Simon Willison's Weblog: phil-ringnalda

Quoting Phil Ringnalda

2007-04-14T10:21:30+00:00

My "why move away from SGML?" reason is the way that every time I have to explain to someone that their Mozilla bug in invalid because HTML is actually an SGML application [...] I finish up by saying "if you want to see the actual spec that I've been told says that, you can buy a copy for 230 Swiss francs."

— Phil Ringnalda

Tags: html, html5, mozilla, phil-ringnalda, sgml

amazon2melvyl

2005-04-02T08:43:02+00:00

amazon2melvyl

Greasemonkey script that embeds icons in data: URIs—kudos to Phil Ringnalda for that idea.

Tags: greasemonkey, phil-ringnalda

Funky caching explained

2002-11-16T13:54:21+00:00

I didn't take much notice of "funky caching" while reading through Rasmus Lerdorf's PHP tips and tricks presentation - I saw that it was talking about using custom 404 pages to serve up dynamic content depending on the URL and wrote it off as a hack that, while useful, was fundamentally flawed in that it would add an error log entry whenever a page was served.

It seems I was mistaken. Phil Ringnalda has explained the concept in more detail, and it's actually a very clever angle on the caching problem. Rather than building content in advanced (the "baked" method, used by Moveable Type) or generating the page dynamically each time (the "fried" method, used by my weblog) you set up a custom 404 script which decides whether or not the requested content should exist when it is called. If the content is meant to be there, it creates the content, serves it up and saves it to the file system (so future requests will get the file rather than a 404). To regenerate content you just delete the static file and wait for someone to request it, at which point it will be rebuilt by the 404 script. Clever stuff.

Tags: caching, phil-ringnalda, php, rasmus-lerdorf

Pingback coverage

2002-09-25T12:54:44+00:00

The Pingback 1.0 specification is getting some serious attention. Mark Pilgrim and Dave Winer have linked to it. Ben Trott (co-author of Moveable Type and creator of TrackBack, the system that inspired Pingback) has objected to Hixie's suggestion that Pingback is more transparent than TrackBack, claiming that TrackBack could be made just as transparent by the right blog tools. Ben blogged some further thoughts which lead to the following comment by Phil Ringnalda:

I've avoided saying anything about PingBack until now, since I like and respect the people who've developed it, but it is *not* TrackBack. When you send a TrackBack ping, you are saying "I responded to this, and I think that your readers would also like to read what I said." You are leaving a remote comment. When you send a PingBack ping, you are saying "I linked to you", nothing more. It's a "show referrers" script that filters out non-weblog referrers, a way to avoid having to click your own links to be sure you send a referrer. It is *not* TrackBack.

This is an interesting perspective, but I can't agree with it completely. Firstly, Pingbacks are meant to be sent by blogging tools. If you have blogged a link to someone else's entry you are linking to them for a purpose (which is almost certainly some form of comment on their entry) - this is why my Pingback implementation grabs an extract of their page from the text surrounding the link.

michel v has some further thoughts on the differences between Pingback and TrackBack.

Tags: ben-trott, dave-winer, hixie, mark-pilgrim, phil-ringnalda, pingback