I've ranted on the brokenness of HTML the last time Bill brought up the subject, but now the it appears the damage is spreading. Russell is rightly annoyed about all this, but he's rightly annoyed at the wrong things, the wrong people, and that's understandable given how we got here. I take the opposite view to Russ; not having mainstream availability of PUT and DELETE is the singularly most broken aspect of web technology today.

Just got back from a quick trip to Boston, where I ended up renting a car and driving to my destination. Just to make that clear: I. Drove. In. Boston. That's one of those things that would be so much better in SVG. I'm from the UK. Some former colleagues of mine went to Boston for meetings. They brought back a map and commented how the locals thought navigating was really hard whereas they didn't find it so.

Pertti Korhonen, Nokia's new CTO introduced PhotoBlog for Series 60 in his keynote at ETech in San Diego. This application proof-of-concept is supporting the Atom API enabling users to post to leading blog platforms. The application was developed by Futurice, who is developing a Photblog platform. [Christian Lindholm] Wow.

I just finished reading Cory Doctorow's latest book Eastern Standard Tribe. It was a cool book and the next time I hit a bookstore or Amazon.com I will buy a copy. Because Cory released the book under a Creative Commons license people have been transforming it into a variety of formats. The one that caught my eye was "speed-reader" by Trevor Smith. This is a Java applet that flashes the book up on the screen a word at a time.

My first article, Atom API Update, is now up on XML.com. It provides an overview of the changes in the latest version of the draft RFC and lays the groundwork for future aticles that will explore how the AtomAPI enables the Editable Web. Congratulations. It's really a good article. I can't hope to see next articles talking about wikis or comments. Posted by kusor on 2004-02-05 Excellent article. Looking forward to more on Atom.

I have previously complained about XForms only supporting 3 HTTP verbs. When I complained close to a year ago (and 8 months before XForms 1.0 became a recommendation) I was assured in private email that this would be fixed in the next revision. Lo and behold the XForms 1.1 Requirements are out with nary a mention of fixing this problem. Of course, they plan on spending all their time adding support for SOAP to XForms.

I am slowly working my way through Quicksilver. This is most definitely not science fiction, which is interesting the same could be said about William Gibson's last novel. Why is it that two of the big Cyberpunk authors have moved so far from the style that first brought them onto the scene? Interesting question, but it's not like I am going to stop reading them, they'r moving into different realms and taking me along for the ride, which is what it's all about.

Found via Marks b-links, is Web Forms 2.0. Now I've gone on endlessly about the complexity and short-comings of XForms: Web Services vs. Internet Services, HTTP and HTML, Sans DELETE, and XHTML + XForms + XLink = Xanadu. Web Forms 2.0, edited by Opera's own Ian Hickson, is a breath of fresh air. Instead of trying to completely revolutionize HTML forms, it takes an incremental approach, building on an already stable base, fixing common problems (like the fact that forms can only do GET and POST, which in my opinion is a bug of the HTML specifications), and adding new features in a way that is backward compatible that strike a good 80/20 balance (a new mime-type for form submission of application/x-www-form+xml).

Tomorrow is our last day in China. In less than 24 hours we board a plane for home. I've enjoyed the trip but I am looking forward to going home. I miss the boys tremendously and can't wait for them to meet their sister. Tomorrow we will also part company with the eight other families we have travelled with, and shared virii with, over the last two weeks. Here is a shot of the south shore of the Pearl River at night.

The last two days have been real nice, with a little bit of time spent touring, even less time working on paperwork, and lots of good shopping. Caden is really doing well, she has been eating well, starting to eat solid foods, and is putting away the milk. We are already starting to see changes in her from the improved diet, just in the last week she has cut two teeth and the hair on the back of her head has thickened up dramatically.

Day 9 was pretty uneventful, Lynne, Caden and I spent some time in the morning shopping with Mark, Moya and Andie. The afternoon was filled with paperwork and the rest of the day was spent packing for our travelling to Guangzhou the next day. Part of our shopping was to buy a new large suitcase. We didn't really need it for this leg of the trip but we plan on doing a lot of shopping in Guangzhou, enough that we know we'll need a whole extra suitcase for everything we are going to purchase.

be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others. [Section 2.10 - RFC 793] This has been bandied about as a founding precept of the internet for years. I don't think it's ever been more controversial as when it meets XML. Mark Pilgrim has been pushing the idea that there are no exceptions to Postel's Law and that every feed aggregator needs to support his vision of a liberal XML parser, using the above phrase as his justification.

Another day and another walk around Chongqing. This time Caden and Lynne accompanied me and Lynne took the pictures. Whenever we go out with Caden she gets put in the sling, which does several things. The first thing it does is save my back. The second thing the sling does is cover most of Caden, with a hat only her eyes are visible outside of the sling if she's awake, and she is completely hidden if she falls asleep.

This afternoon I went for a short walk walk in the area immediately around the Marriott. I looped through the 'pedestrian mall' which is a shipping area where the streets have been closed to cars, and the local flower market. This Zhonghua Road, a busy shop lined road on the way to the pedestrian mall. There are a mass of shops along these roads, some no more than 5 feet wide, selling everything from fine suits, to noodles, to shoes.

Yeah, yeah, these aren't in chronological order. Get over it. We had only a little time connected to the internet in Beijing and even less time to sit and write, so I'm backfilling between arrival time and Gotcha Day. This is our first full day in China, and we went for a tour of some of the sites in Beijing. We toured Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City and finally part of the Great Wall.

Day 4 was faily unevenful. We travelled via plane to Chongqing and settled into our new hotel, the Chongqing Marriott. This picture serves as a great study in the area. Chongqing sits in the mountains at the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing Rivers. The city, with a population of 30,000,000 is a primarily an agrucultural area. In the center of the photo you can see a typical farmers house, surrounded by their fields.

Today was a very low key day. I wanted to keep a low profile as I am still recovering from the stomach flu, and we also want time with Caden, so Lynne and I skipped out on the scheduled site-seeing and stuck around the hotel. In the morning we walked around the nearby pedestrian mall with Mark and Moya doing some window shopping and stopping by the grocery store on the way back for necessities.

This is the day, Gotcha Day, the day we get Caden. She came right to us, with no crying at all. It was very cute, she sat on Lynne's lap and just stared at me for a good 5 minutes. Then she reached out for me. We sent pictures out to the orphanage earlier and I think the Aunties did a good job of showing her the pictures because she seemed to recognize us.

It's all a blur. That is, after I got off the plane this will all seem a blur, and truth be told, it's all a blur right now in middle of it all. It's been nice a nice trip to far, Lynne and I got 3 seats in the back of the plane for our Charlotte to SFO leg. This let us take turns sleeping on each others laps.