Category: Technology

Categories
SVG XHTML/HTML

If you’re pushing the grapefruit, make sure the apples don’t stink

Though RealTech is a weblog, it’s also the place where I do much of my experimentation with technology. It’s the site I use to test out the plug-ins, graphics applications, and what not I’m eventually planning on using in the rest of my web sites. Normally you don’t use a ‘live’ site to test changes, but I happen to think a live technology weblog is one of the better places to try something out. All those juicy testers.

However, one of the downsides to such effort is that the page may be challenging to access at times. Or a challenge to access at all times for IE7 and lower if it comes to that.

Another downside is that when I’m pushing one type of technology, my uses of other technologies may make it seem like the one I’m pushing is causing problems, when the reality is it could be any number of other tweaks and tricks.

As an example, I’m a big fan of SVG and XHTML. I serve my pages up as XHTML, and I use SVG inline. I write quite a bit on XHTML and SVG because I’m trying to encourage the use of both. If you access this page and it loads slowly, or seems to have other problems, you might think ithe problems are generated by my use of SVG, because it’s the technology I write about the most. However, it could also just as likely be any of a number of other tweaks I’m currently trying out.

In my post WordPress at the Top: Not, a couple of folks (Seth and Daniel) mentioned they had problems loading the page and scrolling and both thought it might be the inline SVG. It’s true that in their client environments, the inline SVG could be causing the problems–especially with my use of gradients, which are quite CPU intensive.

However, a little experimentation of my own shows that problems with the scrolling could also be caused by two older technologies: the first being the use of the CSS fixed background, which no browser seems to handle efficiently; the second being the use of the JavaScript-collapsed posts.

I also use rather large images in the header, and load them as background for elements, which turns off image caching. The lack of caching and the larger image sizes, combined with the derived CSS could slow load times. However, my experiments for sampling images and deriving CSS elements rather depends on my use of the CSS background attributes for adding the images, rather than just loading them using IMG.

To determine whether it is the SVG causing problems, or my other tweaks, I’ve removed the fixed CSS positioning, for now, as well as the collapsed posts and optimized the images and slimmed down the code deriving the CSS. If you’ve noticed performance problems in the past, can you access the pages now and see if the problems you had have been eliminated?

In the meantime, in addition to the other changes I’m making to support XHTML (BTW, you’ll notice that my XHTML validation of comments is too strict at this time, and will more or less give you invalid errors for any use of element attributes), I’m going to look more closely at my use of photo sampling, photo as CSS background, and what I can do to improve this type of functionality.

Then I’ll probably corrupt all that hard work by experimenting around with something else new, and causing my site performance to tank. Again.

Categories
XHTML/HTML

Speaking of tanking

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Speaking of tanking, the comment thread to the WaSP post on the round table on IE8 versioning took an interesting turn.

A real consensus is that Microsoft should be supporting XHTML (not to mention SVG), and that XHTML strict should trigger standards mode. I think there’s considerably more people supporting XHTML than people assume. I also think this could be a way for MS to save its bacon.

If Microsoft doesn’t follow this advice–doesn’t support the XHTML MIME type, doesn’t turn on standards mode for XHTML strict–the company is sending a message that transcends issues of browser versioning.

Categories
RDF Semantics Specs Web

Semantic web: dull as dishwater edition

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Mathew Ingram has decided that the problem with the semantic web is that it’s as boring as dry toast. Of course, by Mathew’s standard, all the stuff that makes the web work is also boring as hell. It’s probably a good thing, then, that some people looked beyond the need for immediate titaliation when it comes to the tech underlying this environment, or Mathew’s audience for his opinions would be his immediate family members, and perhaps those neighbors not quick enough to run away when seeing him approach.

He also writes:

It’s all about plumbing and widgets and data standards, all of which have names like FOAF and TOTP and SIOC and whatnot. It’s right off the dork-o-meter. The Lone Gunmen from The X-Files would have a hard time getting interested in this stuff, let alone anyone who isn’t married to their slide rule or their pocket protector.

Now, taking Mathew’s complaints of No glitter! No glitter! Mama, Mama, where’s my glitter! seriously, I decided to put my slide rule down for a sec and see if I couldn’t respond to his one statement about no one knowing what this all means.

