Ed Murphy wrote: >How many people have reasonable access to Flash Player these days?
I found that requirement unacceptable. I eschew graphical web browsers for a variety of reasons, chief among them the submission to external authority, the hideous user interfaces, and the security problems. I don't have a standalone Flash player, and even if I did I'd be wary of it because of some of the same issues. I did not in fact run the proffered Flash program. HTML is one thing. Flash is quite another. I also urge the panel (and any future singleton judge) to consider the principle of whether it's acceptable to require the retrieval of message content (not just generic viewing instructions) from an external source. If it's taken to be acceptable then we will no doubt have future issues with web pages that return different data to different viewers, along with the obvious archival problem of external data not being available indefinitely. I believe the best interests of the game require that message content be contained, in full, in the message that is actually published. I also think that's required by a straight interpretation of the rules, but there seems to be some public doubt on that point. I also wish to point out that the purpose of a URI is to identify a resource, *not* to carry data in itself. (The "data" URI scheme is an arguable exception, as it contains the referenced resource in its entirety, but I claim even this is still a reference rather than the resource itself.) Presenting an unadorned URI has information content roughly equivalent to an exclamation of "Elephant!", or, arguably, "WALRUS!" in the situation recently considered by CFJ 1840. It is a noun phrase, not a statement. I claim that a URI on its own doesn't make sufficiently clear what one is meant to do with it in order to interpret it as part of a message. Much of the argument in this case has been about which thing should be done with URI, including the ludicrous choice of ignoring its semantic meaning and picking out parts of the character sequence in which it is expressed. The obvious resolution to this problem is that a URI on its own is uninterpretable. -zefram
