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…
Category: standards
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…
ERH’s comments on XForms, as part of his predictions for 2007. Worth a read. -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…
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….
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…
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…
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
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…
This Wednesday, I’m visiting Berkeley to speak with visiting professor Erik Wilde and his School of Information students. It’s an open-ended discussion, but will almost certainly center on XForms, the intentional web, and related information flow technologies. If you’re in Berkeley this Wednesday, drop me a line. -m
The new Flickr Mobile site is up, joining the recently-launched m.upcoming.org. Notice a trend in mobile URL design here? Expect to see more of this from Yahoo! and other places. The interesting thing about these URLs is that they don’t end in .mobi. There are technical advantages (cookies) to staying with an established domain name….
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…
Watch xml.com this week: the XML Annoyances column is returning, and not a moment too soon it seems. -m
Just ran into this. Nice! Mobile mashups are getting some serious momentum. To elaborate on my previous comments a bit, the concept of what people find usable differs between sitting at a desktop and sitting/standing/running/driving with mobile in hand. Desktop sites aren’t optimized for these kinds of use patterns. Ergo, fertile ground for lots of…
Whoops, the feedback email address for the XForms Validator was down after my last round of changes. Fixed. -m
All right, the article is actually 12 Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS and Standards, but if I were to write the same list for mobile development, it would be almost identical. -m
Article (with a non-best-practice URL) from seomoz. If you’re into this kind of thing, Web 2.0 The Book has an entire chapter on it. Nitpick: Also note how normal folks say URL, not the even-more-geeky URI. -m
Another example of a small, useful spec defined in a language humans can actually read and understand. It also seems incredibly useful to be able to print basic things without going through the multi-megabyte printer driver madness that everyone else seems to be going for. -m
I got this link from Eve, and to think, I never even knew there was a consortiuminfo.org. The Microsoft Open Specifications Promise irrevocably lets any interested parties implement and use a list of technologies without fear of getting sued (at least sued by Microsoft). It is similar in tone and scope to earlier declarations about…
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…
I’ve written before about the xslt2xforms project by Sébastien Cramatte. The project is not only still alive, but expanded into an entire utility kit including a PHP5 framework and forming “a complete xforms/xml toolbox based only on w3c standards”. Check it out on sourceforge. -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…
First off, counting the number of elements isn’t a useful metric for serious discussion about vocabularies–but it is fun. :) Eric van der Vlist reports on the latest XHTML and related specs. -m
Yes, the devastating two-pronged attack is in full swing. Link. -m
Word on the street is that some of the new stuff in XForms 1.1 is fantastic. Also on my to-carefully-read list, the mobileOK Scheme. As always, any thoughts welcome here. -m