Year: 2006

The Rick Mercer Report website: because you can’t watch your high-definition TV at work.

Some of us can. 🙂

Joe Clark is such a stickler for technical correctness that I’m surprised he let a simple error like this get through: URLs are case-insensitive by spec. (He’s referring to the (partial) HTTP URI cbc.ca/thering.) For the record, directly from the specification, RFC 2616 (I’ve chosen to link directly to the W3C’s HTML version, but the text is equivalent to the official text version provided by IETF):

3.2.3 URI Comparison

When comparing two URIs to decide if they match or not, a client SHOULD use a case-sensitive octet-by-octet comparison of the entire URIs, with these exceptions:

      - A port that is empty or not given is equivalent to the default
        port for that URI-reference;

– Comparisons of host names MUST be case-insensitive; – Comparisons of scheme names MUST be case-insensitive; – An empty abs_path is equivalent to an abs_path of “/”.

In fact, this is the default case for all URIs, as defined by RFC 3986: The other generic syntax components are assumed to be case-sensitive unless specifically defined otherwise by the scheme.

As the man himself says, Don’t nitpick angry!

Herewith, a simple demonstration of what aggressive canonicalization can produce. […] The cache is simply files in Atom 1.0 format, with all textual content normalized to XHTML.

More importantly for my purposes, Sam’s Venus branch of Planet also normalizes URLs, which means I can use it to generate a feed so Gregarius (based on MagpieRSS) will no longer mung up relative links in Atom feeds like his and Tim Bray’s. (Neither does my private SimplePie-based branch of Gregarius, but that’s another story.)

As friends, relatives, casual passersby and, most recently, Fringers (I was the guy in the ’70s-logo CBC hat and T-shirt) know, I’m an avid fan of the CBC. My parents originally turned me on to CBC Radio back in the days of Basic Black, Jack Parr, the last few years of Max Ferguson’s shows, and the Royal Canadian Air Farce—they used to be on the radio, don’tcha know, and funny too—and I remember evenings at my grandparents’ house playing checkers and watching Hockey Night in Canada (even though I didn’t, and still don’t, particularly care for the televised game). I started watching The National and The Journal and listening to As It Happens and Quirks and Quarks as a teenager. In my Amiga days I quizzed a CBC staffer about the Broadcast Centre’s newly-installed CDTV-based navigation kiosks during a World of Commodore trade show, and asked what I’m sure were very impertinent questions of an early webmaster about the format in which they were offering audio downloads.

So it’s safe to say I’m an avid follower of all things Corp, and that it’s had a strong influence on my vision of this country.

When the lockout happened last year, that constant presence was interrupted. I soon found, however, that there were a lot of other people who were missing the Ceeb just as much as I was… and that they were the people responsible for what I’d been listening to for all those years, the very people who’d been locked out of their jobs. They were looking for a way to keep telling stories to and about Canadians, and so they did: by writing on weblogs, by producing podcasts, and by creating radio and television any way they could. (Some were just bitter that their jobs had been taken from them, of course.) There was even a manager who joined the fray; several of the new bloggers took her to be the enemy, but she was often a voice of calm and reason.

After the lockout ended, many of those projects slowed or stopped. There has been a core group that has continued blogging and podcasting, but very few new voices have chosen to make themselves heard. Part of the reason for this, I’ve learned, is that CBC doesn’t really have a policy for blogging; as a result, people who might otherwise have something to say about the CBC, their jobs, or the world at large have felt constrained by the rigorous Journalistic Standards and Practices.

But no longer. Today, on the anniversary of the start of the lockout, that selfsame manager, “A. Ouimet”, and several other prominent CBC bloggers (plus one or two outsiders), published the CBC Blogging Manifesto. It’s a set of guidelines for employees to use when blogging, written to fill a gap in the corporation’s official policies. It’s also an invitation: as Ouimet puts it, I also hope that someone reading this in the CBC, or Radio-Canada, or anywhere really, says to themselves: hey that sounds like fun, and goes over to blogger and starts a blog.

That means more stories, for more years, from more perspectives. More of what I’ve grown up listening to and watching. More from and for and by Canadians.

Sounds like a great idea to me.