Burningbird

• Open source developers, providers of free or inexpensive shareware applications, those working on open standards and specifications, or providing documentation, tutorials, and help for all of the above: you almost make me believe there is a land over the rainbow, and that it has fairies and unicorns and we never have to wear shoes. I don't thank you, as often enough, and as much as you deserve.
• Speaking of which: whoever came up with the original idea for CSS, you deserve chocolates
• Everyone is mad at Apple for iPhone, but I don't care: Safari 3 is a wonderful browser. Color management, far out. And Opera? Thanks for standing up for standards. Firefox, you're cool, too, but you need to commit to implementing one spec before you start on others. Oh, and it would be really nice if you didn't crash so much. No, really that would be cool.
• The WhatWG and (X)HTML5 efforts are, in my opinion, not the best use of resources. We've spent years separating presentation values from page layout, only to turn around and make the same mistake with semantics. Accessibility is in; accessibility is out. Machine versus human semantics; Indent versus blockquote. Hey! Poem markup! SVG isn't 'semantically rich' . When semantics have to be hard coded into the syntax, satisfaction will never be guaranteed. Open models, not new specs. When will they ever learn? When will they e-v-e-r learn.
• Regarding microformats: Using "rel", "class", and "profile", as the only available means in which to add semantics to markup is the same as using LOLCats to re-define the Bible: it's pidgin markup. "Me class sitting. Me relate chair. Chair relate desk. Me class watching. Me relate windows. Window relate Woman. Woman class running. Woman relate street. Woman class feeling. Feeling relate weather. Weather class cool. Weather class fall. Me class wistful. Me class wishing. Me relate woman."–this is my sad attempt to describe my sitting in a chair at my desk, looking out through my open window at a woman jogging along in the wonderfully cool fall weather, wishing I was her instead me being here at the computer. At some point in time, simplicity breaks down and you want a richer method in which to express your meaning.
• Chew on this: pictures as data, as well as visual, entities.
• Canvas is cool, but SVG is better. It's not just because SVG elements become part of the Document Object Model (DOM) and are easily scriptable. It's because we can find SVG similar to what we want, copy it, manipulate it, and we don't have to know any scripting. I wanted images of musical notes and searched on "music notes svg", which led me to this Wikipedia page and this (as well as this) public domain SVG. I copied the SVG file and deleted the SVG creating the bars–no bitmap tool magic needed to pull the notes separate from the bars. I split the notes into two separate images by coping and pasting the two different elements. I copied the SVG for both into this post, and scaled them into tiny little representations of themselves. Though the browser had to reach to scale them so small, we're not left with a tiny little bitmap blobs.

  I did think about using the following image, copied from this resource. Oh look, the original SVG contains metadata defined using RDF/XML. Isn't it marvelous when you can merge rich, well defined XML vocabularies together? Just like that?

• Silverlight: Why? There's nothing in Silverlight 1.0 that doesn't exist as an open standard and can't be supported for IE applications–if Microsoft would just support them. Silverlight as a 2D graphics system? Both SVG and Canvas are 2D graphics systems. Microsoft supports form controls like buttons? Hey! Guess what we've had in HTML for years? Silverlight 1.1 integrates web browser and ASP.NET functionality, which means you can use your Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Web Expression applications to create Rich Internet Applications? Fantastic! It still doesn't change the fact that Microsoft pushed its browser on the same developers it's trying to suck into the Silverlight world, and then abandoned it, and us, for five years; effectively holding up advances in internet development for half a decade.
• Adobe Flex/AIR: Why? It's true that Flash has done much for us over the years, and we're grateful, but we're ready to move into a new era of open standard applications and, frankly, Adobe, you're rather hit and miss when it come to 'open' and 'standard'. Take your SVG plug-in. It's cool and we thank you for providing it so that IE users could see what they're missing using a half-assed browser. Now you're going to pull the plug-in and your support for it. Why not open source it, and let the open source community decide if it wants to continue to support it? Is it because, as has been noted elsewhere, you want us to consider converting [our] SVG application to an Adobe Flex® application? Golly, I just love these opportunities to get sucked into another bloated, proprietary application environment. It makes me feel so good when you finally, inevitably, stop.

