Bitworking - theories of software development

A detailed analysis of one of the characters in Cryptonomicon. [via Russell Beattie]

I am currently using RESTLog for editing The Well-Formed Web and I am very happy with it. It was actually fun today to modify the design, including stripping out some tags that weren't being used, dropping back to a plain white background, and adding more items to the navigation bar. It is getting to the point where I dread having to use Pamphlet to post to this weblog, but I'm holding off switching until I get every item on my To Do list complete just to keep me motivated.

What a cool idea using XHTML for Syndication. Wish I'd though of it. Oh wait, I did. At the time it got shot down, and justifiably, I might add. Good objections were raised which are still valid today.

This is how I turned 30: standing in my bathroom wearing nothing but a pair of latex gloves, holding a wet cat in mid-air. [Mark Pilgrim]

Happy Birthday Mark!

Mark Pilgrim has finally moved to XHTML 1.1 and maintained his accessibility. I made the move to 1.1 months ago but unlike Mark my site isn't perfectly accessible yet (I'm working on it) and I really don't care about people using Netscape 4. As a matter of fact if I could find a sequence of tags that would cause NN4 to do nasty stuff like erase your hard-drive or shoot lightning out of the screen when viewing this site I would gleefully add them. Ok, maybe that goes a little beyond a don't care attitude.

If they would just roll up their sleeves and build some toolkits they could stop complaining about SOAP. [Dave Winer]

I am. I prefer to implement rather than debate.

I recently downloaded Mozilla 1.2b and was real happy to find a lot of cool new stuff, but later found that installing it had broken Chatzilla, the irc client and I was also unable to download anything. Turns out both problems have the same simple solution, delete the file compreg.dat then restart Mozilla.

I have now written my third weblog application, and as they say, the third time is a charm. My first two attempts, which I referred to both as Pamphlet, were client-side only .Net applications that used FTP or WebDAV to transfer files to the server with no other server-side processing required. I haven't yet released the code for Pamphlet but once I decomission it from my own use I will clean up the files and publish it. I was not really happy with Pamphlet in either carnation, but my latest attempt, called RESTLog, has made me very happy. It follows a RESTian philosophy and the implementation of RESTLog has benefitted from that. Compared to Pamphlet I find that RESTLog is faster, more robust and easier to enhance. Of course, I still like the name Pamphlet, so I may release the original Pamphlet under a new name and rename RESTLog to Pamphlet. I guess I can blame my upbringing for that; when I grew up we had a beagle and he was always named Tippy. If Tippy were to die from old age, he was replaced with a new beagle, named Tippy. I believe we had a total of three Tippys.

Raising the Bar on RSS Feed Quality by Timothy Appnel. I want to strongly encourage the advice he gives on creating a meaningful excerpt.

Timothy Appnel has published a nice summary of the RDF discussion to date: What's Wrong With RDF?. This summary also gives proper attribution of Shelly Powers contributions to the discussion. Simon St. Laurent worries about the discussion turning into RDF bashing in What's right with RDF.

The discussion of the XML serialization of RDF continues. There is one point of agreement and some recurring arguments. The common point is that everyone agrees that the current serialization is not human readable. The arguments for not changing the current serialization settle into a few categories. Below I give the arguments against changing and then give quotes that argue the opposite position.

There are already implementations in the field, you can't break them.

As a part of the world's information in electronic form, the amount of RDF in the world is trivial - it's not even dust. [Bill de hÓra ]

Even if they wanted to change it, and they do, the WG is restriced by it's current charter.

> The RDF Working Group was given a charter not to rewrite RDF/XML but to
> answer issues and provide as much cleanup and clarification as they could
> but to still remain within that support for previous implementations. It's
> sad that one can't just throw things out and start over again, but that's
> the way of the real world.


No it's not and yes you can, and you should.  
[Tim Bray responding to Shelly Powers]

It's not meant to be read by a human, use a tool to manipulate RDF.

I guess where Shelley and I would agree to disagree is that she doesn't think that easy human-readability is very important in the data formats she uses, and I think it's terribly, terribly important; I think one of the central lessons of the Web is that enabling people do do aa "View Source" and roll their own based on what they see is, well... there's nothing more important. [Tim Bray]

I have a problem with this. If you don't care about being able to read it easily, why not use a binary format of some kind in the first place and reduce the bandwidth footprint? [Jack William Bell]

Punting to tools and APIs to salvage mankind from complexity of its own making is one of the main reason this industry is constantly battling the alligators rather than clearing out the swamps. [Sean McGrath]

We fundamentally disagree on this point. Human legibility *always* matters, *especially* in matters of interoperability (where, by definition, the two sides are using different tools... with different feature sets and different bugs). [Mark Pilgrim]

On the OSAF mailing list they are discussing the extent of use of RDF in Mozilla. Looks like the scope is smaller than the online documentation would suggest. The whole thread is very informative.

Shelly Powers has posted a response in part to Get your RDF out of my XML. She writes:

I am particularly unhappy because of Tim Bray's involvement in all of this. There's an implication and an assumption made that because Tim Bray 'invented' XML, he's qualified to be a definitive judge of RDF and RDF/XML.

No, that isn't why I pointed to Tim Bray's comments. I have had problems with the XML serialization of RDF for quite a while. I pointed to it to say, "Hey, maybe it's not just me if someone like Tim Bray also has a problem with it." I could prattle on all day long about it all alone, but to have company, and high-profile company at that, helps me not think I am just a raving looney in the woods. Of course this does not rule out the possibility of me being a raving looney in the woods, just mitigates the chances that it's not in relation to the XML serialization of RDF.

Now onto the discussion of animosity towards RDF.

I've watched with interest the discussion about RDF within this list and over at the W3C Technical Architecture Group (seeded by this item from Tim Bray -- link). What puzzles and confuses me is why there is so much animosity towards RDF.

