OK, let me take a step back from specific technologies like RDFa, let’s go through a really simple example.

On a certain web page, I refer to a book. That book has a price of 21.86 US dollars. The page is intended as primarily human-readable, but I want to include machine-readable data too, for a global audience.
What would you do? What specific markup choices would you make? What specific markup would you use? -m

Depending on who’s asking and who’s answering, W3C technologies take 5 to 10 years to get a strong foothold. Well, we’re now in the home stretch for the 5th anniversary of XForms Essentials, which was published in 2003. In past conferences, XForms coverage has been maybe a low-key tutorial, a few day sessions, and hallway conversation. I’m pleased to see it reach new heights this year.

XForms evening is on Monday December 3 at the XML 2007 conference, and runs from 7:30 until 9:00 plus however ERH takes on his keynote. :) The scheduled talks are shorter and punchier, and feature a lot of familiar faces, and a few new ones (at least to me). I’m looking forward to it–see you there! -m

I’ll be doing some experimenting around here over maybe the next week or two. Specifically, setting up hAtom within these pages. Watch for falling debris and report any unusual observations. -m

It’s a common need to parse space-separated attribute values from XPath/XSLT 1.0, usually @class or @rel. One common (but incorrect) technique is simple equality test, as in {@class=”vcard”}. This is wrong, since the value can still match and still have other literal values, like “foo vcard” or “vcard foo” or ” foo vcard bar “.

The proper way is to look at individual tokens in the attribute value. On first glance, this might require a call to EXSLT or some complex tokenization routine, but there’s a simpler way. I first discovered this on the microformats wiki, and only cleaned up the technique a tiny bit.

The solution involves three XPath 1.0 functions, contains(), concat() to join together string fragments, and normalize-space() to strip off leading and trailing spaces and convert any other sequences of whitespace into a single space.

In english, you

• normalize the class attribute value, then
• concatenate spaces front and back, then
• test whether the resulting string contains your searched-for value with spaces concatenated front and back (e.g. ” vcard “

Or {contains(concat(‘ ‘,normalize-space(@class),’ ‘),’ vcard ‘)} A moment’s thought shows that this works well on all the different examples shown above, and is perhaps even less involved than resorting to extension functions that return nodes that require further processing/looping. It would be interesting to compare performance as well…

So next time you need to match class or rel values, give it a shot. Let me know how it works for you, or if you have any further improvements. -m

Video from XTech, worth a look. -m

Go check it out. It even has a Tidy option to clean up the markup. But they missed an important feature: it should include an option to run Tidy on the markup first then validate. This is becoming the defacto bar for web page validity anyway… -m

James Clark is blogging. A few zillion people have already mentioned this.

A slightly tangent observation: I had trouble reading through an entire article in web form, but had no problems returning later to the atom feed. At first I chalked it up to early morning grogginess, but it seems to be a repeatable phenomenon at all hours, at least for me.

So a double thanks to James for publishing a full feed.

How about you: do you have an easier time reading long form articles in a feed reader vs. a browser?  Do you prefer feed reader vs. browser for this blog? Comment below. -m

Here’s a great comparison site. Try out some searches you might run from your phone and let me know: which one did you prefer? Why? -m

Today Yahoo! launched oneSearch on their other front page, m.yahoo.com. OneSearch has been available for a while, but only from within Yahoo! Go. Now it’s available to millions of mobile devices equipped with a data connection and XHTML browser.

The basic premise behind oneSearch is to replace the tri-modal search box, where you have to say whether you are searching the web, local, or images, with a single all-knowing search box. Available context information, such as your zip code, is used to guide the search. Internally, the application is smart about figuring out what kind of things you might be looking for. For example, someone searching for “pizza” in a mobile context is probably more interested in a list of restaurants (with reviews) than in a list of hyperlinks. Behind the simplicity of a single search box, there is a great deal of work going on to make your life easier.
Ever since Yahoo! Go betas (and gammas) started coming out, folks have been asking me how else they could get access to this application. Now it’s easy.

Not too long ago, the front page relaunched simultaneously in 19 countries. The new design was simple, and based on a new platform called Sushi, as mentioned in published sources. OneSearch shows off the power of this approach, even though this launch didn’t cover 19 countries…yet. (Getting access to local data for movies, restaurants, sporting events, and so on is no small feat.)

