Category: Asides

The meeting today of the Houston Wireless meeting tonight was very interesting, with a lot of blue sky concepts being discussed. Tonight’s guest was Alan Levy, the adviser to the United Nations Information and Communication Technologies Task Force. To be honest I was a bit confused by his terminology for probably the first part of the meeting, as he tended to throw out the terms OS and VPN quite freely. I’m still not sure what to make of the whole thing, but the gist I got from it was that the current state of WiFi technology is a fluke, a mistake by the governments and corporations in that they created the space for a technology which completely bypasses traditional and monolithic communications infrastructure which is completely unregulated. He described this state as an accident, and stated that there was a small window of opportunity of about ten to twelve months where this advantage could be pushed and reach critical mass in changing the way we communicate before it can be trivialized by regulation. He also intimated that there are several “extremely subtle” measures working their way through legislation, but he failed to identify any of them, saying there was really only one and he didn’t want to comment on it specifically because he hadn’t had a chance to look at it very closely.

He also emphasized several times the insidiousness of corporations with vested interests in the markets that WiFi can engulf, and I got the feeling that he had dealt with this before. That message combined with the sense of urgency he instilled made me feel like a freedom fighter or something, or someone who was around at critical times in the development of the internet or radio. Barrett likened it to the start of Linux, with the analogy following that we’ve been flying under the radar, so to speak, until now and so it’s time to really buckle down and take the platform to the next level. So what was his goal? I wasn’t altogether clear on this either, but what I got out of it was that he envisioned wireless ad hoc networks existing on a community level over which a number of “applications” could operate. The applications he referred to are things that are normally provided to us by large corporations in monopolistic fields, such as television, telephone, cable, radio, and anything else that the community can provide and there is a need for. His main point seemed to be that cost and security weren’t holding back widespread WiFi adoption one bit, it was familiarity and applications. Just like an operating system with nothing to run over it, right now the applications of current wireless networks sans the internet are pretty sparse. Seattle Wireless and their goal of creating a distinct network separate from the internet was brought up several times. What he called on us, and by us I mean the Houston Wireless group, to do is create the platform which would allow the current wireless broadband community to create a Metropolitan Area Network which replaces many of the current communication infrastructure and promotes near universal access to its resources regardless of economic status or location.

At least that’s what I can get out of it at this time of night. The great erewhon has the whole thing on video, including some of the questions from people who appeared to be as confused as I was at points. When the video finally goes up I’ll take a look at it and maybe reexamine my thoughts on the subject. At this point I’m not sure exactly how much of this was what he said and how much is me mixing other thing in, but if you note any crazy discrepancies leave a comment and I’ll patch things up. With that, I bid you all adieu and I think I’ll try and get some sleep. (Finally.)

I’m writing this mainly for my sister Charleen, who wanted to know this for something on Mullenweg.com, but hopefully it will be helpful to anyone wanting to learn a little HTML.

Most Basic

The purpose of the anchor, or <A> tag, is to reference someplace. Links are the very essence of the web, the hyper in hypertext. Let’s talk about the most most important attribute, href. A very basic link might look something like this:
<a href="http://www.photomatt.net">PhotoMatt</a>
To break it down, the <a at the front indicates the beginning of the anchor tag. After that we have the href attribute, which basically tells the browser where to go when you click on that link. You can have a fully qualified address or a relative address there, which we’ll discuss more in a minute. The place we want to send the browser to is equal to “http://www.photomatt.net”. The two biggest mistakes people make when making an anchor tag are forgetting the equal sign and forgetting to quote the attribute value, in this case “http://www.photomatt.net”. (Note: you can quote it either with double or single quotes, which can be useful when echoing out statements in PHP.) Then we close the first part of the A tag (don’t forget the endquote!) with >. Now we write the text which we want to appear linked, which in this case is PhotoMatt, then we close the anchor tag with </a> to indicate that the link is over. You can enclose multiple words or even an entire sentence. That’s it! You now have a link. Note that all the code should be lowercase, like in the example above. This is a good practice in every version of HTML, and is required in XHTML.

Getting Fancy

Now I know you’re thinking, what more could there be? Well to be honest, there isn’t that much else. One common technique, and one I like to use on this site, it to use the title attribute to give a little more information about the link. The title attribute works functionally just like href, but instead the content displays as a tooltip or popup in most browsers, and can be useful for telling additional information about the link. Here’s an example:
<a href="http://www.photomatt.net" title="Photos and thoughts from Matthew Mullenweg">PhotoMatt</a>
The end result is this: PhotoMatt. In the title attribute you can put a description of the link, warn that it’s a PDF or Word document, warn that it’s opening in a new window, whatever you want. Zeldman.com makes great use of the title attribute on almost all his links.

Another commonly used attribute is target, which tells the browser where to open the link. You should use it when you want to open a link someplace other than the current window or frame. In XHTML the target tag is depreciated (illegal, gone) unless you’re using frames and the corresponding DOCTYPE. The goal of this attribute is to facilitate linking in frames. A common use of the target attribute is to open a link in a new window, and to do that you set the attribute equal to “_blank”. If you’re using frames you can set it to “_top”,”_self”, or “_parent”, which will replace either the entire window, the same window/frame, or the parent framesetting document. If you’re not using frames you should’t have to mess with much other than “_blank”, so don’t worry about this too much. There is one neat trick you might use though: if you want to open new windows on certain links, but you don’t want to be too intrusive, you can have all your links open in one separate window. The target attribute can refer to windows by name, very useful in a framed setting. However if no window/frame with that frame exists, it will open a new one. So if you gave all your link targets the same name, say “dalink”, the first time someone clicks a link with that target it will open a new window. If they leave that window open, go back to your page, and click on another link with an identical target, instead of opening a brand new window it will reuse the window you’ve already opened. A good example of this (again) is Zeldman.com. Here’s a tricked out example of what we have so far:
<a href="http://www.photomatt.net" title="Photos and thoughts from Matthew Mullenweg" target="_blank">PhotoMatt</a>

Coming soon: Accessibility, It’s All Relative, and Style Notes! Keep your dials locked.