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Excited about XWT
New toy: XWT, the XML Windowing Toolkit. This is one impressive piece of open source software. It allows you to create a graphical user interface using relatively simple XML markup (with ECMAScript to define interactivity). Your application can then be executed using a browser plugin, implemented as an ActiveX component on IE and a Java applet everywhere else. The idea is not to write whole applications in XWT, but to create server side applications and provide a client side GUI using the toolkit. Both SOAP and XML-RPC are supported for communicating between client and server.
[... 140 words]University of Blogaria
Apparently the University of Blogaria was founded on the principle that the ideal university would have no students to contaminate the educational process
(Jonathan Delacour). The only way in is to earn a position on the faculty, which no doubt requires slightly more than four days of blogging. Thank goodness their courses (or at least the benefits of their wisdom) are freely available to all.
Jonathan on Mark
Jonathan has meta-blogged (I think that’s the term) responses to Mark Pilgrim’s accessiblity series. He replies to my query about the wisdom of limiting the series to bloggers rather than expanding it to cover as much as possible:
[... 166 words]My first XHTML mind bomb
I’ve been looking at PHP’s XML handling functions (in particular the xml_parse() function) and I’ve suddenly realised the advantages of writing entries in valid XHTML. Before I started this blog one of the features I considered adding was something that can pull all of the links out of an entry when it is submitted and index them or add them to a directory somewhere. I was preparing myself for some regular expression hacking, but thanks to XHTML this is now completely unnecessary. All I need to do is define a couple of handlers to deal with <a> tags and Expat will do the hard work for me. In fact, this approach gives me a great deal of flexibility in what I do with my entries. I can extract quotes and blockquotes, pick up on emphasized text and generally allow my blog software to “understand” my entries as and when I add them. The true benefits of XHTML have suddenly become clear.
Fixed validation again
The road to validity is frought with peril. I’ve just fixed another small group of errors that were preventing this page from validating (after spotting the ominous W3C validator in today’s user-agent logs). This time is was a couple of forgotten </p> tags and an unescaped ampersand.
[... 242 words]Meg replies
Meg has replied to Jonathan’s criticism of her piece on the nature of blogging via his site’s comments system. She defends her original viewpoint, commenting on blogging that we can’t define this thing based on the content we’re outputting
. It looks like this debate still has quite a bit of life left in it.
Meetup Launches
With launch notices on both glish and Signal vs. Noise I just had to check out MEETUP. I was not dissapointed. MEETUP is a beautifully simple concept that has been superbly executed. It aims to arrange real life get togethers around the world of people with similar interests. You simply find a topic that interests you and see when the next scheduled meetup for that topic in your area is, then enter your email address to have the site update you on the status of the meetup and remind you nearer the time. Meetup participants vote on the venue (from a list of over 11,000 suggested spots) and the rest is up to them. Why MEETUP?
[... 160 words]Anil Dash does Amazon
Anil Dash provides a copy of Amazon’s home page in HTML 4.0 Transitional, and it validates. Solid proof that you can rewrite a complex ecommerce site in valid HTML, and another victory for the web standards movement.
[... 40 words]The nature of blogging
Meg Hourihan’s explanation of blogging (which I linked to and praised earlier) is stirring up something of a storm. Meg’s suggestion that the key to blogging is the format has been ripped to pieces by the likes of BurningBird, Jonathan Delacour and Stavros. Jonathan uses photography as an analogy—some photographers are excellent technically and concentrate on taking the perfect photograph while losing sight of the art of the medium. I hope I’m not overquoting, but Jonathan clinched his argument for me with the following:
[... 331 words]JSRS 2.1 released
Brent Ashley: JSRS2.1 Released (from June 10th—Internet Archive copy). JSRS is Javascript Remote Scripting, an incredibly powerful javascript library that allows DHTML pages to communicate with a web server without having to reload the page. This latest version fixes POST suport for Mozilla. The library opens the way for a whole host of interactive web applications without the normal limitations caused by the request-and-response nature of the web. Best of all, JSRS is cross platform (at least for Mozilla, NS4+ and IE4+).
[... 151 words]Pure CSS popups
New example on Eric Meyer’s css/edge: Pure CSS Menus. This is very impressive stuff—it’s an implementation of those dropdown menus where you hover over an item and a new menu pops up, but it’s done in pure CSS without a line of javascript. Even better, the markup for the menu is a nested unordered list, so browsers that don’t support the advanced CSS needed will still display the menu in a meaningful way.
[... 113 words]Learning from smart tags
Scott Andrew LePera in a mail to Webdesign-L (sent on the 12th of June, I’m catching up on my mailing list folders):
[... 196 words]Python iterators
Via Daily Python-URL (which appears not to provide permalinks): Introduction to Python iterators. This is an extract from Deitel & Deitel’s “Python How To Program” and includes extensive code samples. Iterators are very cool—as I see it, they allow you to overload an object ready for use with Python’s powerful for ... in ... syntax (as well as other looping methods). This blog is implemented as an object in PHP—had I used Python I could display the whole blog using for entry in blog: print entry.
