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There’s something about the Diggbroglio that has left me scratching my head: how is it that so many people are up in arms about the DiggBar when they’ve had nothing to say about the framing bars of StumbleUpon, FaceBook, etc. etc.?

Now, please note that I’m not saying the DiggBar, or any other framing bar, is cool and we should all love it. I’m not. I absolutely, completely, totally get all the reasons why framing bars are bad for breaking bookmarking and navigating and search engines and copyright and hijacking content and so on. But that’s precisely why I’m so confused, because we’ve known for years now that framing bars are bad mojo—and yet StumbleUpon, for example, is based on bars. There is a browser extension/plugin StumbleUpon thingy you can install, but there’s also a web-based framing bar thing (see this link, for example) that they offer, and I bet people use. You don’t have to be a member to use it: I hit that link in a browser that allows cross-site frame loading and I get the bar and the page it’s framing, and I’ve never been a StumbleUpon member. The source shows it’s using iframes to make it happen. So far as I can tell, it’s not really different from the DiggBar.

So why do we have people writing JavaScript and PHP and Ged-knows-what-else that specifically busts out of the DiggBar framing, instead of busting out of all framing? After all, site framing is universally agreed to be objectionable; even yet-to-be-discovered life forms orbiting distant stars think it’s a bad idea. So why is one instance of it being targeted while the rest are tolerated? Why are we all not just using if (top != self) {top.location.replace(self.location.href);} and other-language equivalents? Yes, I know, some of you do just that, but why isn’t everyone?

Perhaps because I have yet to eradicate a stubborn streak of faith in the rationality of my peers, I assume that there’s some technical difference here that I’m missing and that, once understood, would let me understand the source of the outcry. So can someone please explain to me, or point at an explanation that states, the technical ways in which the DiggBar is worse enough than already-extant framing bars that it’s triggered this outrage? Again, nobody has to enumerate the complete list of the DiggBar’s sins; I understand. A list of any different and more egregious sins would be just fine, though.

Also, if anyone comes up with a way to bust out of the frames while still preserving the bar—that is, correcting the problems framing bars cause while preserving their functionality for the people who want to use them—that would be extra-cool. After all, people who use those services like the bars. If we could let them browse the web the way they prefer while fixing bookmark/SEO/etc. problems framing bars can cause, that would be a win all the way around.

Update 14 Apr 09: looks like Porter’s trying to keep the bar without the framing.

Update 16 Apr 09: in his post about Digg changing the way the DiggBar will work, John Gruber lists (by way of quoting Digg VP John Quinn’s post about it) the two things that made the DiggBar extra-objectionable (at least in his eyes). Thanks, John!

I was reading an article on cosmology, as I am sometimes wont to do, and it brought back to me one of those questions that I’ve had for a while now, concerning the redshifting of light from distant galaxies as it relates to the history and expansion of the universe.

For those of you not familiar with this topic, the general idea here is that when we look at galaxies outside our own, the light they give off is shifted toward the redder end of the electromagnetic spectrum, which means the wavelengths are getting longer. According to our present understanding of physics, the simplest explanation for this observation that the further away a galaxy is, the faster it is receding from us—thus redshifting the light it gives off, thanks to the Doppler effect. It turns out that the amount of redshifting is directly and linearly proportional to the distance of the galaxy, a ratio named the Hubble constant in honor of Edwin Hubble, the man who first made this observation. (He’s also the namesake of the Hubble Space Telescope, of course.)

It seems to me that this explanation either overlooks or glosses over one kind of important point: we don’t see those galaxies as they are right now. In fact, we’re seeing them as they were in the past, and the further out we look, the further back in time we’re looking. If a galaxy is a five million light-years distant, then we see it as it was five million years ago. Double the distance, and double the amount of time involved, which would seem to mean that greater redshifts are as much a product of how far back in time we’re looking as they are distance.

So why is it that distance is regarded as the primary factor here? Why don’t we assume that the universe’s expansion is actually slowing down, given that the closer things are (and therefore the more recent they are), the less quickly they’re receding, whereas the really distant (and therefore much, much older) galaxies were receding more quickly back then?

I’ve no doubt this has been explained one way or another by people way smarter than me, but some Googling yielded no decent results—just about everything I came up with challenged the Hubble constant on various and sundry grounds, not all of them sensical (at least to me). Nothing I found addressed this specifically. Though I figure the explanation is straightforward enough, I don’t seem to be using the right search terms to find it. Anyone got any help for me here?