ivy’s page

In the beginning of the internet (now I sound like an old guy), its users behaved in ways prescribed by netiquette; a term that Wikipedia defines as a set of social conventions that facilitate interaction over networks. You would for instance be flamed for sending unsolicited mail to a bunch people, and if you did it again, your sysadmin would hear about it and block your account for a while…

Since internet became common and commercial, netiquette faded into oblivion and gave way to the dark side . Ah well, common sense get’s you a long way and the internet became a lot more fun too, so you don’t hear me complaining (or at least not that much though).

One thing that annoys me though is the continuing spam in my mailbox; an unthinkable thing if the guys sending this stuff had ever glanced over the netiquette guidelines. Today we have to block and filter instead of relying on the naive behavioral constraints posed by netiquette. It’s a rat race where spammers come up with new ways of slipping through spam filters every day. Spam filters ‘read’ the text? The spammers put theirs ads in pdf attachments! These mails get blocked too? Let’s hide our message in images… And so the story continues.

One method I hadn’t seen before is HTML table-based characters, where a table cell represents a pixel in the message. I have to give them credit; it’s an original avoidance strategy. The spamfilter just sees HTML codes like:

<table border="1" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2" width="100%">
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td bgcolor="navy" valign="top"><br>
      </td>
      <td valign="top"><br>
      </td>
      <td valign="top"><br>
      </td>

But the browser renders:

Anyway, if you ever feel like finding out how ‘the elders of the internet’ intended us all to behave, read the officially defined Netiquette Guidelines. Be warned though; the latest update was in 1995, which is light years in internet time

I once heard someone claim that XML has the efficiency of a plain text file combined with the readability of a binary. Every time I have to type XML by hand, I tend to agree! XSLT for instance seems nice… until you actually have to program and maintain logic/functionality encoded in it for a while: it is verbose, it forces you to express constructs in hierarchical XML structures and it becomes a bit frustrating….

XML is great for tools and communication between programs, but it’s verboseness and forced hierarchical structure makes most XML documents not as readable as promised. The problem I observe is caused by the accidental complexity (the difference between intention and result) inherent to the language. You have to close each tag (type it twice), parameters are passed by attributes or subnodes (a lot of text) and there’s only hierarchical structures instead of more shortly expressed ways. There’s a lot ‘ceremony’ to express simple intent.

Therefore, I’d advice people to use XML for it’s strong points, but not overestimate it’s power for purposes it’s just not intended for. For many purposes I’d rather create an (e.g. oaw-based) Domain Specific language that let’s me express more things more easily and gives me context support in my favorite editor while doing so.