I think we need a “moral maze” for technology. If you don’t know the Moral Maze, it’s a BBC Radio 4 programme in which a highbrow panel quizzes specialists on a divisive topic — say, whether animal-human hybrid embryos should be banned, or whether growing biofuels is defensible if it raises food prices — and tries to draw out the keys to the argument.
Well, I think we need the same thing for technology — the ‘Technological Maze’— but not for trivial stuff like “What camera should I buy?” or “What’s all this porn doing on my computer?” but “Is Windows too complex?” or “why have web standards if a growing number of people aren’t using browsers that meet them?”
Uncommon Windows?
The question of Windows seems increasingly important. The fact that Vista is unbelievably complex is a given: the metric of however many million lines of code it includes is often taken as a direct measure of its complexity. But of course that’s not close. In a system such as Windows, which has lots of interacting elements, it’s not the total number of lines, nor even the total number of elements that indicates its complexity but the total number of interactions among the elements and that rises geometrically, not arithmetically.
Vista is already less complex than it could have been. When still codenamed Longhorn, it was to have included much more detailed desktop search. But James Allchin realised, some time in 2004, that all that had been planned for Longhorn couldn’t be implemented the way it was being planned — using Microsoft’s .Net 2.0 programming framework — and strode into Bill Gates’s office to tell him it should be done using the successful Windows Server 2003 codebase.
Although Gates resisted, he saw sense, leading to what is now known as the “reset” in Longhorn’s development. Complexity was cut down. But it’s still there. What’s worrying is that this giant edifice of code is sure to have rats’ nests of code, in part because Microsoft has never, ever been able to cut off its past in the way that Apple has in its move from its “classic” OS9 to Mac OS X.
Microsoft can’t cater for all the devices that may be attached and hardware configurations it may find and in some cases the software authors just can’t be bothered to rewrite for Vista. Complexity is strangling Windows. Can it find its way out of that maze?
You’ll find complexity online, too, where the team behind the Opera browser and Apple’s WebKit rendering engine hitting the finish line to declare themselves at 100% compliance with the Acid3 test, the latest piece of fiendish HTML dreamed up by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Cascading style sheets
What is Acid3? Well, obviously, it’s the one after Acid2, which was about how well a browser laid out a horrendously complex piece of HTML including the Cascading Style Sheets From Hell. Acid3 is like that, only worse; apparently the Mozilla Foundation, makers of Firefox, aren’t impressed, because the W3C’s Ian Hixie sought out layout devices that didn’t work in Gecko, WebKit and Opera. “It’s not about establishing a baseline of useful web capabilities,” is one complaint. No, it’s just about making it even harder to design a rendering engine.
But here again, the real world doesn’t much care. Almost every web page online is imperfect, if you go by the W3C’s criteria. The complexity has outgrown the ability of the people who use and develop it to keep up with the twists and turns. If you’re not using Opera or Safari, you may find that your browser doesn’t meet the Acid2 test either.
The question then becomes, is any of that extra complexity adding anything useful to the web? Or is it just makework for rendering engine developers, like making them crowd more angels onto the head of a pin? We’re deep, deep in the Technological Maze, and all around us are twisty passages leading in all directions. I’m not sure though that we can find a way out of this one in half an hour.
Which only goes to show how much more complex technology is than morality.
