intertwingly

It’s just data

Half Full


Roy Fielding: When did you stop beating your wife, Ian?

The apparent catalyst for this exchange was a document put out by Mike Smith.

Clearly there are areas of disagreement.  Not just between Roy and Ian, but between many of the participants in the working group.  Many are focusing on such details as to what should be normative, and how such specifications should be arranged.  My opinion is that this discussion is premature and can’t be settled without first establishing a common understanding of the context and goals of the effort.

Meanwhile, it is important to note the Mike’s document does not attempt to be inconsistent with the ongoing HTML5 work, it merely attempts to capture a subset of this information, and present it from a different perspective.


The bigger problem is that HTML5 will be finished in 2022.  Or in 2010.

The first thing that needs to be recognized is that the WHATWG’s goals (are these documented?) won’t be met in 2010.  The second thing is that neither will the W3C’s.

There are many ways to address this.  One that I would not be in favor of is adjusting the W3C’s date significantly.

IMHO, what’s needed is a chair that will take consensus whenever he (or she) can find it, and graciously accept defeat when that’s not possible.  Again, not all of the goals are achievable by 2010.  Whether they ever could have been or not is irrelevant, at this point it clearly is not the case.

And it is worth repeating that the intent is that Mike’s document and Ian’s document aren’t in conflict.  One way to resolve any apparent conflicts is to relabel the document which is intended to be later.  Picking some dates out of the air, how about HTML5=2010; HTML6=2013; HTML7=2016; HTML8=2019; and HTML9=2022?  Meanwhile...

Question: Do we need to resolve whether ping is in HTML9?
Answer: Not today.
Question: Do we need to resolve whether the DOM bindings are in HTML9 or are in a separate document?
Answer: Not today.

I could go on, but the basic point is that if HTML5 were redefined to be the set of things over which we can come to rough consensus over the next 18 months or so, it would in all likelihood be (a) delivered on time, (b) be significantly smaller than the current working draft, and (c) as consistent as we collectively know how to make it with the full “2022” vision.

Repeat that process ever three or so years, and I’m confident that we will eventually converge on full consensus.  Possibly even by 2022.

Utensils


Patrick Mueller: We fundamentally have the wrong tools to do the job. We’re using a spoon where we should be using a backhoe. Look down! You’re using a spoon for bleep's sake! Don’t you realize it? Slap yourself around a little and clear the fog from your eyes. Expect better.

I’ve seen applications that have been built using a backhoe.

RDFaification


Shelley Powers: One unfortunate consequence of switching DOCTYPEs is that when I do use embedded SVG, the page won’t validate. However, this won’t impact on the user agents and their ability to process the SVG correctly, so I’ll just have to live with the invalidation errors. That’s the joy of DOCTYPEs.

We either need a DOCTYPE that supports both RDFa and SVG and that a validator recognizes, or a validator that doesn’t rely on DOCTYPE that supports RDFa.

oliver, Henri: suggestions?

Native JSON parser


Mark Pilgrim: HTML 5 will not ... expose a native JSON parser for web content

HTML 5 may not, but the plan is that ECMAScript will (section 15.12).  It is already supported in IE8 beta 2.  Firefox has landed support, and is tracking it as a part of an overall plan to support ES3.1.

gem install ibm_db


Antonio Cangiano: The IBM API development team has released version 1.0 of the ibm_db gem, which includes both the Ruby driver, and the Rails adapter, for IBM’s databases.

This was just over three years in the making.

...

Content Drives Demand


Jeff Schiller: These days, Internet Explorer is the last browser I look at… as long as all my textual content is actually visible, then that’s just fine by me.

I think I’ll take a bit of Ian’s advice, and drop my use of the X-UA-Compatible header.

...

Go Long


Lauren Wood: The bit I have found most disconcerting in the whole process, which has been going on for months now, is the demonisation of each side’s supporters, the assumption they’re not intelligent/patriotic/… enough. The level of vitriol hurled around is astounding, not only at the candidates themselves, but at their supporters

Now is a time for a bit of optimism; and a time for winning, or losing, gracefully.

...

Benefits of Uniformity


Jon Udell: These are, of course, best practices for an ecosystem sustained by web standards like URI, HTTP, and XML. But it was wonderful to see those best practices clearly demonstrated in a PDC keynote.

