Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Wednesday, 20th December 2006

Why JSON isn’t just for JavaScript

Dave Winer’s discovery of JSON (and shock that “it’s not even XML”) has triggered an interesting discussion thread, on his blog and elsewhere. Plenty of people have re-assured him (and themselves) that it’s only used for JavaScript—it’s convenient in the browser but irrelevant elsewhere.

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Percussive maintenance, with a twist. How to fix your broken iPod by dropping it, repeatedly. # 9:15 pm

I read on Niall Kennedy that del.icio.us has come up with an API that returns a JSON structure, and I figured, sheez it can’t be that hard to parse, so let’s see what it looks like, and damn, IT’S NOT EVEN XML! [...] Who did this travesty? Let’s find a tree and string them up. Now.

Dave Winer # 7:21 pm

Three steps to OpenID. Maybe explaining OpenID isn’t as hard as I thought... Jacob Kaplan-Moss nails it in three. # 12:44 pm

Conditionally Sticky Sidebar. A nicer implementation of the trick I’m using for my add comment form; this one takes advantage of position: fixed in browsers that support it. # 1 am

ErlyWeb Documentation. The Erlang web framework finally gets some formal documentation. # 12:45 am

Beginning of the end for open web data APIs? Google just ditched their SOAP API in favour of a crippled Ajax widget. What are the implications for other free-as-in-beer APIs? # 12:44 am

Mapping the postal network. Image of a GPS trace for a unit that was left on and sent in the post. # 12:43 am

Create cross browser vector graphics. An accessible introduction to dojo.gfx, a powerful 2D drawing API built on SVG and VML. # 12:42 am

Nginx English wiki. I’m back up and running after the digg meltdown, currently using CherryPy load-balanced behind Nginx. # 12:37 am