Two Wrongs Do Not Make A Right

Posted on by Chris Warburton

Recently there was an Open Source iPhone application made called OpenClip which allows copy and paste functionality to work between applications. Well, seems Apple didn’t care for it and in their latest firmware update they’ve stopped it working. To me that just means a bit of I-told-you-so gloating, since it’s exactly what to expect when you take on a computer that’s largely controlled, and for all intents and purposes owned, by the manufacturer.

In somewhat related news, perhaps this is Karma (no not the OpenSuse one), the iPhone adverts which Apple have been spreading liberally all over the place have been labelled “misleading” by the Advertising Standards Authority. Now, although it causes yet another I-told-you-so moment and I’m obviously teh awesome at modestness, I’m going to tell you what it’s about. The adverts are apparently misleading because they claim “all the parts of the internet are on the iPhone”, but since Flash and Java aren’t installed then that claim is wrong and (to quote the BBC) “Some pages on the iPhone won’t look like they do at home”.

Now, I’m sure a few people will remember my furious claims that the Internet and the Web are not the same thing. Well, this confusion is right at the heart of the issue. I’ll say right away that I think this decision is wrong and that the iPhone adverts are not misleading in the way that has been claimed. I’ll detail why it is wrong below:

Teh Internets

The Internet is a super-global computer network. A computer network is defined (as I can attest from both my formal and informal studies in this area) as a way for machines to communicate, but which specifically describes a general network (so the ’phone network isn’t a computer network since it passes analogue audio signals around, whilst most computer networks pass packets of binary data which are, in a quantum mechanical world, general as they can mean anything). An internetwork (an internet) is a network of networks, where devices called routers translate between the different physical technologies and virtual addressing systems of each network (for instance I have a router in my house which translates between IEEE 802.11g wireless networking, Ethernet, USB networking and my ADSL line). “The Internet” is a slang name for the network of internetworks which reaches around the globe, into the Earth and out into space which is more commonly referred to by its correct title “teh Internets”. If you want a diagram showing the “net” then this’ll have to do:

As you can see, each vertex (joint) is a computer, and each edge is a network connection of some kind. Apple have claimed that on their iPhone (connected to the 3G network operator on the left at about 8 o’clock) has all parts of the Internet on the ’phone. Now, since the Internet is by definition more than just one ’phone this obviously referrs to the fact that the ’phone can access the entire Internet (insomuch as any device can, taking into account people using encryption and various server outages around the world). The Internet is real, physical thing that you can see if you look at the wires coming out of your house. The iPhone can access the entire Internet just as much as a desktop computer.

Now, the actual data that gets passed around on the Internet can be literally anything, since it is by definition a general network. However, throwing random bits at computers isn’t particularly useful if the other end doesn’t know what you’re trying to say. This is where protocols come in. There are LOADS of protocols, and they stack up on top of each other at various layers of the architecture. Examples are IP (the Internet Protocol), FTP (file transfer protocol), XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), SMTP (simple mail transport protocol), and of course HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol).

The Web

HTTP is all about transfering “hypertext”. This is like plaintext (which is actually just a bunch of binary, anything can be seen as a type of plaintext) except that it uses SGML markup to specify links (called “hrefs”). These links allow readers of the hypertext document to be transported to another hypertext document living at the address given in the href. I’ll draw you another diagram below:

This is a little harder to understand since there are two kinds of node, the pages (in green) and the links, technically called anchors (in red). Plus the edges are directed (ie. there are arrows). Just to clarify, there are no arrows pointing TO links, all arrows end in a green page but I’m not too good at drawing with a mouse :P

What’s happening is that you’re at a certain page in your browser (in green) when you click one of the links (in red). Your browser shoots off down the arrow coming from that link until it gets to the green page at the end of it. If there are links in that page you can click those, but if not then you either need to go Back along the last edge your browser went down or enter a location manually. This is the Web, and you can’t see it because it’s not real. It’s just a visualisation of a data structure. The green web pages mostly live on computers , which are nodes in the first picture, but the Internet and the Web are completely different things.

Web pages, as I’ve said, are hypertext, written in the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), which is just a special structuring of text. HTML is designed to allow arbitrary non-HTML stuff to be stuck inside, and the standards say, and I quote:

13.3.1 Rules for rendering objects A user agent must interpret an OBJECT element according to the following precedence rules:

  1. The user agent must first try to render the object. It should not render the element’s contents, but it must examine them in case the element contains any direct children that are PARAM elements (see object initialization) or MAP elements (see client-side image maps).
  2. If the user agent is not able to render the object for whatever reason (configured not to, lack of resources, wrong architecture, etc.), it must try to render its contents.

Authors should not include content in OBJECT elements that appear in the HEAD element.

Flash and Java applets are examples of OBJECT elements. The standards say that the user agent (browser) should try to render OBJECT elements which aren’t inside the HEAD element. If they can’t then they should try to render the contents (for example the “alt” text which is rendered if an image doesn’t load). The iPhone’s WebKit browser is completely following the rules here.

So, in essence what I am saying is this:

  1. The “Internet” is the physical network which carries data. The iPhone has a complete connection to the Internet, as they claim.
  2. The Web, which seems to be the point being argued, is NOT the Internet. Apple have not claimed that everything on the Web will work on the iPhone, they’ve said that you can get everything that is on the Internet.
  3. Flash and Java are not HTML and thus not even IN the Web. They are external in nature, even if they appear in the middle of a HTML document. For an analogy, open a text editor window and drag it over this web browser window. Is the text editor now part of the Web? Is it bollocks. Flash and Java can communicate over HTTP if directed to do so but they are not part of the Web. They are interpreted programs which can be accessed over the Internet.
  4. Flash and Java have been incredibly proprietary until very very recently. When the iPhone was in development it was completely reasonable to not include these proprietary technologies, especially if they weren’t available for Darwin on an ARM (which was an internal Apple build environment until the iPhone came out anyway). Now that Free Software Flash players and Java environments are getting mature it may be a different story, since the rules are different with Free Software (Apple would still be in control, rather than Sun or Adobe).
  5. For fuck’s sake! The BEST part about the Web is that it degrades gracefully. If a browser doesn’t support some feature which it encounters then it just ignores the request and carries on. This is exactly what the iPhone is doing. The real irony is that WebKit, the browser engine used on the iPhone, is one of the most standards-compliant, correctly done browsers there is! The majority of desktop machines are stuck on Internet Explorer, so the comparison to “at home” (ie. on a desktop or laptop, most probably running IE) is actually scary.

OK rant over. For now.