ANM.: Belege, Fussnoten und ausfuehhrlichere Anfuehrungen von Daten (Stand Mitte 1998) wie in URL http://www.inti.be/hammer/access3.htm - in der ueberarbeiteten (Druck-)Fassung des Texts sind die richtigen Einhaengungen leider verschuett gegangen ! Da die Korrektur zu viel Zeit brauchte, die ich in dem Augenblick nicht hatte, werden die englischen endnotes hier erst mal angehaengt; immerhin ist die Reihenfolge einigermassen synchron zum Text: ===================== Notes: ===================== (1) Uwe Afemann, Internet - another panacea to solve the world's problems ? http://www.rz.uni-osnabrueck.de/rz/special/misc/inet-3w/inet-3w.htm (2) First standards for HTTP were established (by ITU) in 1992, for WWW using HTML in 1993 (by the predecessor of the now standardising body, W3C or World Wide Web Consortium). After sufficiently many "Internet Service Providers" (ISP), i.e. points of access to the Net by individual users, had installed HTTP - and after sufficiently many ISP had established and offered dial-up access publicly -, the year of 1994 is now considered as the break-through date for the Web. (3) Historically and functionally, HTTP has merely been a specific, standardised set of commands for file retrieval according to the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) long existing; only the (usually) coupled application of a program which interpretes the mark-up (in HTML) of the text file thus retrieved, constitutes the specific category of (Inter)Net use. The basic functions of Net use are: Telnet (use of the basic Internet protocol, TCP/IP, and a packet driver on the individual client side, of a simple BBS-like, quasi-direct telecommunication connection) SMTP (Mail send/receive), later POP3 NNTP (Newsgroups messages retrieval) FTP (file transfer and retrieval) Gopher (an FTP based, menu-driven file retrieval system depending on servers responding to the specific client demands; has been marginalised by HTTP/WWW use - and server set-ups - despite its faster and much less cumbersome file/content transfer capability) Finger, and Ping/ICMP IRC ("chat" via keyboard, originally as a mode of Telnet use) Server functions: -- Time (& Daytime synchronisation) (ISP or backbone) -- Address/Domain name resolving -- Routing (the most important of all, costituing the "net" property) HTTP (and additionally, on the server side, CGI) i.e. processing of WWW addresses and client/server demands; all additional task of WWW/HTML, including processing of audio-visual elements, are strictly browser dependent presentations of HTTP-transported files on the client side. (4) http://www.mids.org/press/pr9701.html (5) The whole industry, and even regulatory bodies like the EU Commission or the ITU, expect unbroken optmistic increases of lines and channels to be available, and of exponential growth of transfer volumes (in terms of content as well as monetary value). Some scepticism seems appropriate though - taking the example of mobile telephones, the "population" of users was almost completely recruited from the one already connected to conventional telephone networks. Real new recruitment concerned economical elites in infrastructure deprevated regions with comparably high popolation density - capital cities in some African countries, Eastern Europe - where conventional telephone systems have broken down. (6) Shane Greenstein, Universal Service in the Digital Age. Conference paper, Symposium on The Impact of the Internet on Communications Policy, Harvard Information Infrastructure Project, Dec. 4-5, 1997 http://ksgwww.harvard.edu/iip/iicompol/Papers/Greenstein.html (7) Rather ridiculous examples may be found, of all places, at the "text_only" www-sources for the BBC's "Newsroom", the textual presentation of news features of the British BBC World Service radio(!). (Wrong) use of the HTML-"Table" elements, of colour attributes and the like, bloat the text of a simple news feature from 4,304 bytes to a 49,734 bytes HTML "document" to be downloaded. A sober - and appropriate - HTML mark-up would hardly add more than some hundred bytes to the original. Ever so, a random sample of HTML marked-up text items from that same source showed an increase of a quarter of the byte volume by the HTML-marks alone, and and increase of more than 300 per cent in volume between the the sheer text content of items - certainly line- and paragraph-formatted for good readability on a screen - and the final HTML-marked up page. (cf http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.htm) (8) Another example of inherent irrational development may be seen with other recent technological innovations, fax and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The motive to develop OCR and its primary use for humans, it would seem, should be the access of the blind to written sources. It is not; its "economical" raison d'etre is to re-transform printed characters which originally had been stored and presented as bytes and transformed to print style, into stored bytes again. Almost amusing is the process where "word-processing" equipment and software is used to produce paper sheets which then are transmitted from a fax machine to another only to be read in by OCR hard-&-software there again in order to be "processed", read and stored. A global economical assessment might be rather damaging, not to speak of incidental ecological charges to our limited resources (bloat of paper consumption in general, and of that of the environmentally dangerous fax paper in particular). The perfectly appropriate technology of the first-generations PCs would do the job probably for a fraction of total "costs", and without the additional equipment for OCR. It may be reminded that these are real, social costs: resources spent on the means of organisation of our societies are taken from the available surplus value of productive work, and