attempts, and lays out his thesis regarding Scott’s failure and Amundsen’s success. His central criticisms of Scott relate to his status as a ‘gentleman amateur’, with no expertise in the skills such as skiing that would be vital to polar exploration,  and to what Huntford perceives as his alienation from the natural world, relying too much on technology and viewing nature almost as an enemy to be conquered. From these stemmed a tide of poor choices and mistakes, in clothing, personnel, transportation, and training, that practically doomed his expedition to failure before it had begun.

Scott’s failings are compared to Amundsen, who had far greater experience in the right areas, both professionally and as a native of cold-climated country, and by Huntford’s reckoning, far more empathy with the natural world. Amundsen, it is argued, was a true professional explorer, who combined his lifetime of experience with exacting preparation to pave the way for his success.

A criticism I would level at Huntford is that he perhaps overreaches in the conclusions he draws. Scott’s failures are numerous and obvious. Even without Huntford’s analysis, the side-by-side comparison of the diaries makes the bumbling and confused nature of the English expedition painfully obvious. But from Scott’s personal failings, Huntford extrapolates to the entire nation of Britain, building up an almost apocalyptically condemning picture of political, spiritual and meritorious malaise. A nation that shuns success and celebrates and glorifies failure.

I’m not sure I buy it. That Scott’s legend is an inane case of undeserved hero-worship and the folly of the gentleman amateur seems true, but that it underlines some gaping flaw in the British national character seems less proven. Could it not just be an aberration, driven by a nationalistic media and a few opportunistic myth-makers? I wonder if Huntford, stung by the battles he has fought with Scott’s advocates, has magnified its philosophical significance through the lens of his own feelings.

In any case, the core of the book is still a highly compelling comparison of two very different expeditions. If I were a Hollywood producer, I might complain that the ‘race’ of the title never feels like much of one. Despite setting off within days of each other, Amundsen’s team are just too good, and Scott’s too poor, for there to be much real competition, even leaving aside that we know the ending anyway. A conventional narrative would have both teams exchanging the lead frequently, as each meet with triumph and mishap along their way, before at last, neck and neck, they reach the final straight and the winner emerges. In fact, Scott’s expedition quickly falls hundreds of miles behind Amundsen’s and its only battle is for survival in the face of its incompetence. Even Scott himself seems less concerned in his diary with the competing Norwegians as with settling scores with Ernest Shackleton, another explorer who had almost reached the South Pole in a previous attempt, and with whom he seems weirdly obsessed.

Another criticism I would make of the book is that, while I would not defend Scott from the charges of incompetence laid against him, I do think that Huntford is a little too easy on Amundsen. Scott’s errors and passive-aggressive bitchiness never pass without scathing comment, but though Amundsen makes mistakes as well, he gets off lightly. Despite his vastly greater skill, there is something of the pettiness and even the pomposity of Scott in Amundsen. His self-awareness is greater, but they are clearly two men on different ends of the same scale. Perhaps only such men, driven by a conflicting mix of nagging insecurity and self-regard, would pursue such lofty but dangerous goals to secure fame.

In stark comparison to both Scott and Amundsen is the third diarist, Olav Bjaaland. The inclusion of his diary entries is apparently something of a scoop, having never been translated into English before. Huntford is fluent in Norwegian, and apparently did the translations himself. Bjaaland was a champion skier, brought onto the Norwegian team for his vast expertise and experience in cross-country skiing. Unlike the two team leaders, Bjaaland was not looking for fame, or keeping his diary with a mind to write a book. His entries are terse, having been written for no audience but himself, but often very entertaining. He mixes entirely matter-of-fact missives with wry observations and the occasional sardonic comment on his leader Amundsen, or their situation. 

Bjaaland seems much more the voice of an ordinary man, even though, as a famous champion skier, he was not just anyone. His seems like the testimony of someone who is comfortable with himself, his abilities, and his achievements. His are some of the best parts of the book, undercutting the fairly humourless competition of the other two and bringing them down to Earth. Huntford seems to like him a lot as well.

