Over a month ago Paul Ford published a great essay entitled How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web. After reading it the first time I thought it was a great introduction to the Semantic Web, an idea I had been trying to wrap my head around even since encountering RDF as it is baked into RSS 1.0. I had seen the light and bought into the promise of the Semantic Web.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that you can't measure a thing without changing it. What google does is measure the web. This topic came up obliquely at the RTP bloggers lunch yesterday. The topic turned to the fact that Google loves bloggers, ranks us highly and that eventually they would tune their ranking parameters to put us bloggers back down further on the list where we belong. Google rewards good web behaviour: changing, linking and being linked to.

A basic guide to formatting CSS. This document, like so much on this site, is a work in progress. As I do more with stylesheets and learn what works and what doesn't that experience will be codified here. Also, like so much of the content on this site, this is not a diatribe or a directorate. I am not writing this to tell you how you should code your stylesheets.

Think of a really good piece of software, a program that is either really popular, has a really fanatical following, or is just your personal favorite. I predict that the program you chose has a scripting language embedded in it. That's it. That simple. I'm right aren't I? Mere coincidence? No. Benfits of language centric design All really good software development takes place around a language.

Open source software (OSS), the development model of wildly popular projects like Linux, Apache and Perl, is compared with closed source software (CSS), the development model of proprietary software projects. The two models of development are compared by viewing the processes from the perspective of a text file. OSS versus CSS Open source software (OSS), the development model of wildly popular projects like Linux, Apache, Perl, BSD, etc. is characterized by the ability to get, modify and redistribute the source code for programs and documentation.

The field of software has the worst record of shipping standards compliant products. No company today is shipping a browser 100% compliant with the W3 recommendations for HTML 4 and CSS2. Neither Microsoft nor Borland ship compilers 100% compliant to the ANSI/ISO C++ standard. The ANSI/ISO C++ standard was ratified September 28, 1998, the W3 recommendation for HTML 4 was released December 18, 1997 and the W3 recommendation for CSS2 was released in May of 1998.