Dorward Online

The Friday Night Comedy podcast comprises episodes of The News Quiz and The Now Show. For 6 weeks in the summer, both of these programmes are off air and Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive is broadcast in that Friday night slot. We don't have the rights to include this programme in the podcast but you can listen to it on the BBC iPlayer via the Radio 4 website. The podcast will resume when The News Quiz returns on Friday 26th September.

Have I even mentioned how much I hate the licenses that traditional broadcasters have with content producers?

A very small number of items are distributed via podcast, so you can download them and enjoy them wherever (oh, except for the sections which are replaced by one of the presenters saying "Due to licensing restrictions, podcast listeners are not hearing Joe Bloggs singing Gotta Love DRM").

The rest? Well, you get one week to watch or listen to them online. If you miss it, you miss it (so much for the iPlayer making these things unmissable).

Downloading? No, the license requires that the broadcasters do everything they can to stop people doing that. Thus making me muck about with mplayer and its --dumpstream switch.

It doesn't even need to be that complicated. With a few clicks I can have a computer record the program when it is broadcast over DVB, convert it to mp3, and drop it on a webserver with an RSS feed I can subscribe to in my usual podcast client. The only limitation is that I have to know about the program in advance.

It is exasperating that they have to go to all this effort to have little effect other then to annoy people.

On a similar note, Outpost Gallifrey has news on Dr Who appearing on iTunes, but only in the USA.

While most of the titles released so far have already been made available on DVD, such as "Carnival of Monsters", "Mark of the Rani" and "The Ark in Space", a number of stories have been released that are avaiable nowhere else (with the VHS releases now long out-of-print), like "The Krotons", "The Sun Makers" and "Planet of the Spiders".

I would quite like to see The Krotons, its one of the few episodes of Dr Who I haven't seen yet. However, despite living in the country where it was made, I can't buy it online (and it isn't out on DVD yet).

Things tend to come in threes, so I might as well complete the pattern by complaining about anti-piracy adverts.

Buy a DVD? (I own lots) Well done, now sit though a message telling you not to pirate movies.

Buy a cinema ticket? (I go about once a month). Well done, now sit though a message telling you not to pirate movies.

Pirate a film? Yes. Well. Straight to the good stuff (or so I'm told).

BrokenTV spoofed a poster that describes the whole sorry mess best.

I live in hope of big media, one day, giving us what we want. I wonder if it will be before or after someone creates a sustainable method of electricity generation efficient enough to power the world and produce chocolate as a side effect?

While I'm ranting at the traditional media industry, I'll drive off on a tangent to quickly to moan about the BBC (again) and the cinema (again). This advert is far too long, has a number of complete idiots on it, and starts out with the BBC "forgetting" that if you get something wrong when filming, you can edit the result.

A long, long time ago (last year sometime), I started work on an article about dealing with Internet Explorer's limitations when it came to buttons and image inputs in HTML documents.

I was reminded about it a couple of weeks ago, when Drew wrote his article Coping With Internet Explorer's Mishandling of Buttons. This isn't a case of "Drat, now all my work is wasted" though, since I've been taking a different approach.

So, now I've finished editing it, you can read Multiple HTML submit buttons a shortcoming of Microsoft Internet Explorer and what you can do about it over at The Developers Archive.

Photo credit: Push the button by INoxKrow used under a Creative Commons license.

in Licensing Issues, Alex Schroeder asks:

Should I be happy that a Creative Commons license was used, or should I be frustrated because the license allows me to copy the map (and use it in my game) but doesn't allow me to easily build on it and contribute back to society?

This is my take on it.

If the author didn't publish under a CC license, then normal copyright restrictions would apply. Thus you have gained, so be happy.

CC licenses don't take anything away from you, and one of the things that they have left you is the ability to request further permissions.

So if you want to build on it and contribute back, then ask for permission to do so. They might grant it, and everybody wins. They might not, and all you've lost is the five minutes it took to write an email.

I've published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivatives before, and the reason I picked "No-Derivatives" wasn't to ensure that nobody every changed my work, but just so that nobody changed in a way that I wasn't comfortable with. I was open to requests for permission to create such works, I just wanted to know the author's intentions first.

My first reaction to reading Blockquote: Then and Now was a sigh as I spotted people changing the meaning of attributes in HTML. Before I ranted about it, I checked the HTML 4.01 specification for cite, this would make sure I got my facts right, and give me material to quote.

The value of this attribute is a URI that designates a source document or message. This attribute is intended to give information about the source from which the quotation was borrowed.

Well, that wasn't exactly what I was expecting. Source document or message? What does that mean?

Source document is easy enough to interpret, it is the document from which the quotation is taken.

What does message mean though? Is it supposed to be "Source message"? That would be fairly redundant. It we couple it with the rest of the material I quoted above, it suggests it could be a simple piece of text which gives the reader enough information to identify the source.

This means that the microformat described in the article may be rather a good one.

Sadly, the examples for that section don't confirm this.

So, what started out as an exercise in ranting about a technique turned into a guarded approval of it, and another little frustration with HTML 4.

I like HTML 4, it is a good language and the specification is generally good. There are, however, some bits which could do with some polish. The cite attribute is one, definition lists are another.

Another application of DL, for example, is for marking up dialogues, with each DT naming a speaker, and each DD containing his or her words.

But dialogues aren't terms and definitions. Why use a definition list for this? And does that mean they can be used for any purpose where you want to associate one or more bits of information with a heading? I'm not alone in my dislike of this.

What we need, in my opinion, is HTML 4.02. HTML5 is coming, but won't be ready for a good few years. In the meantime, the web might be a better place with a slightly polished HTML 4 which doesn't try to add new features, but just expresses the existing ones better.

Photo credit: Fountain pen by Bright Meadow used under a Creative Commons license