Overall, I enjoyed the book a great deal, I would recommend it to anybody with an interest in history or human endeavour and the reasons, both technical and personal, why it succeeds or fails. Doubtless there are lessons to be drawn from it for all of us who engage in difficult or complex work, even if it is not quite as dangerous or intrepid as an expedition to the South Pole.

Firstly, CSS Grid Layout is just great. It’s a proposal from Microsoft on a new way to layout HTML components via CSS. See, one big problem with HTML/CSS over the years has been that the layout model was meant for documents, not for application UI. Document layout is pretty simple, you get a width as input, and then you lay words out in rows until you reach the end of a line. Then you go to the next line, and continue until you run out of words, at which point you get a height, and you can render a resulting box. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work at all for the layouts with buttons and widgets and columns and all the other crap that UIs have.

Web devs needed to find a way to build these kind of UIs on the web. The first way they did it was using HTML tables, because tables are pretty much perfect for building those kinds of UI. However, the problem was that HTML isn’t meant to be presentational, it’s meant to be “semantic”, where elements express the meaning of data rather than how it looks, and using tables for layout violates that principle. Presentation was meant to be controlled using CSS. However, CSS was originally created for styling documents, not laying out UI. It didn’t provide any obvious way to achieve equivalent results, nor was any such functionality forthcoming. Instead, web devs learned to abuse features such as margins, padding and (especially) floats to get the results they wanted. Later-on absolute positioning came along, which made things easier, but was still far from a silver bullet.

This difficulty lead to a schism in web development between those who build web sites using tables for layout. and those who use CSS. And it’s one that you still see see today, whenever people in blogs, forums, etc. discuss the topic of web development. A lot of developers, especially those who only do a bit of web development, really hate CSS. They don’t see any problem using tables for layout, and override objections with the argument that it is simply too awkward to try and build complex layouts with CSS. Most of these people aren’t building web sites for fortune 500 companies, more often just small firms and internal tools, but they’re still a sizeable group of vocally dissatisfied customers. Arguing back is usually an equal number of CSS apologists who are adamant that using tables for layout is an abhorrence, and that everything is easily achievable with CSS.

While I don’t use tables for layout, I do have sympathy with the former of the two groups. Building UIs with floats and margins is a horribly unnatural and unintuitive process, especially for the beginner. These features were never intended to be leveraged in this way, and in that respect it’s an abuse just as much as using tables for layout was. It’s also an approach that is practically impossible to build good visual tooling experience around. Something is badly wrong when doing things the “right” way is so difficult.

Some better means of laying out pages via CSS was badly needed, and for years the W3C worked on various half-assed proposals around adding columns and weird ASCII-art based templates, but nothing practical ever arrived in the browsers. Things weren’t helped of course by this being Internet Explorer’s wilderness years, where it was enjoying 90%+ market share and 0% development effort. However, while they were ignoring IE, Microsoft were building WPF and Silverlight, two closely related technologies that took a lot of inspiration from the web, while attempting to improve it. One such area of improvement was layout. In particular, they provided a grid layout container that could be used to lay out controls in rows and columns.

Finally, a couple of years ago, Microsoft started getting serious about the web again, and putting a lot more effort into improving IE and participating in the creation of web standards. They submitted a number of proposals to the W3C, and one such proposal was Grid Layout, essentially an adaption of the model they developed in WPF and Silverlight for HTML and CSS.

The key thing about Grid Layout is that the structure of the grid is not specified in markup. There are no <tr> and <td> elements containing things. Instead, there is just a container element of some kind, perhaps a <div>, and some other elements within it, and then the grid is specified through CSS properties that target the elements via their id.

While the grid layout is a major improvement on floats and margins for hand-coded layouts, its real strength is that it’s eminently toolable. It should finally be possible to build a visual design tool for HTML and CSS that is…

• Intuitive
• Powerful
• Round-tripping
• Produces clean and straightforward markup and CSS

Truly a promised land, eh? We’re not quite there yet, but the holy grail of easy layout for web UIs is within our grasp.

Microsoft themselves have already implemented Grid Layout and shipped it in previews of IE10, so it’ll be available on Windows 7 and Windows 8. There’s still the long tail of IE7-9 users to worry about, but at least there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Firefox doesn’t yet appearing to be working on support, although I expect they’ll try to get one in time for the Windows 8 release in order to stay competetitive, especially if webkit also has an implementation. There is a Firefox bug open here, voting on it can’t hurt.