they are lost for other, meaningful employment, even if some (minor) parts of the economy - say, paper, fax, and scanner producers - may have their particular profit from it. (9) ARPA, the US-military network of linked (computer-)information sources, certainly had the function to serve a power-centered and hierarchical institution originally - even if this was a "public", but nontheless secrecy-obsessed one. Its very contruction however, as a completly decentralised, non- (or even anti-)hierarchical system made it nearly "by nature" a public thing. Once opened, the public of that time accepted it as such and contributed, again in a totally decentralised way, to its development and expansion. Much of what followed then may be interpreted as a permanent attempt to catch and cage the swarming birds (cf. the debate on privacy and censorship, concisely resumed in that respect in Katja Diefenbach, Kontrolle, Kulturalisierung, Neoloberalismus, in: P.Schultz, Ed., Netzkritik. Berlin: Edition-ID-Archiv 1997) (10) A tentative classification of "key actors" could look like this: -- owners/administrators of physical infrastructure: -- basic infrastucture -- telcos -- backbones/nodes (big) servers -- ISPs=interfaces -- (smaller/local)servers -- regulators: -- on infrastructure (basic/technical telco functions) -- on material access -- (at first) by public instances: administrations, universities, libraries -- on their material support (i.e., budget authorities) -- on physical inter-operablity (ITU) -- on software interoperability (ISO/W3C,ITU,...) -- on "content" (public legislators/judiciary) -- hardware/software producers -- for intermediary use (ISPs/backbones) -- terminal/end-user use (machines as well as applications) (11) The "" element of HTML mark-up has in all versions clearly been defined for what is says, the ordered row/colums presentation of (variable but volume restricted) tables, and has been recommended to not be used for general page-layout tasks. This is arguably the most abused mark-up tools of all though, and it plays havoc with screen readers for Braille output. But this is very much a problem of professionalism of web site designers, and a task for supervision by their superiors. (12) Which is patently wrong - "FRAMEs" can be read by even the most primitive versions of text/line browsers sequentially, so this should not be used as a pretext to bar access to their contents. However, the - "legal" and standardised - procedure allone of the web site server to identify the type of client (the name/type of the browser used by a visitor) raises a number of more fundamental questions of privacy, personal data identity/determination and more (not to speak of "proprietary" properties of servers to use "proprietary" qualities of a client's browser to manipulate the client's machine, like "cookies"). Of quite another nature is the argument about how far a Web designer can or may determine the complete end-product of "presentation" on a client's screen. The intention to make it come out "best" - in terms of presumptions of the clients' browser capacities - is equally legitimate as the users' choice of browser programs (or ability to choose/employ such). Under condition of equal footing this would not produce a problem of basic accessibility, as both sides could balance advantages of "better" screen presentation for secondary attributes. (13) There is a factual, but slowly less rigid link between hardware equipment and software employment specificly in respect of the basic operationg system with INDIVIDUAL PCs. Because of the INTEL CPUs' memory addressing limits and modes, PCs of the pre-80386 type could not use alternative operating systems to the Microsoft-DOS or MS-Windows(=DOS) type (though there had been and there are alternative, MS-DOS compatible OSs, which by-pass those problems - but the later NS/MS browsers never were adapted to them). Apple, with its "Macintosh" the main alternative of hardware-plus-OS stand-alone PCs, saw a steady decline of its market share, from about 15 % of NEW PCs sold in the beginning of the '90ies to about half of that in later years (but less so in absolute numbers), and in any event the NS/MS browsers were always late to be adapted to the Apple-Macintosh OS. IBM's own, new "OS/2" only came off the ground, and rather slowly, with the "Pentium" CPU generation. The UNIX-type OS was designed from the beginning for "big" computers, using individual PCs only as (relatively "dumb") end-user terminals, connected mostly (at first) via Local Area Networks (LANs) of the Ethernet type and pertinent additional hard- and software (from another near-monopoly, Novell) - but basically any DOS-run PC could serve in this environment, and connected to the large university networks, still to-day quite a large number do, but these are unaccounted for in any statistics. LINUX, a completely non-commercially developed UNIX-type (and compatible) OS however, has gained steadily ground on the user-side, but again this is mostly unaccounted for in the usual "market"-statistics of PC-sales with an OS installed (users just replace that with the nearly cost-free LINUX); UNIX/LINUS does require at least the past-1992 generation of INTEL 80386 CPUs however. All this boils down to a rather steady share of non-MS-DOS equipped "sales of new PCs" in the range of 15 % of the total; with an overall increase of that total. Only in that respect the publicity claim of Microsoft of having 85 % of PCs "installed" with their OS (and until now, all "Windows" versions are MS-DOS based too) may be true. It does not say anything about how and with what OS, and if, with what "Graphical User Interface" (GUI, for instance MS-"Windows) these PCs then effectively are run - a rather recent report, based much on Microsoft/CH's own data, concludes that "about half of all" PCs in Switzerland are