Category: RDF

Categories
RDF W3C Writing

It’s a beautiful fall and I’m stuck inside

he fall has been nice, but I haven’t been able to take advantage of the decent weather and pretty scenery. I have a book deadline next week for my new book for O’Reilly, The JavaScript Cookbook.

I can’t do much anyway, because my car is doing very odd things, and I no longer trust it for longer out of town trips. I know there’s a short somewhere, but every time I take it in, it costs me $500.00. But I’m getting a relay click in the dash, the battery light comes up, briefly, every time I start the car (and it’s a new battery), and the speedometer went crazy on one trip. All of this combined is wiring, and wiring seems to be beyond car repair people.

I save the longer trips for the weekend when I can drag my roommate, and my roommate’s car, about. His car isn’t possessed.

I rejoined the HTML WG. Again. The group has come up with a change procedure/process that I can support. There was confusion before about whether HTML WG members could issue formal objections, since supposedly we’re part of the group making the original decisions. The new procedure, though, reserves us the right to submit a Formal Objection if all other avenues are blocked. I’m more comfortable being part of the group, now. I even have a first change proposal assignment, due after the book deadline.

Good news from the group: the HTML+RDFa document is now a published draft. However, the work on distributed extensibility is slow going. It’s difficult to split off the technical concerns from the knee jerk reactions.

You may, or may not, have noticed that I don’t post links to my main feed, or this site, for my Just Shelley site. That site is very personal, and a lot of people who read my stuff are more interested in my more impersonal writings, such as tech. Of course, I haven’t been writing at any of my sites lately. Too busy with the book.

I did get a Wave invite–thanks to whoever sent me it. And yes, I’ve given out all of the Wave invitations I have.

What do I think of Google Wave? I think it’s too much for me, though I did have a fun exchange with Marius Coomans, as he was sailing the ideal waters around Australia. We exchange emails and twitter messages, but there’s something different about seeing a message being typed out by someone who is on a boat, and watching them make corrections, as they’re watching you correct your own mistakes. And you’re on opposite sides of the planet, and different hemispheres. It’s not earth shattering, but it is a bit uncanny.

So what else is there to say about Wave. The user interface sucks, but that’s not unusual for a Google application. The performance is sluggish, but it’s alpha. And it performs better than Twitter. Other than that, though, I’m just not sure about the usability of the service. I know that others like the tool, such as Laura Scott who had a nice write-up.

Frankly, though, I’m really getting burned out on the whole social media thing so I may not be a good judge.

There was another instance where I wrote one thing, and it was interpreted as the opposite. I supported what Kurt Cagle wrote on HTML5, but based on a intense Twitter exchange I had with another person, Kurt interpreted my reaction to be opposite of what it is.

Twitter is useless as a tool for doing more than pointing out a link or talking about what you had for breakfast.

Categories
HTML5 RDF

HTML5, RDFa, and the Beatles

How is the ongoing debate about HTML5/Microdata and RDFa like a Beatles’ song? Read more at Bb RealTech: Maxwell’s Silver Hammer: RDFa and HTML5’s Microdata.

I’ve turned comments back on, at least until I get overrun by spam, or the crickets get too loud.

Categories
HTML5 RDF Specs W3C

My HTML WG status

I posted about quitting the HTML WG on Twitter, but there’s only so much one can shove into 140 characters. Of course, I realize that most people will probably be uninterested in a longer writing on my reasons, but that’s the advantage of syndication feeds—you can see at a glance whether you want to read beyond the first few sentences of a writing. Or not.

First of all a clarification: I joined the HTML WG once. I quit the HTML WG once. I joined the HTML WG reluctantly, because as I wrote at the time, I’m really not a joiner. I feel I’m best writing in my own space, not participating in a back and forth in email lists; definitely not through quick non-thinking blurbs in an IRC channel, or teleconferences where key players never participate.

I did join, though, and became actively involved. However, I never could figure out the “rules” of the effort, and I found it both discouraging and exhausting. So much so that it drained the energy I needed for the writing I need to do for a living. More importantly, I felt I really wasn’t making a difference, and I’m not sure I was willing to play the game in order to make a difference.

A further point of clarification: My decision to quit did not come about because of any exchange I had yesterday with any person. It was a number of factors that led to my quitting, a primary one being the one I just mentioned, needing to focus on work. I’d already decided to quit before yesterday, but was waiting for a specific thread on RDFa to play out. I will mention, though, that some of the reasons why I’m leaving were echoed in that thread, including the hostility of the WhatWG backchannel IRC, and the lack of respect some members of this group have for members of the HTML WG and other W3C groups.

Some of the the WhatWG members seem to think that I’ve quit the HTML WG more than once, but they are mistaken. I unsubscribed from the WhatWG email lists, because I found the environment hostile. I stopped working on my assessment of metadata use cases, because the HTML5 author, Ian Hickson, suddenly released a new microdata section, changing everything I wanted to write.

I have unsubscribed from the WhatWG mailing list, and that won’t change. I have quit the HTML WG, and I may, but it’s unlikely, rejoin at some later time. But I have not stopped writing about the HTML5 specification. Whether I make a difference or not, my way of “participating”, in the HTML5 effort, and any other, is by writing in this space. And I will continue to do so, in my own time, and in my own way.