¹He’s not really my homeboy, I don’t even know him.

The past six months have been spent working on two projects. The first of these was a fairly significant Silverlight application for a financial services company. The second, which I’m still working on, is an AJAX intensive website for a property company. Somehow, through this work, I’ve transitioned from being a mainly server-side developer to being a mainly client-side one. Right now, 90% of the code I write is client-side JavaScript, which is something of a change from the 100% C# I was writing before this.

It’s certainly a change, but not an unwelcome one. I’ve always had an (un)healthy fascination with browsers and the client-side, um, side of web-development, but traditionally at my  firm, “real” programmers have done the server stuff, while designers and front-end specialists have handled the scripting stuff alongside the photoshop, HTML and CSS work, with little crossover between the two. However, the realities of, firstly, developing in Silverlight, and secondly, developing a complex AJAX interface, have meant the lines have become somewhat blurred.

The Silverlight project was an interesting experience. I’m not really a fan of proprietary web stacks, being more of an open-web advocate. Albeit one who is often driven to despair by the politics of the standardisation process and the glacial rate of advancement (mainly due to IE version lag). It also became increasingly clear as the project went on that Silverlight as a technology was sitting on a rather shaky foundation, as the news coming out of Microsoft regarding its future was not promising. In fact, just last week the shoe dropped, and Mary J Foley all but confirmed that the next release of Silverlight, version 5, will be the last.

What happened to cause this is, of course, the rise of the Smartphone and iOS, and the decline of Flash. Silverlight was developed by Microsoft purely as a competitive move against Adobe, in the days when it genuinely seemed possible that Flash might take over the web. Now that everyone agrees that isn’t going to happen, and focus is instead switching to “HTML5″ for the web and integrated app stores selling native apps. Indeed, even as we were finishing up work on the Silverlight app, work was beginning on an alternative HTML version to run on mobile platforms. From what I gather, that version may end up supplanting the Silverlight app on desktops as well.

It might sound like a frustrating experience, to invest that much time in what appears to be a doomed app and platform, but it was actually an incredibly useful one. As I said, I have no love of proprietary web stacks, and will not shed any tears over the death of Silverlight for that reason. On the other hand, I cannot deny that it is a fantastic piece of technology is many respects. It’s clearly the product of some smart people who looked at web development, understood what worked about it and what didn’t, and tried to make a technology that improved upon it. In some respects they succeeded, in some they didn’t. In some respects I think they succeeded even in-spite of themselves.

Working with Silverlight, and learning the patterns and practices required to implement a complex app, really helped me grasp the right way to build for the client-side web, in particular the use of the MVVM pattern and asynchronous operations. In many ways Silverlight forces you, or at least strongly encourages you, down the right path in these areas, and this is tremendously useful when you move back to regular web development using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. That is something I want to expand on in future posts, and go into the kinds of libraries and patterns that have been particularly useful in my latest work project. I think that’ll do for now though.

The News of the World phone hacking scandal has provided no end of entertainment and office chat over the past week. I must admit to getting swept along with the mob spirit and sending a few polite emails to various companies, expressing my wish that they cease advertising with the paper due to its nefarious activities. It’s all a bit of self-righteous moral masturbation of course. After all, the British social-networking crowd were recently falling over themselves to aid newspapers in exposing the private affairs of Ryan Giggs and other celebrities, who were using super-injunctions to keep details of their private lives out of the tabloids. And now everyone is waging war on the News of the World for going too far in giving people exactly what they want, and seem to believe they’re entitled to?

But you know what, fuck it. I never buy tabloid papers, and it’s nice to engage in a little moral posturing and schadenfreude when the targets are as disagreeable as Rupert Murdoch and his cohorts. I do feel a little sorry for the journalists who will lose their jobs now that the News of the World has been shut down. They’ve basically been used as human shields in News International’s desperate attempt to protect Rebecca Brooks at all costs. However, I’m not sure I buy into all their teary eyed laments that NotW was a great paper and its closure a terrible loss. Looking through their website now the paywall has been pulled down, it just seems like a fairly worthless mix of tits, celebs and right-wing political rhetoric that the country won’t be much poorer without.

