Monthly Archives: April 2003

RSS in XHTML

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On the Syndication list, Doug Ransom proposed a way of embedding RSS into XHTML:

<html>
  <head>
    <rss:channel xmlns="a new namespace">
          whatever elements you need</rss:channel>
  </head>
  <body>
    <rss:item>
      <h2><rss:title>My Item</rss:title></h2>
      <p>Date:<rss:date>2003-20-01</rss:date>
        <rss:description>Today we went fishing</rss:description>
        down at the wharf. 100 more lines blah blah.</p>
    </rss:item>
  </body>
</html>

I think this is a fantastic idea. XHTML being used as a framework – exactly what it was designed for. Getting authoring tool support should be fairly easy too.

Making XML Extensible with RDF

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I wrote an article recently which generated some traffic on (and off) the XML-DEV list. Some people commented without reading it of course, but others asked interesting questions:

Hmm… does that fable mirror an actual use case? I suspect there are a
good number of programmers using XML without RDF who would say their
productivity is not suffering. Whether they would say the same after doing
it the “RDF Way” is an interesting question. Anyone in xml-devland have a
use case to match the fable?

The best use case I can think of is the one that prompted the article in the first case: RSS 2.0 modules vs RSS 1.0 modules.

Edgar Codd Dies

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Edgar Codd, who formulated the rules decribing the normalised forms of relational databases died last week. Thousands of developers use the results of his excellent thinking every day without realising it. It’s not an understatement to say he made a phenomenal contribution to computer science.[good obituary]

PlaceTime URI Space

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PlaceTime is another ongoing project of mine:

PlaceTime.com is intended to be a URI space containing URIs that represent places and times.These URIs can serve as common identifiers for a wide variety of applications such as genealogical research or calendaring.

Stay tuned for some interesting interactive experiments. Anyone who knows me will probably guess they involve spiders, content analysis and heuristics…

US Government Namespace Policies

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The US government have published a draft of an interesting document: Recommended XML Namespace which will be a policy document for defining namespace URIs.
It’s a good, in-depth review of the various possibilities such as using a single namespace vs. multiple namespaces. They’ve decied to opt for URNs over URLs for their namespace identifiers which is probably a good move as a long term strategy. For us quick-n-dirty types, HTTP URLs are the only practical choice given current Internet infrastructure constraints.

Full Content Feeds

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Bill Kearney sums up some of the reasons why I don’t include full content in my RSS feeds. One reason he didn’t cover is that my pages are basic XHTML anyway – a full content feed would be virtually a reproduction of this page. My view is XHTML for content, RSS for distibuting the links.

Blog Culture

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This
Medley posting caught my eye:

some guy, who apparently hasn’t even been weblogging a year yet, has decided to proclaim to all and sundry that if you don’t follow his set of 10 rules, then you’re ‘highly annoying.’ Good grief. Let’s see, you must have comments, you must use trackback, you must have an about page, you must provide an RSS feed, you must have a blogroll, and so on. No, no, no. Here’s Medley’s ‘rule’: You must write something interesting. Period.

As any long-term reader of this site (there are a few!) knows I’m not a stereotypical ‘blogger’:

  • I don’t write much about me
  • I try not to post links to stuff that other people have linked to (I assume anyone reading Internet Alchemy is probably reading the other sites too).
  • I’ve dallied with comments several times over the past four years but when it comes down to it they’re just another type of bulletin board and who want’s to sit there refreshing a web page every 30 seconds?
  • Since coming back from hiatus last year I’ve made a real effort to focus on original content creation rather than the link and witty comment style of posting. It means the volume of postings is way down, but I hope there’s more value in what I post.
  • I’m not a natural conversationalist so I don’t try to carry out faux conversations on the web with people I don’t know.
  • I don’t follow the blog crowd so I wasn’t surprised to find out who Raging Platypus was, but I’m still puzzling over BlogShares.

StrutsCX

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StrutsCX is Struts with XSLT – but without JSP. Therefore strict seperation of business logic from presentation brings development closer to the MVC pattern. In addition it always outputs well-formed XML (what JSP does not guaranty) and is much more flexible on the presentation layer.

This has some similarities to the XMLEngine code I wrote as part of Calaba’s content delivery server (aside from the Perl/Java difference of course :) – this used a graph of multiple chained stylesheets to reduce the complexity and redundancy of any-to-any content transformations. [via whump]