BurningbirdEnough tilting at windmills. In the quiet of the night, when the fires cool and tongues still, one can listen.
Loren’s To find out what is true and About the size of a fist.
Jonathon’s For a Dancer.
No further comment. Go read.
Awake to understand you are not dreaming
It is not seaming just to be this way
Dying men draw numbers in the air
Dream to conquer little bits of time
Scuffle with the crowd to get their share
And fall behind their little bits of time.Colors of the Sun
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
What’s particularly difficult about writing something such as my posting Girlism? is seeing the gentlemen in the community linking to Halley’s post, but not my refutation. Huzzahs for Halley’s refreshing honesty and blowing the lid off the terrible games we women play.
Perpetuating the myth by controlling the links, and thereby controlling the discussion. Well done. Is this another lesson we women should learn?
But then, I’m picking on Halley with my posting, aren’t I? And members of the same community are not supposed to do this. We either agree, or stay silent. Another lesson to learn.
Why are more women’s voices not heard in technology? Because men control technology’s voice. I guess the same could be said for weblogging.
Update: Thankfully, the conversation is starting up again, which is what I really was hoping for. I knew there had to be other voices with something to say on this issue. See Elaine, Steve, Dorothea, Mike, and Jen. And associated comments attached to all the postings.
Second Update And Sam! Of course, Sam! Sam, who is the first official member of Burningbird’s Anonymous! I would never forget to link to Sam. Nah uh. Not me.
I guess I won’t be finding any interest in my SORSS syndication format because the weblogging kingdom is now circling about XHTML as a syndication format. In other words, publish your page as XHTML and let aggregators scrape it.
It looks as if Anil Dash started the discussion with a well written suggestion:
My new syndication format is called XHTML. I propose that existing syndication and aggregation clients should be able to read an HTML file, detect if it has the appropriate XHTML doctype, and then render the contents of each XHTML node in the appropriate place in the client’s display. All that would be needed is standardization of names and classes for page elements like DIVs and headers. A post/entry title would always be an H3, with a class set to “title”, for example. Permanent links would always be P tags with their classes set to “permalink”. Simple.
What was particularly nice about Anil’s posting is that it generated a lot of good discussion and commenting, and no animosity. Pay particular attention to Timothy Appnel’s comments, which I think were quite good. (Thanks to Chris for heads up on excellent discussion.)
The “RSS Rebellion” has now spread elsewhere:
Mark wrote a Python program to scrape HTML and generate an RSS stream. You know, that boy do like Python, doesn’t he? Wait a sec — he just turned 30. Excuse me, I should have said that man do like Python.
Mark based his efforts on the discussion at tantek/log.
Aaron Swartz likes the idea and provides an XSLT implementation (and links to other discussions).
Personally, though I have just finished a template re-design for most of my pages that validates as strict XHTML 1.0 (not implemented yet, so don’t test this page), I have no interest in someone grabbing whatever they want for syndication from my web page, including the entire posting. I’d rather they take the excerpt I give them, which I can control by having a seperate syndication feed. Besides, I’m going to implement SORSS for my site. You know, that Dark and Beautiful Queen thing.
So why am I interested in and promoting this debate? I’m all for bubbling the Daypop joy juice, watching to see what floats to the top.
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
I spent the last several days reading through the six RDF documents currently under final review. During the last few days I acted the minor irritant to some members of the W3C RDF Working Group, primarily getting clarification on some confusing or complex aspects of the documents. I also spent time trying to bring concerns expressed by fellow webloggers to the attention of the group members — trying to bring the viewpoint of non-RDF folks to the RDF table. I find myself in the interesting position of being an RDF supporter who doesn’t necessarily support all aspects of RDF. Which means I can’t claim kinship with any ‘side’ in the RDF debate.
Of the items I couldn’t cover in the article (due to space considerations), and their possible impacts:
Containers Containers such as Bag, Seq, and Alt are still included, but without additional semantics attached. What does this mean? It means that a container is a grouping of resources, but there is no additional assumptions attached to the RDF specification about how container elements relate to each other, or how applications process the data. Elements in a Bag are treated no differently, to the specification, than elements in a Seq. It’s up to each individual application to determine what ‘Bag’ or ‘Seq’ means.
Sound familiar? Can we all say “HTML”?