I also got involved in the campaign to stop Rupert Murdoch from taking over BSkyB, by submitting an entry to the government consultation on the matter. They’ve already achieved a minor victory, as the submission of over 100,000 responses to the consultation apparently means the decision will be delayed until at least September, as they examine every single response as they are legally required to do. If you want to contribute yourself, the consultation is closing on Friday 8th July, so I suggest you submit a response as soon as possible.

I didn’t send the form letter the campaign provided, as there seemed little point. It opines that the takeover is undesirable for various reasons, but the government’s line seems to be that its hands are tied as it can only block the deal on the grounds of media plurality, not on ethics. Therefore, I decided to write my own response, attempting to present a quasi-legal argument why recent events do in fact have a bearing on whether the deal affects media plurality. I don’t have the exact text of what I sent, so I can’t include it here (I may have used some language that it wouldn’t be wise to openly publish anyway), but I’ll try and provide a summary.

I am not a lawyer, so cannot really make a properly informed legal argument, but I decided to at least start by looking at what the law says. In particular, I found a Media Plurality Dossier by the London School of Economics that included an interesting quote from the relevant legislation:

2a.1. Enterprise Act 2002

“Section 67 allows the Secretary of State to intervene in order to protect legitimate interests, including that there is a sufficient plurality of persons with control of media enterprises.” http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2002/40/contents

The use of the word “sufficient” seemed particularly interesting. What is “sufficient” plurality of the media? It seemed to me that if there was a case to be made, this was a promising area of attack.

News International has allegedly been involved in a wide range of illegal and immoral activities, and also an effort to cover-up that activity that has continued for a number of years. Some claim this attempted cover-up is still ongoing. Perhaps of more concern however, is that there seemed to be little appetite to investigate News International and hold them to account. The metropolitan police, the government, the Press Complaints Commission, the government; all of them failed to give the oversight that it is their responsibility to provide. Even the rest of the press, with the exception of the Guardian, were highly reluctant to investigate or cover the story.

Why did this occur? The most plausible explanation appears to be that News International was powerful enough that it could frighten politicians, dissuade police officers, pay-off victims, and silence journalists. And it did exactly that for many years. Its power stemmed from the scale of its reach within British public life. It had too many newspapers, too many people on the payroll, and too many friends for anyone to cross it and expect to win, especially in the highly-political upper-echelons of bodies like the police, parliament and national newspapers.

This situation came abount due to the plurality, or lack thereof, of the British media. Too much power has been concentrated in the hands of too few, unaccountable individuals. In this context, for the plurality of the media to be eroded even further, by allowing News International to take full ownership of BSkyB, seems highly foolish. It is clear that, instead, the definition of what is “sufficient” plurality needs to be examined in light of these events, with the likely conclusion that organisations like News International should be owning less of the media, not more. Media plurality over the past decade has obviously been grossly insufficient, and contributed to a media and wider establishment wholly unequal to the task of holding News International to account over its actions.

That was pretty much the gist of my argument, although I couldn’t resist getting in one, slightly cheeky, final point. Given that there is an ongoing police investigation into criminal activity by the News of the World, and that there is grounds to suspect that News International used its influence to unduly disrupt attempts to investigate and expose this activity, wouldn’t any decision by the government to extend News International’s influence even further mean it was essentially acting an accessory to this activity? Not a position that government would want to be in, I’m sure!

That was more or less what I sent in. Given how quickly things are changing, the next days and months may render current questions about the takeover of BSkyB moot anyway, but I’m still glad I made my voice heard, in however small a way. I encourage you to do so as well. It really is therapeutic to unload on an issue like this, with the hope, however small, that it might have some effect or do some good somewhere down the line.

First impression is it continues the rapid pace of recent IE development. There’s a lots of really cool additions, although no single, striking visual feature, like gradients or transforms, this time. Instead, mostly this release seems to be focused on a spread of new APIs and more subtle features, although it’s no less impressive for that. As usual, Hachamovitch writes the announcement blog post and mixes in the usual marketing stuff, around Microsoft’s ‘site-ready HTML5′ line, with the descriptions of new features. Personally I wish they’d get someone technical to write these posts and put in a few code snippets and whatnot, Scott Guthrie style, but whatever.

