• Selenium IDE lets you record tests in a number of languages, but only HTML ones can be played back. For someone using only Selenium IDE, it’s a confusing array of choices for no apparent reason.
• Selenium RC has bindings for lots of different languages but not for the HTML tests that are most useful in Selenium IDE. (Why not include the ability to simply play through an entire recorded script in one call, instead of fine grained commands like selenium.key_press(input_id, 110), etc.?)
• The list of projects prominently mentions Selenium Core (a JavaScript implementation), but when you click through to the documentation, it’s not mentioned. Elsewhere on the site it’s spoken of in deprecating terms.
• If you look at the developer wiki, all the recent attention is on Web Drivers, a new architecture for remote-controlling browsers, but those aren’t mentioned in the docs (yet) either.

So yeah, right now it’s awkward and confusing. The underlying architecture of the project is undergoing a tectonic shift, something that would never see public light of day in a proprietary project. In the end it will come out leaner and meaner. What the project needs in the short term is more help from fresh outsiders who can visualize the desirable end state and help the ramped and productive developers on the project get there.

By the way, if this kind of problem seems interesting to you, let me know. We’re hiring. If you have any tips for getting up to speed in Selenium, comment below.

-m

it’s time for the W3C to show some tough love and force the two (X)HTML Working Groups together.

On July 2, the W3C wrote:

Today the Director announces that when the XHTML 2 Working Group charter expires as scheduled at the end of 2009, the charter will not be renewed. By doing so, and by increasing resources in the Working Group, W3C hopes to accelerate the progress of HTML 5 and clarify W3C’s position regarding the future of HTML.

The real test is whether the single HTML Working Group can be held to the standard of other Working Groups, and be able to recruit some much-needed editorial help from some of the displaced XHTML 2 gang.  -m

There’s still a place for a simpler syntactic approach to embedding RDF in HTML, as evidenced by projects like Yahoo! SearchMonkey. And eRDF is still the only game in town when it comes to annotating RDF within HTML-without-the-X.

One thing the RDFa folks did was define src as a subject-bearing node, rather than an object. At first I didn’t like this inversion, but the more I worked with it, the more it made sense. When you have an image, which can’t have children in (X)HTML, it’s very often useful to use the src URL as the subject, with a predicate of perhaps cc:license.

So I propose one single change to eRDF 1.1. Well, actually several changes, since one thing leads to another. The first is to specify that you are using a different version of eRDF. A new profile string of:

"http://purl.org/NET/erdf11/profile"

The next is changing the meaning of a src value to be a subject, not an object. Perhaps swapping the subject and object. Many existing uses of eRDF involving src already involve properties with readily available inverses. For example:

<!-- eRDF 1.0 -->
<img class="foaf.depiction" src="http://example.org/picture" />

<!-- eRDF 1.1 -->
<img src="http://example.org/picture" class="foaf.depicts" />

With the inherent limitations of existing syntax, the use case of having a full image URL and a license URL won’t happen. But XHTML2 as well as a HTML5 proposal suggest that adding href to many attributes might come to pass. In which case this possibility opens:

<img src="http://example.org/picture" class="cc.license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/" />

Comments? -m

Competing globally with dynamic capabilities is the top priority of multinational executives and managers everywhere. Rethinking strategy in a highly networked world is the big challenge. How can your company navigate successfully in this turbulent, highly networked and socially connected environment? …

If this does it for you, I couldn’t recommend this book more highly. -m

So what exactly is it?

A few months ago I went through the pages on this very blog and added hAtom markup. As a result of this change…well, nothing happened. I had a good experience learning about exactly what is involved in retrofitting an existing site with microformats, but I didn’t get any tangible benefit. With the “SearchMonkey” platform, any site using microformats, or RDFa or eRDF, is exposed to developers who can enhance search results. An enhanced result won’t directly make my my site rank higher in search, it it most certainly make it prone to more clicks, and ultimately more readership, more inlinks, and better organic ranking.

How about some questions and answers:

Q: Is this Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Semantic Web finally getting fulfilled?

A: No.

Q: Does this presuppose everybody rushing to change their sites to include microformats, RDF, etc?

A: No. After all, there is a developer platform. Naturally, developers will have an easier time with sites that use official and community standards for structuring data, but there is no obligation for any site to make changes in order to participate and benefit.

Q: Why would a site want to expose all its precious data in an easily-extractable way?

A: Because within a healthy ecosystem it results in a measurable increase in traffic and customer satisfaction. Data on the public web is already extractable, given enough eyeballs. An openness strategy pays off (of which SearchMonkey is an existence proof).

Q: What about metacrap? We can never trust sites to provide honest metadata.

A: The system does have significant spam deterrents built in, of which I won’t say more. But perhaps more importantly, the plugin nature of the platform uses the power of the community to shape itself. A spammy plugin won’t get installed by users. A site that mixes in fraudulent RDFa metadata with real content will get exposed as fraudulent, and users will abandon ship.

Q: Didn’t ask.com prove that having a better user interface doesn’t help gain search market share?

A: Perhaps. But this isn’t about user interface–it’s about data (which enables a much better interface.)

Q: Won’t (Google|Microsoft|some startup) just immediately clone this idea and take advantage of all the new metadata out there?

A: I’m sure these guys will have some kind of response, and it’s true that a rising tide lifts all boats. But I don’t see anyone else cloning this exactly. The way it’s implemented has a distinctly Yahoo! appeal to it. Nobody has cloned Yahoo! Answers yet, either. In some ways, this is a return to roots, since Yahoo! started off as a human-guided directory. SearchMonkey is similar, except a much broader group of people can now participate. And there are some specific human, technical and financial reasons why as well, but I suggest inviting me out for beers if you want specifics. :-)

Disclaimer: as always, I’m not speaking for my employer. See the standard disclaimer. -m

Update: more Q and A

Q: How is SearchMonkey related to the recently announced Yahoo! Microsearch?

A: In brief, Microsearch is a research project (and a very cool one) with far-reaching goals, while SearchMonkey is targeted as imminently shipping software. I frequently talk to and compare notes with Peter Mika, the lead researcher for Microsearch.

Shameless plug: Isn’t it time to refresh your memory, or even find out for the first time about XForms? There is this excellent book available in printed format from Amazon, as well as online for free under an open content license. If you guys express enough interest, good things might even happen, like a refresh to the content. Let’s make it happen.

From a consumer standpoint, this feels like a welcome play against Android, too. Yahoo! looks like it’s placing a bet on working with more devices while making development easier at the same time. I’ll bet an Android port will be available, at least in beta, before the end of the year.

Disclaimer: I have been out of Yahoo! mobile for several months now, and can’t claim any credit for or inside knowledge of these developments. -m

P. S. Don’t forget the book.

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

So, is this a sign that the general industry is picking up? -m

P.S. I’m not looking. :)

What do XUL, Yahoo! Widgets, OpenLaszlo, Silverlight, and Apollo have in common? All of them mix content with presentation to some degree. Years of experience on the web have shown that a properly-done CSS layout gives you:

• smaller, faster pages
• better accessibility and user control of rendering
• better adaptation to different screen resolutions
• easier repurposing of data, including microformats
• better mobile compatibility

Initial HTML browsers didn’t have these advantages, and gave in to early pressure to implement things like blink and font tags. Today, most webfolks would admit that these presentational tags were a mistake, and contemporary web design avoids them.
So what is it about “rich” clients that’s different? Are developers missing out on the hard lessons learned on the web? Or is there something inherent in the definition of “rich clients” that changes the balance? Your comments are welcome. -m

(If you get the pattern, post below…) -m