If you haven’t been following Ted Nelson on YouTube, you’re missing out. Recently, he’s been posting a series of informational videos on the Xanadu architecture and concepts. Even more recently, he hosted a live Q&A session, taking questions from Twitter. Ted Nelson’s Channel What’s Xanadu, you ask? It’s the original concept for a hypertext system,…
Category: browsers
Alex Milowski asks on Twitter about my thoughts on Skunklink, now a decade old. Linking has long been thought one of the cornerstones of the web, and thereby a key part of XML and related syntaxes. It’s also been frustratingly difficult to get right. XLink in particular once showed great promise, but when it came…
At David Lee’s nocturne about XML and JSON round-trippimg, several folks were talking about a site that listed several “off-the-shelf” conversion methods, but nobody could remember the site. Late that night, with 15 minutes of battery remaining, I found it. The operative search term is XSLTJSON. -m
As the world of web apps gets more framework-y, I need to get up to speed on contemporary automation testing tools. One of the most popular ones right now is the open source Selenium project. From the look of it, that project is going through an awkward adolescent phase. For example: Selenium IDE lets you…
Some thoughts worth considering on state of HTML development today. -m
The best thing a user can do to advance the Web is to help move people off IE 6 — Ryan Servatius, senior product manager for Internet Explorer. Source. -m
One of the lead bullets describing why XForms is cool always mentions that it is based on a Model View Controller framework. When building a full XRX app, though, MVC might not be the best choice to organize things overall. Why not? Consider a typical XRX app, like MarkLogic Application Builder. (You can download a…
One particular conversation I’ve overheard several times, often in the context of web and standards development, has always intrigued me. It goes something like this: You know, Ted Nelson’s hypertext system from the 60’s had unbreakable, two-way links. It was elegant. But then came along Tim Berners-Lee and HTML, with its crappy, one-way, breakable links,…
On this comic‘s panel 9 describes XHTML 1.1 conformance as: the added unrealistic demand that documents must be served with an XML mime-type I can understand this viewpoint. XHTML 1.1 is a massively misunderstood spec, particularly around the modularization angle. But because of IE, it’s pretty rare to see the XHTML media-type in use on…
In case any of the 7 regular readers here aren’t following xml-dev, check out and add to the discussion about Pragmatic Namespaces, proposed as a solution for the “distributed extensiblity” problem in HTML5. For years people have been pointing to Java as the model for how XML namespaces should work, so this proposal goes that…
I enjoyed Nicole Sullivan‘s talk at the BayJax Meetup on Object-Oriented CSS, something I hadn’t run in to before. Adding predictability to CSS development seems like a huge win. I need to wrap my head around it better. Anyone with experience using this technique care to comment? -m
On May 8 I wrote: 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….
A great introduction article. Maybe it’s just the crowd I hang with, but RDFa looks like it’s moving from trendy to serious tooling. -m
XSLTForms, the cross-browser XForms engine (written about previously) that makes ingenious use of built-in XSLT processing, reached an important milestone today, with a beta release. Tons of bug fixes and additional support for CSS and Schema. If you’re thinking about getting involved with XForms and are looking for something small and approachable, give it a…
Have you checked out Opera lately? You should. Their briliant strategy it to include a JavaScript debugger so excellent that you’d be willing to test on that browser just to use the tool. If you’ve been having the same kinds of troubles that I have with Firebug lately (not to demean the thousands who use…
Implementing client-side forms libraries is, and has been, all the rage. I’ve seen Mozquito Factory do amazing things in Netscape 4, Technical Pursuits TIBET on the perpetual verge of release, UGO, and others. In a more recent time scale, Ubiquity XForms impresses me and many others, and it has the right combination of funding and…
I will talk about one or more sessions from XML 2008 here. Mark Birbeck of Web Backplane talking about Ubiquity XForms. Browsers are slow to adopt new standards. Ajax libraries have attempted to work around this. Lots of experimentation which is both good and bad, but at least has legitimzed extensions to browsers. JavaScript is…
I haven’t tried this, but these guys claim to have a solution where The form definitions are saved and exchanged as XForms, and the data as XForm[s] models. The data can be exchanged over http (if the phone users can afford GPRS and have a data connection) or over compressed SMS messages. Sounds like they…
A determined spambot has been submitting the XForms contact form on XForms Institute. OK, so it’s probably more Flash-aware than XForms-aware, but still. -m
This post will be continuously updated to contain the most recent details about an XQuery 1.0 RDFa parser I wrote for Mark Logic. It follows the Functional RDFa pattern. At present there is little to say, but eventually code and more will be available. Stay tuned. -m
It would be awesome of someone made a site that catalogued all the common mis-encodings. Even in 2008, I see these things all over the web–mangled quotation marks, apostrophes, em-dashes. I’d love to see a pictoral guide. curly apostrophe looks like ?’ – original encoding=_________ mislabeled as __________ . That sort of thing. Surely somebody…
The W3C RDFa specification is now in Candidate Recommendation phase, with an explicit call for implementations (of which there are several). Momentum for RDFa is steadily building. What about eRDF, which favors the existing HTML syntax over new attributes? There’s still a place for a simpler syntactic approach to embedding RDF in HTML, as evidenced…
Andy King’s Website Optimization is now in print from O’Reilly. This book covers it all: performance, SEO, conversion rates, analytics, you name it. If you run a web site, you’ll find this useful. I tech edited and contributed a small portion, about the growing trend of metadata as site advantage. Go check it out. -m
Several folks, including me, have experienced increased CPU usage on Firefox 3, especially on OSX. Try disabling it, going back to the bookmarklet. -m
I just found out about a nice little XForms engine called Ubiquity. (Having dinner with Mark Birbeck, TV Raman, and Leigh Klotz certainly helps one find out about such things) :-) It’s a JavaScript implementation done right. Open source under the Apache 2.0 license. Seems like a nice fit with, oh maybe MarkLogic Server? -m
If you are used to XSLT 1.0 and XForms, you see { $book/bk:title } and think nothing of it. XSLT 1.0 calls the curly-brace construct an Attribute Value Template, which is pretty descriptive of where it’s used. Always in an attribute, always converted into a string, even if you are actually pointing to an element….
Reminder: Thursday evening at Yahoo! Sunnyvale headquarters is the launch party for the developer-facing side of SearchMonkey. In case you haven’t been paying attention, SearchMonkey is a new platform that lets developers craft their own awesomized search results. If you’re interested in SEO or general lowercase semantic web tools, you’ll love it. Meet me there….
If you have webdev skillz, you might be interested in the SearchMonkey launch party on May 15. Good food, good drink, good coding. Space is limited, but I have a few invites to share. Comment here or contact me offline if interested. -m
Some time ago, Doug Crockford’s excellent blog pointed me to this page on “excessive DTD traffic” at the W3C. Go ahead and follow that link, I’ll wait… All the standard templates that show how to construct a basic XHTML page include a public identifier of http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd and often a namespace name of http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml. As the…