First, there was the web. The web was dumb, but it was hyperlinked.

Then, there was search. Search followed hyperlinks, scraped pages, massaged keywords and tested the strength of the links. The web was still dumb, but number crunching helped generate some smarts. Think of your favorite dog. Yeah, that smart.

Next, there was the semantic web. The semantic web says, You and I can derive understanding from this blob of text on this page, but applications can’t. Applications can pull keywords and run algorithms, but can only approximate what this blob of text is all about. What if we add a little information to this blob of text so that applications don’t have to crunch numbers or make guesses as to what we mean?

How do we add a little information? A hundred different ways. We can use microformats, or RDFa, or RDF, or whatever the HTML5 people cook up for us. With this little bit of extra information, applications can access a web page list that’s created with UL/LI elements, but instead of having to look at the text in the list and try to guess what the list is all about, it can read that little bit of data and know that the list consists of recommended books. Perhaps they can take that little list of books and use another application to look up these books at Amazon. Or at their library. Or better yet, click a button and load all the books into our Kindle. (Assuming that Mathew doesn’t subscribe to the Steve Jobs school of, “We don’t read, we aint’ got no books, gimme the vids”, school of thought.)

The little bit of information might, instead, be an address for an event, triggering the browser to add that event information to a desktop calendar application.

It could be information about people we know and how we know them, so that when we move from Facebook, which is today’s darling, to MyPowerBase, we can tell MyPowerBase to add all people who we have defined as friends, but not those defined as just contacts.

If the information is embedded in a photo–wow, information embedded in a photo, how dull–when we upload the photo to a site like Flickr, it could automatically be added to a map, with all the other photos from the same location. It can be pulled up on a search someday, when we ask the web to show us all photos for St. Louis, or for a certain block in St. Louis. Perhaps it can even help us find photos that are licensed Creative Commons so we can steal them.

I might write about a product or company, and the little bit of information I add to my post might help others who are thinking of doing business with the company, or buying that product. Sure, search engines can scrape the content and try and gleam useful bits based on keywords such as the product or company name, but we’ve all had enough really strange search results to know how far search can go, no matter how brainy the algorithm.

Someday, I’ll be able to write about movies and add just a little bit of extra information, and we can do the same for movies. Or music. Or cooking recipes (“give me all recipes on the web that use apricot jam and bourbon, but I don’t want chicken”). Or even poetry, though don’t mention poetry around Sir Tim–it makes him peevish.

Mathew is very addicted to FriendFeed, which allows him to pull in all the activities of his friends in various places. I bet if we scratched the surface of this application, a lot of the data that makes the application tick comes courtesy of the semantic web dorks.

I could go on and on, but I’ve already been away from my slide rule too long. Instead I’ll end with the best for last: because all of these different ways of adding that tiny little bit of useful information to blocks of text or photos or video files or what have you are based on agreed upon specifications, we can use applications to merge this data and use it for something new; something we haven’t thought of yet. See, now that’s when it really gets exciting because rather than coming up with an idea and then taking five years to get enough data to test it, we’ll already have the data, at no extra effort or cost.

Maybe I’ve been cooped up in my cube with my computers and code for too long, but that strikes me as kind of interesting. In a dorky sort of way.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

WordPress at the top: not

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The biggest mistake I ever made was to install WordPress at the top level. The second, was to use “smart” URLs.

My site was restricted due to bandwidth overlimit this morning, something that shouldn’t have happened. When I checked my stats, one site, proxyit.com, was hammering my bandwidth. Checking the recent visitors list, this domain was grabbing my feed every minute, except it was grabbing the Burningbird feed, which was then redirected to the new combined feed, at http://burningbird.net/feeds/atom.xml.

This feed, created by the aggregator, Venus, hadn’t changed, but with the redirect, it was coming up fresh and sparkly new. Now, that doesn’t excuse the fact that this site was accessing it every minute, but I’m not sure that my twisted convoluted redirects to feeds wasn’t at least partially responsible. To make matters worse, I used an inline SVG object yesterday, which shouldn’t tax bandwidth limits overmuch…unless your feed is being hammered.

