So the W3C has officially ceased work on the next iteration of the XHTML standard, abandoning it in favour of the new and shiny HTML 5. I have some mixed opinions on this, since the simplifying purist in me likes the consistency and rigour provided by XHTML, but HTML 5 appeals to my more pragmatic instincts. HTML 5 also has support for a slew of nice semantic tags, like <section>, <article>, <header> and <footer>, which should make it easier and cleaner to style documents according to their content, and do away with the ubiquitous <div id="blogpost"> constructs that currently make up most sites.
Since I'd hate to be left behind when the HTML 5 rapture arrives, I have started converting this site to use the proposed standard. Of course, browser support for HTML 5 tags is minimal at this point, but there are some workarounds. All block elements, for example, need to be defined in CSS as display: block. Interestingly, where certain versions Internet Explorer previously tried, and failed terribly, at rendering this page, using the new HTML 5 elements actually improves the site display, because currently no version of IE even tries to style unknown tags appropriately. The result is that the page displays in a simplified and entirely unexpected way, but one that actually allows you to read the content, as opposed to a garbled mess where large swathes of the page are not visible. And people complain that there's no progress.
In any case, please let me know if any worthwhile browsers render things funny.
A few days ago there were reports that Korea, already a leader in
telecommunications infrastructure, would be pursuing plans to provide 1 Gbps
Internet connectivity across the country by 2012. An excerpt from the Slashdot
summary:
The entire country is gearing up to have 1 Gbps service by
2012, or at least that is what the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) is
claiming. 'Currently, Koreans can get speeds up to 100 Mbps, which is still
nearly double the speed of Charter's new 60 Mbps service. The new plan by the
KCC will cost 34.1 trillion ($24.6 billion USD) over the next five years. The
central government will put up 1.3 trillion won, with the remainder coming
from private telecom operators.
Now, whenever facts like this are mentioned, people ask why we in Canada
and the US are stuck with paltry two to ten Mbps connections that also suffer
from ISP bandwidth throttling and traffic shaping policies. Usually at least one
response points out that the US and Canada are vastly larger countries, and it
is therefore not economically feasible to cover the entire country in high-speed
fibre-optic links. An unusually mild example is this comment to the Slashdot story:
Korea is roughly 1/100th the size of the US. If we estimate a
similar plan in the US based on size only, it would cost $2.46 trillion USD.
The Korean government is paying 1.3 trillion of the 34.1 total (or roughly
4%). If the US government did something similar, it would be about $100
billion USD.
Population, not area
Although the above argument is technically correct, it confuses coverage of
landmass with coverage of people. The fact is, there is no
need to provide high speed internet to vast tracts of US and Canadian
wilderness, or even rural, regions. There are inhabited areas in both
countries that have no broadband connectivity whatsoever, and likely more than
a few villages that lack even dial-up. The point of expanding the capabilities
of North American Internet infrastructure is not to provide
everywhere with high-speed connections, but to provide them to as
many people as possible. Focussing on the densely populated metropolitan
centres of both countries reveals what a specious argument comparing areas
is.
First, some background statistics to frame the discussion: The area of
South Korea is almost exactly 100,000 square km. The US and Canada cover
approximately 9,826,600 and 9,984,700 square km, respectively. The estimated
population of the US is a shade under 306 million, while Canada is home to 33
and a half million souls. The GDP of Korea is just under one trillion US$; the
US's a bit more than 14 trillion, and Canada's is almost exactly one tenth of
that, at 1.4 trillion.
If the US government and telecoms would invest in providing a similar level
of coverage to just the five most populated cities and surrounding areas (New
York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Philadelphia), it would
represent an area of 85,966 square kilometres (so, well under the area of
Korea), and would provide coverage to 53,189,247 people. Furthermore, there
are a number of areas that I suspect state governments and even local
corporations would be willing to help finance the buildout; San Diego, Irvine,
and San Francisco come to mind, as do Washington D.C. and Seattle. On top of
that, if we use GDP as a very rough measure of the relative investment
potential of the two nations, it seems clear that the US should be able to
afford an investment around 15 times as large in the first place. Adding up
all these factors, it's clear that the US could easily afford to extend
coverage well beyond those five areas, and provide coverage to many millions
more, as well as most of the country's technology hubs.
In Canada, the situation is even more extreme. The top five metropolitan
areas (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Calgary), cover just 24,687
square kilometres, and contain just over 13 million of Canada's 33 and a half
million inhabitants. In other words, almost 40% of the population in less than
a quarter of South Korea's area. Extending coverage to the top ten
municipalities would likely produce quickly diminishing returns, but would
probably still encompass less territory than the Korean plan, while providing
coverage to over half the population. Given that Canada's GDP is roughly 1.5
times that of South Korea, the proportional size of the investment would be
even smaller.
No need to go overboard
Now, 1 Gbps may be an investment in the future, but in this context one
must certainly mean the distant future; for the fact is that 1 Gbps is not
just extremely fast, it is gratuitously fast. To put it in
perspective, a network connection of that speed would be able to
simultaneously carry between 50 and 200 HDTV channels (depending on quality
and compression). An investment in Canada or the US to provide connectivity at
100 Mbps (the current Korean high-end class of connectivity) would require a
much lower cost, while still providing connections 10 to 50 times faster than
the current residential standard of 2 to 10 Mbps. I'd settle for that. So why
doesn't it happen?