Articles Tagged with “Web”
29/03/2008: Cognition 0.1 Alpha 6
Tonight I’ve released another alpha version of Cognition, my semantic web parser. Changelog includes:
- Microformats:
- Add option (disabled by default) to require
<head profile>for microformat support. Microformat profiles are treated as opaque strings! Supports the following profiles:- http://purl.org/uF/2008/03/
- http://www.w3.org/2006/03/hcard or http://purl.org/uF/hCard/1.0/
- http://dannyayers.com/microformats/hcalendar-profile or http://purl.org/uF/hCalendar/1.0/
- http://purl.org/uF/hAtom/0.1/
- http://purl.org/uF/rel-tag/1.0/
- http://purl.org/uF/rel-license/1.0/
- No profiles required for rel-enclosure, adr or geo (yet).
- Support for hAtom, WebSlices.
- In addition to hAtom 0.1, rel-enclosure is supported within hEntries.
- Improve include-pattern support to prevent some infinite loops.
- Add option (disabled by default) to require
- GRDDL:
- Add option (disabled by default) to require for GRDDL.
- Add option to check profile URLs for…
09/03/2008: The Semantic Web
One of my current interests is the semantic web — that is, the push to move from publishing text on the Web to publishing structured data, which can actually be understood by computers (in so far as a computer can truly “understand” anything). By publishing information so that computers can understand it, you make the Web into a huge mine of interconnected data, free to be queried by everyone.
As an example of what I mean, searching for the keyword “train” on Google brings up results related to:
- trains, as a form of transport
- the band Train
- IT training courses
- toy trains
In the semantic web, the search engine and my computer would inherently understand the difference between these concepts, so if I wanted to know about the new Train album, I wouldn’t get any result related to locomotives!
What I’m particularly interested in is ways of embedding semantic data in ordinary web pages, so that we have a single web that can be…
22/01/2008: CSS to HTML Compiler
I’ve searched around the ‘Net for something like this before, but without success, so decided to write my own. The basic idea is this: there are certain circumstances in which you need to write some styled HTML without access to the document’s header. For example, when composing HTML-formatted e-mails, which may be displayed in a web-based e-mail client; when adding content to limited content-management system; or in an eBay auction description. In such a situation, you can’t (validly) include a <link rel="stylesheet"> element, nor a block (if you do include such a construct it may just about work, but the document will not be valid), so instead you are reduced to using HTML style attributes all over the place.
However, it is slow work using style attributes as you can’t take advantage of CSS selectors. Instead…
09/01/2008: X-Blog-Name
OK, so the Trackback specification includes the ability for a pinging page to specify its article title and blog name when it sends a trackback ping. However, these fields are optional. When not present, typically the recipient of the ping will then make an HTTP request back to the pinger to determine the article title from the page’s <title> element. But there is no standardised way of determining the blog name — or more generically, because Trackback can be used by sites other than blogs — the name of the “collection of web pages”.
The following informal specification suggests a method of determining the name of the collection of documents to which a given HTML document belongs. It also provides a clear way for you to mark your own HTML documents as being part of a particular collection.
Determining the Collection for a Given Document
Attempt to find the name of the collection…
07/01/2008: New BBC Home Page
So the BBC has redesigned its home page. OK, so normally I’m against the “let’s be a portal” philosophy, but for the Beeb, I think it works. They produce such a colossal volume of content — and in areas that make sense for a portal site (news, weather, sports, listings info) — that they can get away with it. It sports togglable, movable widgets a la iGoogle, thus allowing the user to customise their “BBC experience” to their own tastes.
Overall, I’d say it’s an improvement. There’s still work to be done, but it’s only in beta, so that is to be expected.
But why the animated clock in the upper right-hand corner? (No, unlike most of the content on the page, it can’t be removed.) Virtually every operating system includes a clock somewhere on the screen by default — which the user can generally customise to their heart’s content — not only in terms of fonts and colours, but also more important stuff like whether to use 24-hour or…
02/08/2007: Open Mobile Alliance DTD Oops!
The Open Mobile Alliance, who are responsible for co-ordinating the web-browsing efforts of mobile phones, seem to have misplaced xhtml-mobile12-model-1.mod. This file is a key part of the DTD for the latest version of their XHTML Mobile Profile standard, which defines how authors should construct web pages intended for the consumption of mobile phones. Now that it’s missing, all pages that reference the XHTML Mobile Profile 1.2 DTD are instantly invalid. Oops!
Oh, and the corresponding files for versions 1.0 and 1.1 of the standard have also gone astray.
16/06/2007: Typography Links
Most of the really pleasant web designs I see seem to display more than a little evidence of classical typographic knowledge. Here’s my collection of typography-related resources, including links to some classic (and some common) fonts.
Tips and Tricks
- Mark Boulton: Five Simple Steps to Better Typography
- Richard Rutter & Mark Boulton: Web Typography Sucks
Particular Characters
- Mark Boulton: The Right Glyph for the Job (ellipsis, quotes, ligatures)
- Mark Boulton: Dashes
- A List Apart: The Trouble with EM ‘n EN (dashes, hyphens, spaces, quotes, primes, ellipsis)
- “Jukka Korpela: Dashes and…
31/05/2007: URLs in demiblog
URL design is important. For this reason I’ve put a lot of thought into the URLs used by demiblog.
demiblog has a PHP object SiteURLSpace that maps between URLs and data queries. This means that demiblog’s URLs don’t necessarily have to bear much resemblence to its code structure. It’s also pretty easy to completely replace the object, and thus restructure demiblog’s URL space. (Except for a few cases like feeds and enclosures.)
Front Page
Firstly, demiblog can be installed anywhere on your server. If your domain name is example.com, then you could theoretically give demiblog URLs like any of these:
- http://example.com/
- http://www.example.com/
- http://example.com/demiblog/
- http://example.com/anything/you/like/
This makes it easy to have demiblog power your whole site, or just a part of it.
Now let’s look at some of the URLs within demiblog…
Tags
demiblog articles may be tagged. This is a loose form of…
29/04/2007: Keen on Web 2.0
The Observer has an interesting article about Andrew Keen’s new book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy. Although the book isn’t released until early June, according to the Observer article the basic premise is that:
bloggers and other evangelists for the web [are] destroying culture, ruining livelihoods and threatening to make consumers of new media regress into ‘digital narcissism’.
He points out that most of what you see on MySpace, YouTube and other such social networking sites is utterly banal; the information you read on Wikipedia has often not been edited by experts; and a disproportionate amount of information can be found on Pamela Anderson, compared with,…