(Not to mention that using SVG inline absolutely killed my entry at Planet RDF…)

Of course, when I redirected my Burningbird main feed, /feed/ to atom.xml, this redirected all other variations of /feed, including /feed/atom, /feed/rdf, and so on. Not just for Burningbird, but all sub-domains, too. So I had to add more redirects, which attempted to bypass WordPress’s programmatic management of URLs. I had to so many redirects in my sites to get feeds to serve correctly, I wasn’t sure who was getting what. So I’ve removed all of them.

One of my site changes is to remove WordPress at the top level. I’m replacing it with a page generated by Venus that combines all feeds from WordPress installations in sub-domains. Each sub-domain gets its own WordPress installation. Some will get the full installation, and others will get my new semi-forked version that I’ve named Curmudgeon WordPress. Curmudgeon WordPress is a WordPress installation that has had all the reader interactive bits, such as ping back, registration, XMLRPC, and comments, and their associated includes and admin functions removed.

When I get all this finished, no more RDF feeds, no more RSS feeds. You get one feed for each WordPress installation, an Atom feed. And you get one overall feed generated by Venus, name and location TBD, generated once per day.

In the meantime, feeds may be a problem. My bandwidth may be exceeded. Yada yada, you know the rest.

Categories
Technology Writing

Tasks, transcripts, and semantics

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’m spending the rest of the week creating plug-ins that will XHTMLate WordPress. I’m not sure how far I can get with plug-ins, but the end result could be both interesting and useful. I still feel that XHTMLating WordPress is at least partially philosophy, as much as it is code. I can’t seem to communicate this clearly, though, so I am dropping the subject and just focusing on code.

I also have a design for my “Painting the Web” book web site, and need to create a lovely SVG paintbrush, as part of the design. Since my artistic skills are more along the lines of telling a program to draw a line from A to B, the effort may take some time. However, the medium I’m using (SVG) is compatible with my skillset, so perhaps the effort will be trivial and the result good. Better yet, I’ll be able to find a paintbrush at Wikipedia to use.

I did want to point out an interview that Paul Miller of Talis had with Tim Berners-Lee. Unlike most other podcasts, this interview also has a written transcript as well as published show notes. I really wish more video and audio podcasters would spend the time transcribing shows into text, as well as providing more in-depth information about the show than posting a video window and telling people, “Hey! Cool Stuff!” In the meantime, I’m going to watch this podcast via my Apple TV, since the Talis series is also listed at iTunes. I wonder if it’s in HD? (Later: oops! It’s not in video. Darn. I was looking forward to seeing Sir Tim in HD.)

In the write-up on the interview, Miller wrote:

We talked for a fascinating hour during which we ranged from past to future, from technology to policy. We covered specifications such as RDF and SPARQL, and we talked about the pressing need for more accessible texts to explain the Semantic Web to mainstream business.

My book, “Practical RDF”, is out of date, and I and my editor have been talking about a new edition. However, a new edition would not be focused entirely on RDF, and probably wouldn’t cover certain aspects of RDF, in order to be a bit more comprehensive. RDF doesn’t function alone in the world, and a book that covers semantic web technologies needs to cover not only RDF, but also all the complementary technologies. This, in addition to the new tools, data initiatives, and companies.

Now is actually a rather exciting time to be creating a new edition of a book on semantic web technologies. I remember when I wrote “Practical RDF”, which was published before the final release of the RDF specification, I had to stretch a bit to find tools and technologies focused on RDF and/or the semantic web. Now, the semantic web is hip, and the challenge is less on finding good material and more on ensuring that the book isn’t too big, or covers too much.

I don’t think the new edition will be called the same, but we’ll be keeping the “Practical” in the title in some way. Maybe something along the lines of “Practical Semantic Web”. I am nothing if not a practical person, and the “practical” component of the title will also be the overall theme for the book. However, even with this constraint I visualize a book bursting at the seams.

We’re also planning a new edition of Learning JavaScript, too. Unfortunately, the first edition was on a bit of a fast track, and I made mistakes in the book; more than I’d like to see with any of my books. I’ve made corrections via errata, but it will be nice to create a new, updated version.

I’m also helping out with a new edition of a third book, but this would be more along the lines of contributing commentary on organization and some chapters than being sole author.