50 posts tagged “tim-bray”
2004
Tim Bray: Opening Everything. “... the days when the recipe for success included wrapping the engineering in a veil of secrecy, those days are gone.”
My photos from Minnesota (via) With some pretty flowers, ala Tim Bray.
Malice and Incompetence. Tim Bray’s commentary on the Iraq Intelligence report.
plinks—a purple numbers variant
Via Tim Bray, I came across the concept of Purple Numbers. In a nutshell these are permalinks attached to every paragraph on a page which, to paraphrase Tim, make every paragraph on a page a first-class Web citizen.
[... 1,213 words]Jython. Tim Bray gets excited about Jython, and says nice things about Python in the process.
Web Services Theory and Practice. Tim Bray on avoiding over-complication.
ongoing—Mac OS X. Collected OS X tips from Tim Bray
2003
Practical Unicode, please!
Joel Spolsky has joined Tim Bray in the quest to educate the masses as to the importance of Unicode. Dan Sugalski kicks in as well with What the heck is: A string, a lengthy essay about string handling and why it really is a lot more complicated than you think it is.
[... 237 words]On Metadata
Tim Bray’s series On Search now has a table of contents page linking to each of the previous entries. The most recent article covers metadata, and includes some insightful commentary on the huge problem of gathering metadata from users in the first place.
Compact XML Schemas with Relax NG
Tim Bray has cooked up a RelaxNG schema for the 0.1 Necho/Pie/Fecho/!Echo snapshot (they really need to hurry up and decide on a name). I had never looked at RelaxNG before, although I had vaguely picked up that it was a lot nicer than the W3C’s XML Schema format. Tim has used RelaxNG Compact, a shorthand method of writing schemas that uses a curly-braces style language instead of XML. It’s suddenly got me very interested—the compact format is instantly readable and looks a lot more efficient to use than DTDs or an XML schema language. Best of all, there are tools to instantly convert compact syntax in to a full RelaxNG XML schema, and then convert that in to XML Schema (should you want to do so). The Compact Syntax tutorial gives a good overview of how the compact syntax works. Now if only there was a Relax NG validation tool in PHP...
More on Search
Tim Bray’s series on full-text search has got to the meaty bit: how search engines actually work, including an overview of the kind of data structures they use (presented in XML format for readability). The basics are a lot simpler than you might think. Tim has also posted some thoughts on how people actually use search, of which the most interesting point is that advanced search is hardly ever touched.
[... 222 words]Tim Bray on search
I love it when bloggers stick to their word. The other day, while describing a quick Perl hack that really impressed a major client a few years ago, Tim Bray mentioned the following:
[... 240 words]iTunes Web Service?
Via Tim Bray, it turns out Apple’s new iTunes Music Store is driven under the hood by a whole load of XML documents, which are available via HTTP. Here’s hoping this leads to something similar to the Amazon Web Services API.
Tim Bray on Unicode
Tim Bray’s ongoing really is one of the best technical blogs out there (if it even is a blog). One of his current topics is Unicode, which is one of those topics that pretty much every software developer should try to get under their belt. On the Goodness of Unicode gives a thorough, entertaining overview of the subject (including its importance and why it isn’t as scary as it sounds) while Characters vs. Bytes is the first in a promised three part essay covering the technical details of modern character processing.
Why XML doesn’t suck
Tim Bray: Why XML Doesn’t Suck (a follow up to XML Is Too Hard For Programmers). I’d quote the best bits but there are just too many—this article clears up all of the loose ends in my understanding of why XML is such an important technology.
The goodness of binary search
Tim Bray provides an in depth, practical explanation of the binary search algorithm with example code in Java. Great revision material for second year computer scientists like myself.