I know it’s not wise to pay any attention to political or marketing waffle, but this whole ‘site-ready’ especially confuses me when you look at what they’ve actually added in this release. As far as I understand, The ‘site-ready’ thing is about Microsoft wanting to make the distinction between browsers adding features that are experimental vs those that are stable. Experimental features are things like Web Sockets that are still undergoing a standardisation effort and may change significantly before they are finished, as parts are added or changed, and bugs discovered. Whereas stable features are those that have been in development for longer, and which have reached a level of maturity where major changes are unlikely. Microsoft point to the trouble with Web Sockets experienced by Chrome and Firefox, where they implemented an early version of the protocol, only to have to disable it when a security flaw was discovered, as demonstrating the dangers of releasing experimental features too early. It puts users in danger, they say, and leads to developers having to keep rewriting their code to target changing APIs. In response, Microsoft created their HTML5 Labs initiative to prototype implementations without building them into IE proper.

Now, that’s all reasonable and sensible. But now look at the most trumpeted of the more visual features added to PP2: Positioned Floats. The idea here is to allow text to wrap around floated elements in a controllable way, such as in the manner demonstrated in this image that I have ‘borrowed’ from Microsoft’s draft spec:

Nice idea, very useful, etc. The spec it’s contained within is CSS Floats and Positioning Level 3. Although the spec is formatted as W3C editor’s draft, if you look at the URL you’ll see that it’s hosted on interoperabilitybridges.com, which is a site Microsoft uses to host a lot of its standards-based and interoperability projects. That’s because it’s not actually an official W3C CSS3 module, just a proposal for one.

In fact, the spec is an amalgamation of two previous proposal: One by Microsoft to extend positioning for floats, and the other being Adobe’s CSS Exclusions. Adobe’s spec was previously part of their CSS Regions and Exclusions proposal, which was created and prototyped together by Adobe as a way of letting web browsers create the kinds of fancy, magazine type layouts that a lot of publishers are creating in native iPad apps. The spec for the feature was laster split into separate Regions and Exclusions modules. In addition, Tab Atkins of Google has also been working on a Positioned Layout spec that covers much of the same ground and which he was supposedly going to publish as a new CSS3 module later this summer. Oh, and there’s another CSS3 module called Generated Content for Paged Media that also extends CSS 2.1 floats to allowing floats elements with respect to pages and multiple columns.

At the recent Kyoto face-to-face meeting on the 11th of June the W3C CSS working group looked at all these different proposals and decided on an action to bring them all together in a single new mega-spec called CSS Floats. Whereupon, they can be all be progressed together and the overlaps and interactions between them defined, and at some point in the future possibly split out again into separate specs.

Confused yet? There’s nothing really wrong with all the above, it’s just a result of there being a lot of people with good ideas, all interested in making progress in the same area, and having to work together to achieve it. However, it seems to me to be very clear that what Microsoft calls Positioned Floats in IE PP2, which is as yet only specced in a non-official W3C proposal on interoperabilitybridges.com, is very far from being in the least bit stable. In fact, it has effectively already been superseded by this as-yet unwritten spec that the W3c intends to produce. It also appears from the minutes of the FTF that at least one person, Mozilla’s David Baron, has strong concerns about whether it is a good idea at all.

In this situation, for Microsoft to turn around and not only implement positioned floats, but to do so while beating their drum on so called ‘site-ready’ standards vs those that are still experimental, seem just a little hypocritical. Now, I know Microsoft guys would say that their competitors add new CSS features as and when they feel like it, often without even a proposal spec. Apple in particular have been guilty of this on several occasions. And they’re right of course. I don’t object to Microsoft including an experimental implementation of positioned floats in IE10 if they want, but I couldn’t miss the opportunity to point out such a blatant example of double-standards and use it to illustrate ome of the craziness in the CSS standardisation process.

…and this is what Yahoo demanded in order to connect the accounts. I mean, just look at that shit. Words fail me.