As I said before, this is only a small part of an overall strategy that has been years in the making. Much more to come. Watch this space. -m

Big surprise, huh? More evidence that the XML namspaces spec is out of touch with the reality of developers ‘on the street’, a.k.a. it has cracks in the foundation.

I disagree that aggregator developers are “bozonic”, as the title of the first cited article indicates. Why should any developer need to keep all that extra complexity bouncing around in their head? Optimize for people first, machines second. -m

OK, RESTafarians and HTTP experts, here’s a question. Is it kosher to send a Location: header back with an ordinary, say 200, response?

Scenario: the server knows better than the client what the client needs. ‘I realize you asked for http://foo.com/x, but instead I’m sending you http://foo.com/y — ready or not, here it comes..’
-m

Spotted under the headline Windows Live Search for Mobile Goes Final, Still Great (like they were expecting it to suddenly plummet in quality?) on Gizmodo. It’s a 114k jar file that runs on my SLVR, where Yahoo! Go isn’t yet available yet, so points for that. Search suggestions show as you type, hugely useful on a klunky 9-key entry situation. They use an interesting UI to hold search results, densely packed–6 down the screen–with a status bar on top, and each search result marquee-scrolling back-and-forth as needed. A detail page can zap you in to map mode or set up a call.

My standard test search–a little offbeat but still plausible–for mead near Sunnyvale produced disappointing results. The meadery within walking distance didn’t show, and of the top 6, two were duplicates. Scrolling down to the 10th result, though, did show an interesting, useful result, albeit 60.15 miles away: Knowne World Meads. I wanted to visit the web site, but here lies another problem: there’s no web integration. None of the search results include a URL or clickable link.

For all the hassle, I’ll stick with Opera Mini and my favorite search engine, thank you. -m

Some random thoughts and responses to lots of blog discussion sparked by the XML2 article, where I asked “Is HTML on the Web a special case?”

By which, I mean, if you go through all the effort of writing down all the syntax rules used by the union of browsers that you care about, then go through the pain of getting consensus within a standards body, will the resulting document be useful beyond HTML on the Web, much like how XML is useful beyond being a vehicle for XHTML?

I don’t know if Tim Bray had that same version of the question in mind, but he answers “obviously ‘yes’”.

But I don’t think so. Once you have that set of rules, wouldn’t it be useful in other areas, say, notoriously RSS on the web? SVG? MathML? In fact, I’d go as far as saying that any hand-authored markup would be a candidate for XML2 syntax.

What about mobile? Anne van Kesteren responds:

in that article Micah Dubinko mentions mobile browsers living up to their premise and all that. What he says however, isn’t really true. Mobile browsers and XHTML is tag soup parsing all the way.

He links to this page, which does a rather poor job of making a point the author seems to have decided upon before starting the experiment. If you look at the specific test cases, one tests completely bizarro markup that no author or tool I can imagine would ever produce. Another test checks the handling of content-type, not markup. On the other axis, the choices there seem a bit jumbled: lists of user-agent strings, one for stock Mozilla, and a footnote indicating confusion about what browser is really in use. If anything, this page shows that the browsers tested here, with the exception of Opera Mini, are crap. If you spend more than a few minutes in mobile, you’ll discover this widespread trend. (And I’m working on a solution…watch this space).

Look at this from a pragmatic viewpoint. Check the doctype used on Yahoo! front page vs mobile front page. Despite the poor browsers, XHTML adoption is still farther ahead on the mobile web then the desktop web.

The last thing nagging at me (for now) is whether XML2 will have an infoset. Will it be possible to use XPath, XQuery, and XML tools on XML2 content? How well will these map to each other? In the strict sense, no, XML2 won’t have a conforming infoset because it will never include namespaces. But might it support a subset of the infoset? (Would that be a infosubset?) That’s a huge open question at this point. -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

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

Last week, I visited Erik Wilde, Bob Glushko, and students up at Cal. No major announcements, just some sharpening of discussion points.

Since this was my first visit to Berkeley, I finally got to tell the joke “thank you for your OS”. Maybe you had to be there.