First, despite starting WellFormedWeb, I am not antagonistic towards RDF as a technology. I do have a lot of animosity towards the XML serialization of RDF, which I think stinks. From all the threads on [xml-dev] and [www-tag] I see few people that disagree. The only reaction from the WG has been to throw up their hands and say that it's not in their charter to change it. Sorry, but that's a pretty lame excuse.

The second source of my animosity comes from a push by possibly overzealous RDF proponents to change every format they come in contact with into valid RDF serialized as XML. I can point to RSS 1.0 and now the abortive RDDL as RDF attempt as failures of that strategy. On the other hand I can point to the use of RDF in Mozilla as a successful strategy of leaving the native format alone but still getting the benefits of RDF, as I pointed out Wednesday.

Frankly I think it's about time the tide turned on RDF. For a long time it has been beyond reproach. The attitude has been that because RDF was thought up by a bunch of really smart people and that it's a W3C standard that it was above criticism. I think a healthy dose of skepticism and a critical eye turned on it by people outside of the usual circle would be helpful to RDF, and it certainly couldn't hurt the XML serialization.

So to summarize, my sources of animosity towards RDF:

1. The XML serialization.
2. The push by RDF proponents to turn every format into RDF/XML.

Tim Bray, you might remember him as one of the people that invented XML, recently tried to do his homework. His self-assigned action item was to convert RDDL so that it used RDF instead of XLink. He posted his first pass and announced it on the www-tag mailing list. A long discussion ensued, several errors pointed out and in the end he decided to stay with XLink. Some choice quotes from the discussion:

Aahhh... the RDF tax strikes again. I want to do something that is obvious and straightforward and implicit in the resource/representation relationship, and using RDF is going to cost me oceans of arcane totally human-opaque syntax. [Tim Bray]

Furthermore, the core idea of RDDL is that there is a directory of related resources which can be selected based on the values of two fields: nature and purpose, both identified by URI, with some useful pre-cooked values supplied for each. This simple and easy-to-understand core idea is why RDDL got welcomed.

If that simplicity is not possible to achieve using RDF as a tool, then RDF is not an appropriate tool for RDDL.

Which is my conclusion from this thread in www-tag. Let's stay with XLink. [Tim Bray]

This is the crux of the problem. If Tim Bray can't do RDDL/RDF using his little toe, with his hand tied behind his back and the rest of him hog tied and upside down, then what prayer to we have trying to foist this upon the rest of the world, i.e. people who just want to create and document XML namespaces? [Jonathan Borden]

Now speaking of foisting, every so often someone mentions that Mozilla uses RDF. Now that statement is true on the surface but digging a little deeper into the documentation reveals an important lesson. The way that Mozilla implements RDF is through the concept of an RDF data source. For example a mailbox can be setup as an RDF data source. Note that mail in Mozilla is stored in mbox format and that there is a seperate code layer above it that presents it as an RDF data source. They didn't go back an change the mbox format so that it was native RDF. This is very important because it leaves the mbox format alone allowing the current set of tools that manipulate mbox format to still work. I'll repeat that for emphasis: They left the native format alone. This is very different from picking up a working format and forcing into a convoluted form so that it is natively RDF. We all know how successful that's been.

Brian Graf has put together his own weblog publishing application, the most intriguing part is his integration of Amaya into the project. I was pleased with Amaya when I used it to generate SVG and can't wait for Brian to post more details on his client application.

I have finally published Version 0.1 of the server-side implementation of the RESTLog interface.

Just upgraded to Moziila 1.2b and happily discovered they have 'fixed' some of the keyboard shortcuts. The most important one being you can now use Alt-D to jump to the address bar just like IE, and Ctrl-Tag moves through all the tabbed browser windows which was previously only mapped to Ctrl-PgUp and Crtl-PgDn.

Speaking of Stanislaw Lem, his book Solaris has been made into a movie (again) starring George Clooney and will be released on the 27th of this month.

Having trouble dealing with the XML serialization of RDF? You're in good company.

I was initially skeptical of a list of top 100 best science fiction books. Slightly less skeptical when I found they did include books by Stanislaw Lem and Kurt Vonnegut. I've read 27 of them. [via Mark Paschal]

I have been putting a lot of time into the launch of The Well-Formed Web and so missed these events when they first occured:

• Aaron Swartz has recently redesigned his site. Clean, clear and spiffy.
• Morbus released AmphetaDesk v0.93.2
• Eric Vitello Jr. is working on a new version of his Aggie template which, among a host of other features, includes Movable Type integration.
• And last but not least Brian Graf is back on-line. Welcome back.

Speaking of well-formed XML, I am pleased to announce the creation of a new web site: The Well-Formed Web. I received such positive feedback from my essay of the same name that I decided to launch a whole web site dedicated to just that subject. It will contain news, articles, and source code on implementing the Well-Formed Web. Also, I am 'dog-fooding' on the site, that is, the site is driven by a RESTian Web Service which I will be explaining over the next two or three weeks. So please stop on by, check out the valid XHTML 1.1, the pure CSS layout, subscribe to the RSS feed, and drop me a line with links to any articles you think might be pertinent.

Lachlan Cannon in the latest A List Apart article [courtesy Zeldman] explains how and why you would want to use inline XML in your markup. This is exactly where I thought the web was heading when I learned about HTTP, XML and how HTML was supposed to be moving to XML. Unfortunately reality is a fair site short of the promise, especially after reading How to create XHTML Family modules and markup languages for fun and profit. That is quite a bit of work to add your own tags and still get valid markup. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to stick to well-formed XML.

Reading John Lam's essay When less is more it sounds like he came to the same conclusions I did in Language Centric Software Development.