Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Wednesday, 30th May 2007

If you write a spec, write a validator alongside. How much pain could have been spared with early versions of RSS if we'd had a common, agreed upon validator. In short, it's the test suite that ultimately decides the spec.

Joe Heck

# 1:48 am / joe-heck, rss, specifications, tim-bray, validator

Howto: Google Maps Street View outside US. Add “&gl=us” at the end of the URL to avoid the evil geo IP restriction and play with Google’s latest toy.

# 7:40 am / geoip, google, google-maps, streetview

The Google Maps Street View team? They’re posing outside the Googleplex so I’m guessing this is the team that built it.

# 12:29 pm / easteregg, google, google-maps, googleplex, streetview

Problems with XHTML content type.

The first question you should be asking is why you need XHTML—if you don’t have a specific reason (the need for XML parsers to be able to consume your pages) you’re much better off with HTML 4.01 for now, and HTML 5 in probably a year or so.

[... 245 words]

’tie’ considered harmful (via) Rich Skrenta on the disadvantages of abstractions like Perl’s tie, which lets you create hash data structures that aren’t actually hashes. Operator overloading (as seen in Python) suffers the same problems.

# 11:11 pm / operatoroverloading, perl, python, richskrenta, tie