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Until 2004, the Odeon Cinemas UK listings website was a horrible Javascript-dependent mess which wasn't accessible to the disabled (and so broke the law). So a guy called Matthew Somerville did a “proxy” version of the site; his server downloaded pages from odeon.co.uk and fixed them before passing them on.
Sadly, Odeon had a sense of humour failure, sent him a cease-and-desist letter on the basis of copyright infringement and shut him down. Another example of Matthew's work, his version of the national rail timetable search site, is still available – and better than the official one.
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More recently, both the desire and ability to remix have been fired by a Firefox extension called Greasemonkey. Once Greasemonkey gets its oily little paws into a web page, it can twist, tweak and transform it in any number of ways, enabled by the power of the Firefox rendering engine.
Each set of changes Greasemonkey can make is controlled by a user script, which it runs automatically whenever you visit the script's target site. For example, it can remove that eye-watering shade of pink that your estate agent has unwisely chosen as its signature colour, or can turn anything which looks like a postcode into a link to maps.yahoo.com.
In other words, it builds the page-changing capability into each user's computer. So even if the site owner doesn't like it, who are they going to sue? There's no copyright infringement that any court would recognise. And the customisation is personal – if you like the estate agent's pink, but wish he'd put the high-resolution images of the houses directly into the listings page instead of into a separate pop-up window, you can remix the site a different way to me and fix the problems which bother you.
So how does the estate agent react? Well, hopefully he'll see both the problem and the opportunity. On the one hand, people hate his colour scheme enough to sit down and write code so they don't have to see it. On the other hand, his customers like the service he is providing enough to do something other than just go elsewhere. So, if he's smart, he'll seriously consider a rebranding.
The Odeon story had a happy ending of this kind; the proxy was reborn as a Greasemonkey extension, and eventually the company listened to the market and the law – the Odeon site is now fully accessible.
The web is a mutable medium. If you provide a web service, expect it to be rejigged, remixed and reinvented by your customers. And if you’re clever you'll watch what they are doing and learn from it. Power to the people!
Gervase Markham works for the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the internet. His blog is Hacking For Christ