RSS 1.0, the same RSS 1.0 generated by most weblogging tools, uses a container to group items — a Seq (sequence). I have never been particularly happy with this as I believe that ordering or other processing should result from the data rather than the structure, such as using the posting date to determine sequence of display. In addition, container within RSS add redundancy. Individual items are contained in Items which is contained in Channel. Added redundancy is equivalent to added complexity.
In fact, we can simplify RSS, as I tried to demonstrate once before. Unfortunately, this example won’t validate as RSS.
By putting the onus of semantics — the behavior if you will — of containers on to the applications, there will be differing results based on different applications interpretation of ‘Bag’ and ‘Seq’ or ‘Alt’. The RSS 1.0 group can specify that RSS 1.0 uses a Container, but there is no guarantee that the data within the container will be processed in any specific way by any specific aggregator, or generated a specific way by a specific application.
That’s what happens when precision of meaning is lost…or deliberately withheld.
(I think I’m going to change my Movable Type RSS template to support the new and improved SORSS — Shelley’s Own RSS. I could unite disparate RSS sides under one banner. Instead of a king, a Queen, Dark and Beautiful. All will Love me and Despair…. )
nodeID For those of you who ran into problems with blank nodes (bnodes) when trying to work with RDF, you’re going to love this: the WG has created the nodeID that allows you to apply a label to blank nodes. This means you can use whatever you want as a bnode label and the document will validate. No more having to figure out how to create a fake URI in order to specifically access the relationship denoted by a bnode.
Collection A new container like construct has been created: the Collection. This is used with groups of resources to create a list-like structure. However, just as with Containers and Reification, there is no assumption about the semantics of a Collection — it is up to each application. If I use this in my own applications, it will only be because there’s an absolute need for it, and I can’t avoid it’s use.
datetype There’s a new RDF attribute, rdf:datatype, that can be attached to a property to give a specific datatype URI reference, usually to Schema datatypes. Adding in support for datatyping is a goodness, but I’m absolutely appalled that the Working Group is adding this in at the property instance, rather than into the vocabulary definition. This means that one person can define create-date as an integer, the number of seconds since January 1, 1972. Another person could define create-date as a Schema date, with a value of 1999-10-01. Both would be valid instances of the same RDF vocabulary.
Of course, the designers can provide documentation about what format is to be used, but I would prefer something other than the honor system.
Embedding The WG did come out specifically on the issue of embedding RDF in HTML and XHTML — don’t do it, use link instead.
There’s a lot more, but you’ll have to buy the book. Literally.
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Halley Suitt wrote the following at Blog Sisters in response to the question, “Whatever happened to feminism”:
“There is no more feminism,” I explain. Game Over. But it took me a day or two to name the new game. It’s “girlism” — women want to be sexy girls and use all the tricks girls use. Crying, flirting, begging, winking, stomping their feet when they don’t get their way, general trotting around showing off their long legs and whatever else they decide to show off thereby distracting and derailing men.
It’s about power — the girl power we’ve always had, but forgot about, combined with all the stuff we’ve learned in the workplace. Needless to say, if you’re a man and you call us on it, we deny it. The new double double standard. We learned how to stop playing fair
In my computer technology field, which is one of the most heavily male-dominated professions, I have never once seen a woman use flirting, begging, winking, stomping their feet, showing off their long legs, dressing sexy, or anything of this nature to get their way. If anything, women are less likely to display emotion on the job in my field than the men. Why? Because of statements such as these, saying that there is a double double standard and that women are using ‘girly’ ways to succeed.
Once I was so frustrated at being continually undercut by a male co-worker that I shed tears. Another of my co-workers, a woman, said that I needed to stop crying, because I was falling into the ‘women cry, men swear’ stereotype. I have never cried at work since. However, I have learned to pound the desk in anger, and swear a lot. Are these better? Well, at least they aren’t stereotypical.
Girlism. A label to discount women’s human experience and expression.
When women cry, they’re resorting to ‘girlism’, but when men cry, they’re being sensitive. Men can be hurt and receive understanding and compassion, but when women are hurt, they’re being overly emotional. Is that it works now? Women dress for sex, but men dress for success. And when women get angry, they’re being ‘girly’, but when men get angry, they’re being assertive.