Link tags: xml

The 100 Year Web (In Praise of XML)

I don’t agree with Steven Pemberton on a lot of things—I’m not a fan of many of the Semantic Web technologies he likes, and I think that the Robustness Principle is well-suited to the web—but I always pay attention to what he has to say. I certainly share his concern that migrating everything to JavaScript is not good for interoperability:

This is why there are so few new elements in HTML5: they haven’t done any design, and instead said “if you need anything, you can always do it in Javascript”.

And they all have.

And they are all different.

Read this talk transcript, and even if you don’t agree with everything in it today, you may end up coming back to it in the future. He’s playing the long game:

The web is the way now that we distribute information. We will need the web pages we create now to be readable in 100 years time, just as we can still read 100-year-old books.

Requiring a webpage to depend on a particular 100-year-old implementation of Javascript is not exactly evidence of future-thinking.

XML is 20

XML 1.0 was released on February 10th, 1998. I remember the hype around XML at the time—it was our saviour, the chosen one, prophesied to bring balance to data exchange. Things didn’t quite work out that way, but still…

Twenty years later, it seems obvious that the most important thing about XML is that it was the first. The first data format that anyone could pack anything up into, send across the network to anywhere, and unpack on the other end, without asking anyone’s permission or paying for software, or for the receiver to have to pay attention to what the producer thought they’d produced it for or what it meant.

PhD Thesis: Cascading Style Sheets

Håkon wrote his doctoral thesis on CSS …which is kinda like Einstein writing a thesis on relativity. There’s some fascinating historical insight into the creation of the standards we use today.

The lie of the API by Ruben Verborgh

I agree completely with the sentiment of this article (although the title is perhaps a bit overblown): you shouldn’t need a separate API—that’s what you’re existing URL structure should be.

I’m not entirely sure that content negotiation is the best way to go when it comes to serving up different representations: there’s a real value in being able to paste a URL into a browser window to get back a JSON or XML representation of a resource.

But this is spot-on about the ludicrous over-engineered complexity of most APIs. It’s ridiculous that I can enter a URL into a browser window to get an HTML representation of my latest tweets, but I have to sign up for an API key and jump through OAuth hoops, and agree to display the results in a specific way if I want to get a JSON representation of the same content. Ludicrous!

Things the W3C Should Stop Doing | Infrequently Noted

I was all set to bristle against an attack on the W3C from Alex …but when I actually read the post, I found it hard to disagree with. If anything, this shows just how much Alex cares about the W3C (probably more than most people).

The conversation in the comments is worth reading too.

Thinking about the HTML and XML

Some musings from Norman Walsh. I have to say, I’m still not entirely sure why the HTML/XML Task Force exists. The “use cases” described here are vague and handwavey.

HTML/XHTML Compatibility Authoring Guidelines

A first bash at describing how to write (X)HTML5 documents that can be parsed as XML as well as HTML.

Yahoo! Address Book API - YDN

You can know use an API (with BBAuth) to get contact Yahoo account contact details. There really is no excuse now for still using the password anti-pattern.

Easy as Pie Ajax Requests - Create compelling ajax in minutes with simple examples. | Notes from Phazm

This is a good straightforward hands-on explanation of Ajax: succinct and clear.

Digital Web Magazine - Hacking on Open APIs

The second part of Gareth's series for Digital Web on APIs. This time he's got some PHP code samples for parsing XML and JSON.

Fundamentos Web 2006 Podcast

The website for the Fundamentos Web conference provided audio and video files but no RSS feed to enclose them so Nick Dunn has created one for us.

The B-List: I can't believe it's not XML!

Great explanatory article by James Bennett comparing JSON and XML.

Scripting News: 12/20/2006: God bless the re-inventers

Dave Winer doesn't get JSON.

XML and the Next Web (and the Previous...) - O'Reilly XML Blog

Simon St. Laurent writes about the victory of JSON over XML in the browser and looks forward to a future filled with XQuery.

AJAX Activity Indicators

Want to indicate that something is happening on a web page, like... oh, I don't know... an Ajax request or something? Here's a cornucopia of animated progress indicators.

perl.com: Using Ajax from Perl

My fellow Brightonian geek, Dom, has written an article about using Perl and Ajax.

For Many AJAX is Not Degrading, But it Must :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net

"...it must degrade well. It must still be accessible. It must be usable. If not, it is a cool useless piece of rubbish for some or many people."

rest/ahah - Microformats

Who knew? The way I do my Ajax is a microformat. AHAH: Asynchronous HTML and HTTP.

Microsoft Team RSS Blog : The orange icon...

Possible ideas for IE's icon for RSS feeds. I like number five.

Simon Bisson: Old dog learns new tricks

Ajax in The Guardian.