Write up by Duncan Cragg. More and more momentum is building for this meme. -m
Category: standards
Hey readers, help me guide my scattered thought processes. I’ve been thinking lately about microformats, which are typically characterized by inline annotation through existing class attributes in XHTML. You put the rel=”self” or whatever right into the document, on the element you’re talking about. Another approach, that used by CSS itself, is to keep all…
Yeah, help still wanted. I’m looking for a markup and standards guru to work with me on a cool Mobile project. Can you list five different types of CSS selector off the top of your head? Can you map all five to the equivalent XPath? Can you spot semantic markup by reflex? Do you daydream…
My earlier nofollow post is now officially the most-spammed blog posting I’ve ever written. All this despite a moderation system–the spammers are getting zero benefit from all this. Deterrent techniques are not working; there will always be some small percentage of “unprotected” sites that the bad guys are happy to exploit. Adding insult, even after…
From mnot: the return of the Link: headers, last seen in RFC 2068, and a new header, Link-Template, which has me salivating over the possibilities. I wonder, will this lead to better libraries for dealing with HTTP headers? Or at least better developer understanding of the benefits of not just taking whatever Apache or Tomcat…
The Rise and Fall of CORBA, seen at the ACM. To create quality software, the ability to say “no†is usually far more important than the ability to say “yes.†Sound familiar? -m
when building REST XML protocols. Kimbro Staken. Good stuff. -m
A reader named Jeff asks: are you aware of any way to render an XForm as Swing widgets (or heck, AWT for that matter) from within a Java thick app? Anyone have pointers? Comment here. -m
It’s no secret that Yahoo! has two different photo sites. And two different social bookmarking sites. Until pretty recently I thought this was craziness. But gradually I’ve realized the power of this approach. You take a smaller, hipper embodiment of an idea alongside a mainstream site. The resulting double-threat can’t easily be matched be either…
Python+XPath is a surprisingly powerful combination for doing all kinds of arbitrary validation tasks. I should know. I’ve recently figured out a few things that make it even better. Line numbers in error messages. Libxml2 docs aren’t exactly forthcoming in this area. It’s pretty easy to register an error callback, but maddeningly it doesn’t include…
For better or worse. In no particular order. Affordable unlimited data plans Google getting into the operator business Yahoo! getting into the operator business Affordable phones not tied to carriers The iPod phone Development of strong AI (yes I say this about everything) Development of decent agent software Affordable unlimited voice plans Collapse of network…
Check out the presentation page, with a link to the paper. Because someone asked, my name got top biling due to the prestigious “alphabetical” reference system. -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
As long as I’ve got conferences on the brain, I need to mention the XML 2006 Call for Participation. XML 2005 was great, and this year looks like it could be even better. Deadline for regular talk and tutorial proposals is July 19. -m
At WWW I have a short presentation on Yahoo! Go on Friday. It’s one-fourth of a 90 minute slot, so don’t expect any huge revelations. You might also see my name on another paper, Visualizing Tags over Time on Wednesday (nominated for Best Paper) (!). I won’t be presenting, though I did help a bit…
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…
My friend Kimbro Staken has mostly stopped blogging, instead relying on del.icio.us. Several others on my RSS reader are trending similarly. Until very recently, I was doing the same. For me, posting links is a way of keeping the ‘pilot light’ burning when I didn’t have enough time to do full postings–on del.icio.us, posting a…
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
The argument behind rel=”nofollow” was that spammers were trying to game the system to get link credibility for thier sites. Having a way to flag links that haven’t been human-reviewed so that they don’t count toward PageRank (and similar algorithms) would remove that incentive, and spammers would go away. Fat chance. You haven’t noticed it…
By way of Alan Beaufour and Frank Hecker, more great news. -m
Pronounced “wreck”, as the old saw goes. I can’t be the only one for whom this document makes no sense, which I mean in the broader sense of ‘how does this fit in to the rest of the world’. Many times, looking at the testimonials gives some idea what’s going on. Let’s see… …frees Web…
Some semi-random Sunday thoughts. Why is it that a badly-formed web page will probably still work, but a badly-formed software program (say, a browser) will for certain kinds of bugs crash hard? I think the answer comes down to intent. Even with a missing quote or closing tag, it’s still mostly obvious what should be…