In many ways it feels like we are now about at the point in the evolution of the web where we were two decades ago with respect to GUIs.  For that reason, it pleases me greatly to hear that Don Box was on stage demonstrating the value of Hi-Rest.  And it pleases me that Atom/AtomPub played a role in this.

...

Ubuntu on a Stick


My plans are to do a fresh install of Intrepid Ibex on a number of computers, and since I had a spare machine, I thought I would recover Windows to a known clean slate, insert a second hard drive, and use that install to clone existing machines which would then be wiped and restored.

A few bumps along the way, none of which affect my overall plan.

...

OpenId Minus Id Equals Wide Open


Martin Atkins: Yahoo!'s OP and now it seems Microsoft’s OP both ignore the value of openid.identity provided to them, and just return an assertion for whatever user’s logged in.

I may ultimately need to black-list such ids.  If everybody uses the same URI, I can’t tell them apart.

...

BMT


Today my son is off to 6.5 weeks of Basic Military Training on his way to becoming a Airborne Mission Systems Apprentice.

Web Design


Tim Bray: real deep design skill is rare, but there are a few principles of design and color that, if you follow them, will keep you mostly out of trouble and produce something that may not seduce the viewer’s eye but on the other hand won’t revolt it

Once Firefox 3.1 comes out with SVG mask/clip-path/filter effects in HTML, I plan to experiment with texture.  It seems to me that being able to link to a page that contains one’s effects would be a handy thing to have.  Define your effects and even on one page, reference those effects in your css, and link to both pages and your markup can be clean.

Meanwhile, I’ve tweaked my current textureless design for Halloween.

rubygems-update


Wincent Colaiuta: The standard update procedure yielded an error and didn’t actually install the new version

Notable in this release:

Now uses ~/.gem/cache if the cache dir in GEM_HOME is not writable.

...

Misdirection


Anne van Kesteren: What also was funny was that the Web was not about the browser except that lots of people here at TPAC wanted browsers to do things differently.

I’m not there, but I can’t believe that anybody there would ever say or even want to imply that the web does not include browsers.

...

Post-Update Restart


Aristotle Pagaltzis: Since I started using git, I noticed that I use version control for many more things than I would in the days of using Subversion. It seemed to be a lot easier to put everything under version control, but for a while, it was merely a feeling whose reasons I found hard to fathom, then hard to articulate. After recently reviewing the ceremony required by Subversion to establish version control for something, the reason stood out to me clearly: Subversion makes the mental overhead of creating a repository very much greater than any DVCS.

Me too, and I think it is more than that.  Whenever I find myself updating a script I wrote months or even years ago, these days my first step is to do a git init.

...

Progressive Disclosure


Roy Fielding: I am getting frustrated by the number of people calling any HTTP-based interface a REST API.

I am amused by the people who are valiantly trying to decipher Roy.

While I don’t really have much to add, here is what I have...

...

I Voted


Stopped by the local mall.  Stood in line for five minutes tops.  Gave my name and address, was handed a form by a person who witnessed me signing it, then she signed it herself, and I then took the signed form to a second stop where I swapped the form for my ballot.  I then took the ballot to a counter with partitions where I filled in my choices.  Finally I took the completed ballot to where it was scanned and counted.  I was handed a sticker and thanked. ...

Eee Owner


Seeing a sub-$300 Linux-based ASUS EEE PC 900A on the shelves at a retail store… I couldn’t resist making an impulse purchase.

Even with the “Easy Mode” UI in place, all it takes is a Ctrl+Alt+T and I have a bash shell, ready to ssh into my other machines. 

The keyboard is small but functional.  I can touch type, albeit with higher than normal error rates at this point.  The trackpad is a bit sensitive.

...

Popping Pie Partial


Looking into Asset Rebalancing, I thought a visual aide would be helpful.  So I developed a simple Rails partial for doing a pie chart and a jQuery script which causes the corresponding slice to “pop out” when you hover over a row in an adjoining table. ...

Firefox, Cache, and Comments


It looks like Firefox will soon invalidate cache on non-GET requests, and I will be able to retire my workaround.  Kudos to Mark Nottingham.