The next round of the Browser Wars is getting ready to start. Microsoft has released a "developer pre-release" of its 5.0 browser, while Netscape will probably, by the time you read this, have its version 4.5 out, with 5.0 under development.
A common criticism levied by "HTML purists" against both of these browser makers is their propensity to add "whiz-bang features" in each new release, instead of concentrating on getting the basic HTML functionality, as defined by the official specs, working properly. This criticism still applies with MSIE 5.0 (I haven't seen Netscape 4.5 yet). The developer pre-release of MSIE 5.0 still fails to support such simple HTML 4.0 elements as the <Q> tag for quotes and the <LINK> tag to indicate logical relationships between the current document and others. But why spend a few hours programming that boring stuff when they could be doing the "more sexy" (though probably less useful for the Web's original purpose of presenting and organizing information) things like enhancing the ability of DHTML (dynamic HTML) to animate and manipulate elements of Web pages?
The developer prerelease of MSIE 5.0 can be downloaded free at:
http://www.microsoft.com/sitebuilder/ie/ieonsbn.htm
The latest Netscape version can be found at:
http://www.netscape.com/computing/download/
The official HTML specifications can be found at the W3C site at:
http://www.w3.org/
As the year 2000 gets closer, there is increasing discussion and debate about just what effect the inability of some computer software to deal with dates after 1999 will have on people dependent on these systems. Some are predicting massive catastrophe, with planes, trains, and automobiles crashing, power failures, and everybody getting bizarrely huge invoices from their creditors while failing to get any paychecks, welfare checks, or Social Security checks to pay their debts with. Others say that this is mostly hype, and while there will probably be a few glitches, there is no need to head for the hills. An article taking the latter position is at:
http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,24062,00.html
making the point that most companies are now working hard to fix the problem, and have put safeguards in place to prevent catastrophic effects resulting from any systems they interface with that haven't fixed it.
Others are still taking a more gloom-and-doom attitude, though, so we'll have to wait until New Year's Day 2000 to find out for sure who's right.
Lots of Year 2000 news and information can be found at: http://www.year2000.com/
Other upcoming "overflows" include the failure of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) in mid-1999 when the field containing the number of weeks since 1980 resets to zero, and a potential failure of many stock-market-related programs if and when the Dow Jones Industrial Average reaches 10,000. European financial software is also facing a crisis caused by the need to convert to the new "Euro" currency unit.
The United States Postal Service is making a pitch to take over administration of the .us domain suffix, in the wake of a U.S. government report which suggests expansion of the use of this country-code domain. (The main part of the report, as I mentioned last month, concerned global top-level domains, but a brief mention of country-code domains was present too.) Other countries make extensive use of their country code domains (e.g., .ca for Canada and .fr for France), but .us is little used, because registrations are geographically nested (mysite.bossier-city.la.us), making for longer, less attractive domains than the more-usual .com. The Postal Service proposes to reinvigorate .us by creating some logical subcategories (for instance, oil companies might be able to register under oil.us) as well as assigning all American individuals and companies e-mail addresses within the .us domain using a one-on-one mapping with street addresses. They haven't revealed exactly how this latter idea would work, but I presume that Softdisk, at 606 Common Street in Shreveport, would be reachable at an address like softdisk@606.common-st.shreveport.la.us. In our case, there's no point in dumping our memorable softdisk.com addresses in favor of that, but it might bring some computerphobes into the e-mail universe, but with the down side of introducing to e-mail the flaw of paper mail that your address has to change when you move. But presumably some sort of forwarding can be arranged, just like with paper mail.
How all of this mail would be delivered to people who don't even have computers I don't know. The Postal Service makes some mention of printing out the mail at the nearest post office and delivering it like paper mail, but exactly how is this service going to be paid for? An even bigger concern of many is the wide-open possibility for increased spam this causes, as spammers could now target entire neighborhoods house-by-house (just like they do now with bulk paper mail under "Carrier-Route Delivery" plans). Some theorize that this is explicitly the aim of the Postal Service, to enable bulk spamming which would all go through their own servers, and which they would charge the spammer for in some manner, thus giving this sort of spam the "legitimacy" of paper junk mail. (But could they manage to stop all unauthorized spamming of these addresses? Spammers have proved adept at getting around any sort of blocking and filtering.)
Whether anybody would actually choose to use these new geographical e-mailboxes to receive mail, given that the addresses will be long and unweildy and lots of the mailbox's content will inevitably be bulk junk (even when the individual isn't yet on any mailing lists, since the geographical addresses can be generated in bulk from a city street database), I don't know.
An online story appeared in a web news site mentioning that the USPS brought up this proposal at a recent U.S. government meeting about domain policy, but this turned out to be untrue and the story was withdrawn. The USPS has made a proposal, but it has yet to actually be discussed at any formal public meeting; the news report was based prematurely on rumors and leaks in advance of the meeting.
Stories about this are at:
http://www.newslinx.com/News/cg-070898d.html
http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/13129.html
The USPS's confidential proposal, leaked to the Internet, can be read at:
http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/13130.html
(Contact Daniel Tobias at dan@softdisk.com. My personal World Wide Web page is at:http://www.softdisk.com/comp/dan/)
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