The intentional web is a formalism for describing “why the font tag is evil”. I often work with 3rd party integration languages, and the markup design is, without exception, crap. I hypothesize that the reason for this is jumping into solution-space before fully understanding problem-space. This seems to apply to lots more than just font tags; I lumped in WML and about half the world’s ajax sites for good measure.

Microformats are a formalism for describing “why creating a new markup language for my CD collection” is evil. Could XForms have been done as a microformat? No, microformats require a strong intentional foundation language, and HTML forms ain’t it. Is the proposed W3C approach an instance of “a deadly two-pronged attack”, a la Yahoo! Photos + Flickr? We’ll see. It does seem like that road leads to a namespace apocalypse, highlighting the fundamental difficulty namespaces hoists on attempts to usably extend HTML and XHTML at the same time. A namespace apocalypse may not be a bad thing.

On namespaces, I went over most of the points from my recent article. I won’t rehash that here.

What are some practical and implementation issues around XForms or the lack thereof? Focusing on mobile, as reason #1 I gave the lack of commercial-grade java browsers, discussed here previously. The state of mobile browsers is appalling, other than Opera and S60. Terms like “model” and “field” are troublesome, because the confuse the problem domain (the real world) and the solution domain (the computer). Browser vendors have been too inwardly-focused, both now and during the first attempt at salvaging HTML forms, leading to a premature jump into solution-space. But perhaps XForms dwelled for too long in the problem space…

Maybe I’ve mellowed some, but increasingly I’m able to look at both sides of issues. A useful skill for Information School students, wouldn’t you agree? -m

but there has never been a successful Java implementation of a commercial-grade web browser. (right?)

There exist lots of huge applications including IDEs, and editors of all sorts, but nobody’s been able to nail the whole XHTML+CSS+JavaScript thing in Java. (right?)

Take it a step further–no need to pick on Java–nobody has done this in any VM-based language (right)?

Coincidence or sign of greater forces in the universe? Feel free to post counter-examples in the comments.-m

Check this out. It’s a RAZR V3i, which has a show-stoppingly bad mobile browser built-in. (But overall, it’s still better than the ROKR!) Compared to the huge announcements from Apple earlier this week, this one comes in fairly under the radar. Could this be a trial baloon leading up to an official iPhone?
If this one supports replacing the browser with Opera, this might be a near-term option… -m

A must-read posting from Mark Birbeck, who knows a few things about XForms and Web Forms 2.0.

He talks about the respective approaches embodied in XForms and Web Forms 2.0, and concludes that the primary difference between them has little to do with simplicity. He goes on to analyze differences in how developers and users view browsers. Go read it, it’s worth it. -m

How hard could this be? A six month project if three engineers are doing it in a garage. Five years if you put one hundred programmers on it.

Guy Kawasaki

-m

Like with the element counts, the grain-of-salt alarms are going off with this one. But apparently IE7 passes only 54% of the CSS test suite, up from 52% for IE6. (But even Mozilla only scores 93%). It’s not entirely clear how these numbers derive from the source data, and it certainly isn’t weighted for things like how useful or commonly used various features are.
It’s completely silly to say Microsoft isn’t even trying to implement the standard. Every engineer, product manager, or blogger involved with the project will honestly and sincerely describe the huge amount of effort going into standards compliance. To get to the problem, you need to dig deeper.
I’ll end on that enigmatic note. More later. -m

Lots and lots of blog traffic on Google Spreadsheet, but I haven’t seen anyone make a key point:

The underlying message is: full-blown applications in the browser are now real.

Many smaller players have been doing things like this for years, just as many smaller player were using Ajax before it had a catchy name. But as soon as it had a name and a big player (again, Google) behind it, it left the launch pad in spectacular fashion.

The era of Web Applications has begun. Don’t think that Microsoft Office should be afraid–it’s even bigger. -m

New features in InfoPath 2007 make me smile

• Design once to work on browser and client
• Object model the same across client and server

Both things I worked on extensively for Cardiff LiquidOffice in 2003-2004. ‘Cept we had design once and write out to DHTML, PDF, or InfoPath. :) -m

For better or worse. In no particular order.

