10 October 2007 Archives

I find it funny that I’m currently being inundated with drug comment spam, just after Danny Ayers pointed out the fact that the pharmacy industry is adopting the ‘orphaned’ semantic web:

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Internet standards arbiter that developed the HTML content description protocol, released a new standard several years ago called the semantic Web. Operating on linkages between data called triplets, in which two URL-based pieces of information are connected by a recognizable relationship in a kind of subject-verb-object arrangement, the semantic Web gained far less momentum with programmers than did HTML, which can be searched on the basis of written language.

However, the so-far-neglected standard, which relies on extensive and standardized coding of Web-searchable data and documents, may soon be adopted by the big drug companies, where a coterie of information technology (IT) specialists see its potential in organizing R&D data and expediting drug discovery and development—where a triplet might include a specific compound and a functional relationship of that compound to a specific cellular receptor.

“Many pharmaceutical companies are exploring the use of the semantic Web,” says Susie Stephens, principal research scientist for discovery and development informatics at Eli Lilly & Co. It is one of many avenues Lilly is investigating to develop a research IT regime, she says.

The entire article is surreal. And funny! Triplets!

Perhaps someone went home with one too many “semantic web” samples.

Summary: Wherein author picks up both stick and carrot, paying particular attention to the attached metadata: Me relate stick. Me relate carrot. Me class hitting. Stick class hit. Carrot class eat. Me relate Microsoft. Translation: I am hitting the stick with Microsoft, while eating a carrot.

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 blobsI 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.