There is bad blood between the Developer Division (who make .NET, Visual Studio, etc) and the Windows team (I’m simplifying the Microsoft internal structure a bit) dating back to the release of Windows Vista. During Vista, the Windows team attempted to rewrite big chunks of Windows using .NET and WPF. They failed, performance was too sucky and there were bugs everywhere. So they gave up and restarted work based on a fork of Windows Server 2003 (or whatever server OS was contemporary). They also swore off .NET forever, preferring to stick with good old fashioned C++.

Fast forward a few years. The Developer Division continues to push .NET, while the Windows team continues to ignore it for Windows and Office. Further hampering Dev Div is a need to perform to metrics that don’t favour stabilising on a technology, instead they favour winning new developers and pushing out new stuff, only to drop it and move onto something else the next year. One such flavour of the year project is Silverlight, which really pisses off the Windows team as it’s cross-platform, thus potentially eliminating the need for Window altogether.

The Windows team, who hold massive political sway at the top of Microsoft due to them generating the vast bulk of the company’s revenue (through sales of Windows and Office licenses), decide enough is enough and they have to kill .NET and Silverlight. They use their influence to get engineering resource taken away from the client side of .NET. But that’s not enough, too many people are already using .NET for it just go away. They also need a new development story, so they start to hatch a plan. They have an existing, native, Microsoft internal-only, UI platform called DirectUI that dates back to Windows XP days. They start work on improving it, adding support for XAML and high-performance animation. They tie the work in with that of the Internet Explorer team, who are developing a high performance rendering engine based on Direct2D for IE9.

The pieces start to fall into place for the Windows team: A new, high performance application and UI framework. All native code, but leaning on the Internet Explorer engine, codenamed ‘Jupiter’. This means it’s all accessible via unmanaged C++, but also trivial to make accessible via a Javascript object model. Of course, they can’t just drop .NET given its pre-existing developer mindshare, so they create a managed wrapper as well, but the important thing is that it’s just a wrapper, so native applications won’t be locked out like they are with WPF and Silverlight.

The hope of the Windows team, bolstered by the success of Objective-C as the language for iOS applications, is that developers will choose to develop C++ applications in order to get the best possible performance and access to the underlying platform. What’s more, non-Microsoft developers will be attracted by the ability to write HTML/Javascript based applications for the new platform. In time, these non-Microsoft devs will start to leverage the OS specific APIs that the platform provides, and will be converted into Microsoft developers. .NET, while still an option, will be squeezed from both sides by native C++ apps and HTML/Javascript ones, and, starved of resources and evangelism, will gradually wither and die as developers drop it as a client-side technology.

This new platform is deigned to be the flagship developer feature of Windows 8. Microsoft decides that the announcement of the new platform must be a ‘big reveal’, and plans a new developer event, called ‘Build’ to announce it. They make it very clear to all Microsoft teams that nobody is to spill the beans before the big day, if they value their job. However, they want to generate some early buzz, particularly amongst non-Microsoft developers who would usually ignore a Microsoft conference. These non-Microsoft developers are extremely important, because a key metric that Microsoft managers and teams are judged on its their ability to increase market share. So they plan an early teaser event, at which the new framework will be demoed. At the event, they quite deliberately explain that it will allow development of apps using HTML/Javascript.

The reason this announcement is phrased so isn’t because the framework won’t support C++ and .NET, but because they want to ensure the HTML/Javascript message gets out, without being swamped by attention being paid to the other development options. The plan works, in as much as plenty of heat and light is generated the announcement, particularly by furious .NET developers who believe they are being abandoned. They’re kind of right, but not in quite so brutal a way as they fear. .NET will be supported, it just won’t really be favoured.

Thousands of .NET developers beat an angry path to the emails, blogs and Twitter accounts of various Microsoft evangelists, product mangers and engineers. But all of them are bound by the internal edict not to spoil the ‘big reveal’ at Build by talking about the platform too early, and so can’t offer anything more than the most broad platitudes, leaving the developers to whip themselves up into even more of a fury. At the top level though, Microsoft isn’t too bothered, as .NET developers aren’t a priority, no big customers using .NET have baulked or announced they plan to switch away from Microsoft, and they figure the .NET devs will be salved when the Build conference comes.

