A few more tidbits on the Softbank Mobile turnaround, for which helped architect the mobile platform.

SoftBank phones have a “Y!”-button which links to Yahoo!-keitai. Yahoo-Keitai! offers a list of official sites, new services (e.g. a new communicator service), and also access to free mobile internet sites through the YAHOO directory, as well as access to YAHOO services, such as YAHOO-auctions.

-m

my new publishing technique is unstoppable – but why limit to blog posts?

GET Introspection URI
   scan the list of workspaces for the collection you want to post to
GET to Collection URI
   read the nice [atom] feed 
POST to the collection URI
   push an item formatted as [a nice atom entry]
GET or HEAD to item URI
   grab the item
PUT or DELETE to item URI
   change or delete the  item

-m

Congrats to Opera Mini on its first anniversary. I just installed it on my new SLVR, and the download is an astounding 98k. Why can’t more software be this lean? And yes, Y! search came as the default. -m

An easy to use UBL Editor. Has anyone tried it? -m

My second career as a hand model has been exposed, by a blog post from the guys behind Yahoo! Messenger. BTW, I have even more stickers now, including one of those Flickr stickrs seen in the shot. -m

P.S. The photo is credited to Yodel Anecdotal, which is another blog. Did anyone catch when that first showed up? URL anyone?

I’ve always had a thing for text analysis.

• the 352
• and 250
• to 225
• of 188
• in 118
• a 108
• we 100
• is 76
• our 75
• that 72

Source. -m

So, about a year ago, I wanted to use XPath 2.0 on a project. Turns out no non-toy, non-alpha versions existed except in Java land (where Saxon is quite good). Has the situation changed at all? Anything on the horizon? Libxml2? Anybody?? -m

A semi-random thought that occurred to me.

One marker of a well-designed markup language is that it looks to the future. This doesn’t mean it’s an amorphous blob of abstract indirections mapped to tags. It can (and arguably should) be concrete and solid, but designed in such a way that keeps bigger things in mind.

HTML and XHTML are, I suppose, canonical examples of this, giving birth to microformats and many other uses outside of a browser. -m

The nofollow setting on an outbound link should be a user-editable option, subject to the same community process that all other content on wikipedia already is. (Site guidelines, dispute resolution, restricted editing on certain articles for unregistered users, etc.) By default, links would get nofollow, but over time, they could be ‘blessed’, perhaps after a certain amount of time or human review. Wasn’t this how nofollow was supposed to work in the first place?
The community process works. Why maneuver around it? -m

In case you didn’t notice, a new XML Annoyances is out. From the first comment there:

markup typo
2007-01-11 18:58:33 Michael Dyck [Reply]

In the link following “same unofficial naming scheme as”, the attribute is missing its closing quote-mark, which (in my browser at least) causes a lot of the subsequent text (up to the next quote-mark) to be slurped in as the attribute value, effectively hiding it.
(Indeed, “well-formedness on the Web is dead”.)

This might be fixed by the time you read this, but indeed an interesting typo.

Update: I checked my original submitted article, and indeed there error isn’t there–it found its way in during the production process. But the interesting fact remains that it could happen in the first place 1) without causing any major problems, and 2) causing varied minor problems depending on the browser. -m

And a few not so open…

Q: Does the iPhone (or specifically the desktop-grade Safari browser) make the “mobile web” obsolete?

A: The “mobile web”, as we know it today, will become obsolete without any help. Things change. Devices improve. That said, the context in which one uses the web is different, and there will always be a need for some sites to have mobile-specific versions, even after the day every mobile browser is desktop-grade.

Q: Does the advent of desktop-grade mobile browsers mean that today’s mobile development is meaningless?

A: No. The race is on today, and the winners will be those who can make the most users happy. That includes users who–for several more years–won’t own hardware capable of desktop-grade browsers. The winner on this playing field will have any easy momentum play to carry over to the next one.
Q: Will the iPhone “cannabalize” iPod sales?

A: Goodness, no. People who buy one will be either 1) buying it instead of an iPod, or 2) not. The Cingular CEO said it was a “multi-year exclusive” deal, signed sight unseen. In other words, Apple had incredible leverage to get a good deal. Their subsidy on the 2-year contract is probably significant, maybe in the $300 range, possibly a lot more. So would you call selling a $800-900 device instead of a $200 one cannabalization?

Q: What does this mean for XHTML-MP and XHTML Basic?

A: That’s a tough question. In the end, it will boil down to momentum. Today’s successful mobile development necessarily involves XHTML. Once browsers get better, nobody is going to re-write their sites in worse markup, though some might attempt to merge with the main site. (Another open User Experience Design question is the degree to which it will be possible for one site to work in a different, mobile, context.)

Q: What does this mean for Mobile Web Best Practice and mobileOK?
A: Like the “mobile web” both of these specs-in-progress will become obsolete without help. But now they are going to look increasingly obsolete at an accerated rate.

-m

(Press release) Starting today, Y! is the exclusive search partner for Opera Mini across more than 100 countries. The release also names “oneSearch”, going live later in Q1–definitely something to keep an eye on. -m

Here’s a great new project on Sourceforge: XForms for UBL. In my book, I started in on something like this. Here is a more complete, more up-to-date, fleshed out solution. -m

I have a question for the mobile geniuses out there. What’s the difference (if any) between inputmode=”latin digits” and inputmode=”user digits”?

Will browsers treat these differently? How so? Which ones? Answer in the comment section below.
Thanks! -m