run under MS-"Windows" and MS-"Windows-NT" (WochenZeitung, Zurich: 8.1.98). According to the French Microsoft office, after a first year of "Windows-95" sales "43 % of new PCs sold" were equipped with that software. (De Morgen, Brussels: 23.8.96) (14) The first was quoted from Microsoft publicity in a commentary of the "Gaurdian" newspaper at the occasion of the anti-trust procedure then in course in the USA, the second quotes the then newest update of the publicity page of Caldera, an independent DOS operation systems producer; both date from the last week of December, 1997. (15) Giaco Schiesser, conference paper (Luzern, 26.5.95); in: WochenZeitung, Zurich, 2.8.96; and in: H. N. Mueller (Ed.), Umwelt und Kommunikation, Bern 1996. Schiesser and other authors quote EPA (US Environment Protection Agency) papers and those from a German Bundestag enquete commission (parliamentary enquiry in preparation of recycling legislation for electronic equipment scrap) of 1995/96. (16) Marco Soldera, Oeko-Computer, Gebensdorf CH), 1995 (cit. "C'T" 10, Hannover: October 1996, p.104). Andreas Grote, Oekobilanz, in: "C'T" 12, Hannover: December 1994. Compaq Vice-President Kurt Dobitsch, in: "C'T" 10, Hannover: October 1996 p.90. (17) "C'T" 4, Hannover: April 1996, p.126 (18) IPS, cit. De Morgen, Brussels: 30.7.96 (19) In that respect, even "pro-wiring" biased estimates by institutions like the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) might lag behind in their (low) assessments of Third World, and specificly African, PC-densisity. (20) www.datatestlab.com, cit. De Morgen, Brussels: 11.7.97; requests for details resulted however in that the data given was said to have come from a Reuters news item, and could not be traced more precisely. (21) Commission of the European Community, Imformation Market Observatory: European Information Trends; http://www2.echo.lu/imo/en/trend96/ (publicly available since Nov. 1997 only). The accumulated calculation for "Hausholds with (PC and) modems", and for "European online services: Numbers of Subscribers" are given for - '000 Hh./w. MODEM[1] '000 Subscribers[2] (Online Serv.) France 170 124 5 Germany 2 000 1 435 3 Italy 213 60 1 Great Britain 682 570 3 (total) (3 065) (2 189) Sources given: [1] Jupiter Communications [2] Financial Times Typically, "Online Services" exclusively named commercial providers and did not consider semi-public access (e.g., universities, libraries) or publicly available, non-commarcial access accounts (eg. the rather large networks like APC in GB, Comlink in Germany); not to speak of those interlinked BBS networks which, like the FIDO or Zerberus networks, at that time offered already all Internet functions but WWW access (and some of them even that). (22) Academie-Data, Essen: Press release (december 1997). (23) Afemann (cf. Fn.1), quoting "Net Wizard", http://www.nw.com/zone/WWW/report.html (24) This is rather absurd particlularly in Germany where the mail-order market for the substantial private/individual use of PCs is much more developed than in France or Belgium, where PC sales to a much higher degree are oriented towards the "office" use. (25) From a usenet discussion, Tue, 15 Jul 1997: "Subject: Re: Discrimination of non-illiterates >> Installing WINDOWS in an office is illegal... it violates the >> "Americans With Disabilities Act" in that though the pretty >>pictures for the illeterate are nice... The blind can't read >>them and have to have a TEXT based system such as DOS. > >Is this real (or wishful thinking) ? Has there been a (test) case ? At the moment it's both. The law is real, but nobody has tested it yet. So far companies like LOTUS (makers of 1-2-3) have managed to buy off the victims of WINDOWS in their offices far as I know. But considering the damage that windows is doing to me (Server carpal tunnell made much worse by using that stupid electronic rodent) I'd love to see it happen. Oh, yes... There are a few attornies on INTERNET and most of them (all the ones who have responded in fact) feel it might be a good case. Emphasis is on the word MIGHT however." Note: There are precedences of disabilities-related, or outright disabling cases. The "Financial Times" for instance had nearly a third of editorial staff affected by RSI, had to pay heavy indemnities for some permanent cases and was forced to replace the used corporate system with ergonomically harmful screen hardware (and screen presentation software) and keyboard equipment. Cases like these are considered relevant for later procedures on disabl*ING* conditions.- Germany has a constitutional provision (article 3, para 3 of the "Grundgesetz", a directly appliccable clause against discrimination on grounds of disabilities or handicaps) but despite of some 12 to 15 thousand blind computer users, there had been no testcase (yet). (26) An example e.a., is the EU Commission server for press releases, http://europa.eu.int/en/comm/spp/rapid.htm. The European (ministerial) Council (http://ue.eu.int/angl/newsroom.htm) sends text-only using clients to the commercial site of Netscape to download and install that browser first in order to access the (pure text, and all text) content of its official communications. (27) Denis McCann, Information Resources Manager, Spokesman's Service, European Commission: Note on Access to RAPID, Brussels 21 Apr 1997 (28) Webmaster of a Flemish regional government host site in Belgiun, 12 Oct 1997. (29) Usegroup posting, 01 Nov 1997. (30) Usegroup posting, 20 Apr 1997. (31) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Briefing Package, February, 1997. http://www.w3.org/pub/www/Disabilities (32) W3C Recommendation on HTML-4.0, 18 Dec 1997: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40-971218 (33) Press Release, W3C Launches international Program Office for WAI. Washington D.C: 22 Oct 1997 (http://www.w3.org/WAI/)