1. Affordable unlimited data plans
2. Google getting into the operator business
3. Yahoo! getting into the operator business
4. Affordable phones not tied to carriers
5. The iPod phone
6. Development of strong AI (yes I say this about everything)
7. Development of decent agent software
8. Affordable unlimited voice plans
9. Collapse of network neutrality
10. An active mobile WebStandards task force (ok, not overnight, but still important)

-m

Part of tech reviewing means dusting off a Windows machine again. I haven’t done more than check email or run Quickbooks online on a Windows machine since I was writing my book in 2003. Remarkably, Windows XP is still the latest desktop OS available. But it needs updates.

Checking my update history, I had 37 updates installed, with Windows Update insisting on installing three more things including “Genuine Advantage”. Reboot. Yay, now I’m advantaged. Apparently the main new feature in Windows Update is a five-minute “Checking for the latest updates for your computer…” screen. Next Service Pack 2, which has to be installed separately.

This is taking a while, so I have time to re-appreciate the nuances of the Windows UI. In the system tray, I see room for six icons, but only four present. (Clicking the little arrow, though, causes a wiggle, with six icons showing in the same space; after a second, another wiggle and back to four). All of the icons are blurry, two of them enough that I have no idea what they’re supposed to represent.

I couldn’t make stuff like this up, but it blue-screened 73 minutes into the ordeal. Unbelievable. On the bright side, it did recognize that the whole Service Pack didn’t need to be downloaded again.

As an aside, the crash tool suggested that I run the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool, so it’s possible the blue screen was hardware related. Amusingly, the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool is exactly 640kb. If you don’t get the tragic coincidence, post a comment and I’ll tell you. :)

The second run through installing Service Pack 2…blue screens again, this time with some USB error. Upon rebooting, a Windows Setup screen draws little dots for several minutes while “restoring previous configuration”, and the desktop warns me ominously that the system is in an “unstable state”, and that I need to go to Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs and uninstall SP2. The uninstall program helpfully warns me that lots of programs, including “hearts” and “solitaire” toward the top of the list, might stop working, but I bravely press on.

Reboot again. 640×480 resolution, and all kinds of messages like “found new hardware — disk drive”. On the change resolution screen in Control Panel, the “OK” and “Cancel” buttons are off the screen. And another reboot to get networking set up again. At this point I’m three hours wasted, six reboots, and I have nothing to show but an even more unstable system and Genuine Advantage. Wheeeee! At what point does Microsoft throw the “rewrite from scratch” swich? The saga continues, check comments on this post. -m

Steven Pemberton has done several recent talks on XForms,

XForms tutorial at XTech and WWW

The Power of Declarative Thinking – same slides for the talks at XTech and WWW

I attended at least parts of both of the WWW talks, and I can report that they were well-attended and well-received. -m

Seen on Bill Trippe’s blog.

Gray Knowlton, who indentified himself as a Senior Product Manager for InfoPath 2007 said the next version of SharePoint will “include InfoPath Forms Services, which will render InfoPath forms to browsers and html-enabled mobile devices, and this will not require InfoPath on the form fillers’ desktop, nor will it require any advance download on the part of the person completing the form.”

This is, as far as I know, breaking news. Nice work, Bill!

Now, the big question is, how well will it work outside of IE? -m

The following is a blatant job posting. If you’re not into that kind of thing, feel free to skip.

In Yahoo! Mobile, we’re working on an amazing project which, unfortunately, I can’t say much about just yet. We’re growing, and we need some more talent. All of the following are in Sunnyvale, CA and have the full benefits package. Relocation is always a possibility for the right candidate.

Web Guru/Developer: If you dream in semantic XHTML and prefer command line tools to read and write web pages, this is the job for you.

Release Engineer: On the other hand, if you dream about virtual IPs and consider Apache config files a second language, you’d be happy in this challenging position.
There’s more openings than these; I’m just highlighting a few here. If you’re interested, or just looking for more details, email me. If you’ll be at WWW next week, you could also look me up in person. -m

If you’re like me, you often get email messages with long URLs that wrap, which are a pain to actually get into a browser. Easier on Firefox though:

Go to about:config and change editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines setting to 3 or add: user_pref(“editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines”, 3); to your user.js file.

Excellent! -m

By way of Alan Beaufour and Frank Hecker, more great news. -m