Meg on blogging
Meg Hourihan: What We’re Doing When We Blog. It’s a curious fact of blogdom that many bloggers blog blogging—why they do it, what it is and why it’s so important. I feel Meg has nailed it with this article—blogging is defined by the format, not by the subject matter. She also makes some insightful comments about why the blogging format works so well:
[... 105 words]Google already
This site has been here for less than four days yet it already shows up as the top result if you search for simon willison on Google—and I never even submitted the URL. In fact, asking Google to list pages that link to me currently turns up zero results. Spooky.
[... 54 words]Uni year ends
Well, I’ve reached the end of my first year at Bath University (studying a degree in Computer Science) and I can safely say I’ve never had 9 months go so fast. I’ve had a fantastic time—I met the girl of my dreams, made a whole bunch of great friends, did loads of cool things and spent far too much money. Today I move out of halls (a terrifying prospect when you live on the ninth floor and the lift is playing up). As an aside, I also lose my lovely fast net connection and return to the trauma of 56K. Thank goodness for Mozilla and tab based browsing.
[... 144 words]CSS panic guide
Owen Briggs: CSS Panic Guide. Owen is the author of several excellent CSS resources (including Box Lessons and 264 font size screenshots) and this is his collection of links to CSS resources from all around the web. It covers every CSS reference worth knowing about and is an essential bookmark for anyone interested in using CSS for layouts.
[... 75 words]Mark explains all
Over at diveintomark Mark Pilgrim has explained the aims of his Accessibility series:
[... 208 words]Meta weblog API
I’m itching to get an XML-RPC interface to this blog up and running so I can start playing with blogging tools (or roll my own in PythonCard). It looks like Dave Winer’s MetaWeblog API is just what I need. It describes an XML-RPC interface with 3 methods: metaWeblog.newPost, metaWeblog.editPost and metaWeblog.getPost. More importantly, the standard supports complete flexibility in the data that is sent along with the request. My entries consist of a body, an optional permalink (one is generated if none is specified), optional categories and an optional search string for a “Google It!” link if one is required. The MetaWeblog API looks ideally suited to handling this, and is fully extensible should I change the format of my entries in the future.
Blog added to the OED
Dane Carlson: Blog to be added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
[... 12 words]Day 4: Lillian
Mark Pilgrim’s set of case studies is beginning to shape together. I’ve been following responses to it through his “Further reading on today’s posts” referral tracking tool—reception has been overwhelmingly positive, with almost universal praise for Mark’s decision to use the case study format to drive home his point. kcalder criticised Mark’s suggestion that colour blind users wouldn’t get much out of
images on the web, and Mark has apologised and altered the case study accordingly. SubAverage called Mark “preachy” and posted a parody (mentioned in passing by Dave Winer). All this and we’re only on day 4.
Zend Engine 2 alpha
I don’t know how I missed this, but the PHP group have released an alpha version of PHP with the Zend Engine 2 (tarball / Windows binary). This is exciting stuff—the new scripting engine has vastly improved object support and brand new exception handling, something I’ve wanted in PHP for a long time. The CHANGELOG lists the new features and provides sample code. Here’s a summary:
[... 248 words]Hixie replies again
Hixie has answered my question. Judging by how long it took IE to support CSS1, he estimates 6 years until XHTML is ready for main stream use. He’s almost certainly right, but I’m going to try to stick with XHTML any way (bandwagon jumping can be fun). He also points out that this site does not validate—I checked the original template but it seems that several of the entries I have added have inadvertantly invalidated the page, mainly through unescaped ampersands and the like. Time to add an automatic “validation” system to my administrative tools—it’s a shame the W3 validator isn’t available as a web service.
[... 124 words]More FuzzyBlog stuff
More FuzzyBlog stuff. Scott runs one of my favourite blogs—constantly updated, plenty of interesting new content and most of it fits the areas I am interested in. Today’s items that caught my eye are Why Do I Blog So Much? and Very, Very Practical Tips for the Busy Person : Part 2 (actually posted on Monday, find Part 1 here.). I particularly liked the following quote from “Why Do I Blog So Much?”:
[... 151 words]Hixie replies
Hixie has replied to my previous post (and provided my first ever link in the process).
[... 209 words]Hixie on WaSP
Hixie has been poking around the new Web Standards Project site, and he is not impressed. His analysis of the site makes interesting reading, with complaints including CSS colour and background not being set at the same time and the content-type of the document being set as “text/html” rather than the more correct “text/xml” required for XHTML documents.
[... 169 words]