So, what will happen come Build-day? My guess is that Microsoft will push this new framework as the one true platform, that will solve the WPF/Silverlight/web and native/.NET/Javascript schisms by providing a single, high performance UI platform that combines the best of all possible worlds. Old-school C++ devs will be sold on the ability to write native apps and get high-performance. .NET devs will be sold on the ability to leverage their existing knowledge of XAML and the similar, though not fully compatible, WPF and Silverlight. Doubtless they’ll be some support for converting existing WPF and Silverlight apps to Jupiter, in order to soften the blow, plus the promise that Silverlight and WPF remain fully supported, even if they will not be receiving major development effort in future¹. Finally, web developers will be sold on its ability to integrate with their favourite, open technologies, easing cross platform development while allowing access to the full power of the OS platform.

It’s going to be a hard sell to please everyone, and I suspect, as the Windows team wants, that it’ll be the old-school C++ developers who are smiling the most by the end, finding themselves back at the cutting edge of Windows development after a decade in the wilderness. Of course, a question mark still hangs over the future of the Windows platform itself given the growing competition from Apple and Google. The Windows team clearly hope that this new framework will be the start of a renaissance along the iOS model, but only time will tell.

1. I do wonder what they’ll do about Windows Phone though, could Mango still ship with some kind of Jupiter support? Or will it be case of everything changing come WP8?

So I watched Adventureland the other day. It’s a sort of prequel to The Social Network, released in 2009, where Zuckerberg has to raise funds for Harvard by working in a crappy amusement park, and he starts dating a girl who ends up dumping him for a vampire. Presumably because she likes pale, skinny guys, and that was the next step after a computer nerd.

Lulz, but seriously. Adventureland is really a pretty great movie. I’d heard it was good beforehand, and so had raised expectations from the outset, but it’s definitely one of those movies that would be best if you just discovered it while channel-hopping or as a chance download. So by writing this, and raising your expectations, I’m actually making the viewing experience worse for you. Ha! If I can’t enjoy it at its best, nobody will!

Not everyone will love it though, I’m sure. It depends on your tolerance for American teen/slacker movies, particularly those on the more intelligent, angsty and less sophomoric end of the spectrum¹. Personally I love them, and have done since I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as a young teenager myself. A film that  remains my favourite of all time. It’s not a novel observation, but one worth repeating, that the movies (and other works of art and entertainment) which mean the most to you tend to be those you see when young, particularly ones that come out of the blue and connect on an emotional level.

Adventureland didn’t have the effect that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off did on me, but I can imagine how it might do for someone else, at the right age and right place in their life. It’s got the same sense of fun and pathos, and mix of irony and unguarded emotion that I loved about that film. The writer/director, Greg Mottola, also directed Superbad, which I’ve heard is also an impressive example of the genre, albeit more on the more crude Apatow/Rogen side of things that I’m not as keen on. I’ve someone conspired never to have seen Superbad, despite it being a much bigger hit that Adventureland, but I guess now I’ll have to check it out.

There are a couple of characters in Adventureland though, Bill Hader’s and Matt Bush’s, who seem to have come out of a completely different, broader and more Apatow-esque film. As it is, they both serve well enough as comic relief from the more low-key performances around them, but they do jar at times. Not enough to spoil anything, but enough to make me wonder if it they were directed to act like they do, or if they just misinterpreted the script, or what? With Hader’s character in particular, you can see where the role could easily have been played straight, by some older, more grizzled character actor. Maybe Mottola just figured it would be useful to have a few wacky moments to throw in the trailer and pull in the dick jokes crowd.

I’ve often though there’s a case to be made that high-school/teen movies are one of the most important and effective means that Hollywood has of critiquing American society and human nature in general, drawing parallels with the use of children in films in Iran. I’ve often thought it would make a good subject for a really good piece of written journalism or a documentary. As it is, this rambly blog post isn’t the place to attempt it, but check out Adventureland if you get a chance. It’s good.

1. The characters of Adventureland are in their very early twenties, but it still feels very much a part of the teen film genre.