Danny Ayers, responding to a request for semantic web book suggestions made by Elias Torres listed a number including Practical RDF by yours truly. Danny wrote:

From those I've seen, I'd very much go along with Bill's suggestions, and if pressed for one book would probably suggest Tom's - good concise overview of the ideas. Sowa's book is amazing, but quite hard work in places and not especially webby. Shelley's is great, very practical, but an new edition really is needed, there has been a lot of development recently, even since Tom's book.

I don't believe that O'Reilly, the book publisher, is eager to do another edition of the RDF book. The newer edition that I and my editor have chatted about is related to another book. Right now, I'm so tired with this book, after Adding Ajax, after Learning JavaScript, after…that I'm beginning to think this might be it for me.

I'd like to see an updated Practical RDF, if only to cover all the nifty applications and advances since the old was written. I'm still fond of RDF/XML, but it should include the newer serialization techniques. Some major real world applications have been created using RDF, such as Joost.

I also think there's a lot of confusion–still–about 'semantic' web. The recent Web 3.0 fooflah demonstrates that point clearly. In his retort to the 3.0 nonsense (of which I agree with his sentiment to Calacanis' brain child) Tim O'Reilly wrote:

So for starters, I'd say that for "Web 3.0" to be meaningful we'll need to see a serious discontinuity from the previous generation of technology. That might be another bust and resurgence, or more likely, it will be something qualitatively different. I like Stowe Boyd's musings on the subject:

Personally, I feel the vague lineaments of something beyond Web 2.0, and they involve some fairly radical steps. Imagine a Web without browsers. Imagine breaking completely away from the document metaphor, or a true blurring of application and information. That's what Web 3.0 will be, but I bet we will call it something else.

I'm with Stowe. There's definitely something new brewing, but I bet we will call it something other than Web 3.0. And it's increasingly likely that it will be far broader and more pervasive than the web, as mobile technology, sensors, speech recognition, and many other new technologies make computing far more ambient than it is today.

Imagine a Web without browsers. Better yet, let's imagine a web without web servers.

Sometimes I think that RDF, OWL, the big 'S' semantic web are rejected out of hand because they're seen more as 'old' stuff rather than 'top down' stuff. We're in such a rush to find the next Big Thing, the next New Thing, that we look at the marvelous technology today and sneer at how quaint it is; how we can't be bothered with it all, because something new is just around the corner.

Like my little SVG update to my site, the other tweaks I've done, you've done, others have done, we've barely scratched the surface what we can do with the technology we have now. User agents, like browsers, still haven't even caught up with all the specs released, much less the new ones in work.

Not to excuse the browser makers, but how can they catch up with the old when the companies are in a desperate race to find the next new thing that they can't be bothered to implement, properly and completely, yesterday's specs, much less those of a few years ago. I created a small design feature for my weblog that half the people who visit in my site won't see, just because one browser company can't be bothered. Silverlight, you know. New thing.

We're on such a desperate merry-go-round chase for the new that I sometimes wonder if that shiny new thing everyone is sure is right around the corner will ever occur. Instead, we'll just end up with some piece of gilded crap that scratches the itches, and causes the VCs to salivate. I worry that we'll never advance because we don't take the time to stand still.

Which returns me to Danny's book list and doing a new edition of Practical RDF. RDF is old stuff, not shiny new. There isn't any profit to do a new book on such old stuff. That's the way it is in this new world.

If I do anything with RDF, it will have to be on my own, and most likely online. A labor of, well, not love–I love my cat. My cat and licorice. My cat, licorice, walks by the ocean, good music, great books, fantastic movies. Taking pictures. Friends and family. The environment. Justice for all.

A labor of interest, then. Writing a new book on RDF will be a labor of interest.

Maybe when I'm finished with my labor of interest, I'll parse the book into triples, give away the subject and the object, but charge for the predicate–like a mystery author giving away all but the last ten pages of her book. Now, that's new.