Category Archives: Web

Science and Technology: ICANN what?!?

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There has been a lot of chatter in recent days since the Obama administration announced it plans to transition the control of ICANN away from US control, and most of it has been highly predictable.

I’m not sure I believe that the US stewardship of control over the web has been good enough to lament its passing, nor am I convinced that some other control of it will somehow herald the end of the web as we know it.

However, I am convinced of something related: handing off control of the web to someone other than the US government will inevitably force the web itself to evolve.

To me, that outcome is the best and most exciting thing to come along since the web itself. Since the first time I browsed to a web page in the summer of 1992, my main complaint is that the web, as currently construed, has settled into a constant rehashing of what has already been done. I think a lot of that rehashing is the result of how the web has been managed and controlled.

Now, I don’t think for a moment that this evolution will be clean or pretty, but just like the telco deregulation of the 8os, this deregulation is necessary for the technology and its uses to continue to develop and grow.

DLH

Read more at my Science and Technology weblog…

What I really want from Google Docs

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I like a lot of things about Google, especially the company’s  constant attempts to push the envelope and change how we think about using computers and the web. Unfortunately, I also dislike Google for some of the same reasons because the company’s attempts to push that envelope are single minded and, sometimes, ill-conceived.

From my point of view, the problem Google has as a company is that its heart and soul lives in Silicon Valley, where internet access is cheap and ubiquitous and where everyone is writing code for the next big web sensation. I think that the company doesn’t understand that more than half the population of the United States does not live in Silicon Valley, or even a major city, and that the solutions they preconceive will not necessarily work in, say, rural Ohio.

For example, I would love to be able to use Google Documents as a regular part of the tools I use to create, write, document, and explore. My problem is that Google Docs is only online, in the cloud, and decidedly under Google’s control. I don’t have ubiquitous web access where I live, so having documents locally resident is a must. Further, I need to know that, if something terrible happens out there on the web, I still have control of what I have created.

What Google needs to understand, then, is that there are users who would use their products if Google solved the problem in a different way. I would use Google Docs a lot more than I do if it had a locally resident interface with locally stored files that I could easily manipulate offline whenever I needed to then synchronize with the cloud when I decide to.

Google already has a version of this same technology built into its Chrome browser in the form of its bookmarks synchronization tool. All I am looking for is something that takes the same idea one step further and applies it to the rest of Google’s tools.

Until then, Google Docs, and really the rest of Google’s impressive array of tools, will continue to be a nifty form of file replication with editing capabilities for me, and I suspect, a lot of other people.

DLH

If you want developers to adopt your browser, include a hard refresh option

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I love Google’s Chrome browser because it is, so far, the best and most stable browser out there (thanks to Netscape, Microsoft, and Mozilla blazing a path for it).

I do have a problem, though, with the fact that Chrome does not have a hard refresh option for web pages. This makes checking certain kinds of changes to web pages almost impossible without switching to another browser or by clearing Chrome’s cache. From a developer point of view, neither of those solutions lend me to using Chrome for development work, which is unfortunate given how good the browser is otherwise.

So here’s my suggestion to the good folks at the Chromium development project, if you’re bothering to listen: add a hard refresh feature to Chrome. I would even accept a utility that I have to install or a menu item I have to specifically select. But, if I am going to use your browser instead of someone else’s, it has to do all of the things I need it to do, not just some of them.

DLH