RDF

RDFaification of Drupal

2008-11-09T01:39:48+00:00

Don't you love it when people take bits and pieces of different words, creating a new word that manages, somehow, to be understandable? A word like RDFaification?

But the RDFa beautification of Drupal is upon us, helped along by writings such as A Roadmap for RDFa in Drupal 7, based, in part, on this previous post and discussion, kicked off by Drupal's Dries Buytaert.

Years ago, we used to talk about the "ugly" serialization of RDF (RDF/XML at the time) and how the serialization technique really didn't matter, because one day, the metadata annotation of a site would be handled automatically via whatever content management tool people used.

Future, meet Drupal.

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End of the Politico and Beginning of Computer Fund

2008-09-23T19:59:58+01:00

Today I went to the gas station to fill up my tank before this week's rapid rise in gas prices. The station has two islands, with three filling areas on each side. I drove through the center, between the two islands, which has room to pass even if cars are at both sides. However, I was forced to stop before getting to the pump because an elderly man was using the window squeegee thing to clean the inside of his windows and had his door wide open so I couldn't pass.

I stopped, thinking that he would see I was trying to get past and close his door, but he just continued his painfully slow process of trying to use the squeegee thingie to clean his inside windows.

I was already cranky entering the station, and snarled at him to please close his door, as I was trying to get past— startling him a little, which left me feeling like a jerk because my parents did not raise me to be rude to somebody in their 80s. I had let my cranky feelings overcome both my manners, and my sense of perspective, because I was in no hurry and could have waited a couple of minutes for him to finish.

I'm cranky from the news, not only of the election but the abysmal bail out, which, no, I don't approve of in any shape or form. However, the stress of both is actually adding to a sense of physical degradation, as well as impacting on both my humor and my interactions with those around me. I snarled at an elderly man, and I've never snarled at an elderly person before. I wasn't raised this way. Snarl at webloggers, yes; but never the elderly, the very young, or critters. That's just plain mean.

You'll be glad to know that this is my last post on the election, because I am going to be restricting my intake of news and politics, and especially economics. I can't do a thing to make a difference, and keeping up with the stories is, frankly, ruining what is potentially going to be a beautiful fall.

I had planned on writing a long, seemingly learned paper on the election, listing out various topics and how Obama and McCain differ, but there's a lot of people who do a much better job at this than me. I'm voting for Obama/Biden, plain and simple. To do otherwise will turn the White House over to two people who are incompetent to lead, at a time when this country is in a world of hurt, and needs the best, not the worst.

There. I did my thing, and I'm sure have convinced hundreds, thousands of you to vote for Obama.

Now, writing about the internet, browsers, standards—including and RDF and SVG, and the like—is useful because I may actually make a difference talking about these topics. Same with my tales of Missouri at MissouriGreen, video at Secret of Signals, and whatever at Just Shelley. Even if all I do is post pictures of our zoo's new Amur leopard cub, Sophie, who stole my heart this weekend, forever, when she "stalked" my roommate as he walked around her habitat trying to see her.

Yes, I have given my heart to a leopard cub. Sorry to my male readers who might be disappointed. Come to that, sorry to my female readers who might be disappointed.

Hopefully pictures of this sweet thing will make up for the fact that I've been a dead bore, lately.

update: Decided against trying to run a computer fund.

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OMG! Web Developer has to wait! The Horror!

2008-09-13T17:35:07+01:00

Where I focused on Ian Hickson's statement about extensibility, every other person, and their brothers, sisters, and aunts are throwing a hissy because of the HTML5 timeline.

Scott Gilbertson writes:

Even if your 2022 ronc-o-matic web-enabled toaster (It slices! It dices! It browses! It arouses!) does ship with Firefox v22.3, will HTML still be the dominant language of web? Given that no one can really answer that question, does it make sense to propose a standard so far in the future?

Jeff Croft writes:

I’m not saying the specs should go away. They absolute serve a purpose. I’m just saying that I personally am done paying much attention to them. Instead, I’m reading blogs like Surfin’ Safari and Mozilla Developer News to find out what the new shiny is in browsers, because these are the things I can actually take advantage of in serving my clients and users.

And?

So?

Specification work was never focused on the end users, it's focused at the user agents or others who have to implement the specifications. The Mozillas, Apples, Operas, Microsoft, et al. The only reason I pay attention to any of it is because of my concern about extensibility.

In the meantime, the new stuff that is HTML5 is leaking into browsers now, not years from now. That's part of the specification process—actual implementation on the street in order to "proof the spec", as it were. And pieces of HTML5 are not just showing up in Firefox, Opera, and Safari/WebKit— IE8 has a few HTML5 tricks up its sleeve.

Heck, HTML5 isn't the only longish spec under development. CSS 2 started in 1998, the lost call for CSS 2.1 was in 2002, the candidate recommendation was in 2007, and Microsoft is only now providing CSS 2.1 support. That's ten years, end to end.

In the meantime, I'm using CSS3 stuff that's only supported by a couple of browsers, and the final release of all the CSS3 bits is probably years out, too. Of course, I only play around with my own spaces—professional web designers and developers know that we can't necessarily use the shiny new stuff for client applications, because we're still having to support browsers that are seven years old.

Hey! We're still supporting browsers almost as old as the timeline when HTML5 will be finalized! I guess things aren't as "today" and "now" as we think they are.

The point is, specifications take time, or at least, good specifications typically take time. Any doofus can toss a quick spec out and call it done, but who wants to use the doofus spec?

That schedule part of what Ian had to say didn't phase me. As far as I'm concerned, the group can take as long as it needs. In the meantime, I'll play around with the local storage, and some of the other odds and ends, as I keep putting in my annoying "But what about SVG?" "But what about RDF?" oar; probably helping to slow the development of the spec, even more.

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Death to Extensibility

2008-09-12T19:26:32+01:00

In an interview at Tech Republic, HTML5 Editor Ian Hickson stated:

The second big controversy in recent history was over extensibility. There have been some requests to allow people to extend HTML without speaking to the committees working on HTML. We’ve provided a number of mechanisms for this (the class and rel attributes, the data-* attributes, the meta element for page-wide metadata, the script element for non-script data blobs, the embed element for plugins), but some people simply want the ability to invent their own elements and tag names. So far, we’ve managed to avoid that, and we’ll have to see if we can continue.

Yes, but we've still not resolved—at least, I'm not aware of any resolution—about how to incorporate MathML, RDFa, and SVG into HTML5. I can't help thinking we've spent more time trying to prohibit extensibility than we would if we just provided the mechanism.

In addition, I'm frankly confused about how we'll pull off a consistent model between HTML5, which is rigidly inflexible, and XHTML5, which is anything but. If what's incorporated into HTML5 differs from what's allowed in XHTML5, do we just...wing it?

The whole point of XML years ago was because of issues like this—how do we create a markup that can be extended without having to update the underlying specification/model with each new addition. Ever since, we've been running in horror from the Yellow Screen of Death—the negative aspect of XML we fixate on—while arguing, endlessly, about extensibility—the most beneficial aspect of XML. I can't help thinking that we should keep the extensibility and just get rid of the Yellow Screen of Death.

However, I'm not expert in these things. I am just a humble web developer, with simple needs. One such need is I don't want to lose what I have now.

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Creating Social Networks Few Want

2008-08-15T13:27:40+01:00

There has been considerable discussion this week on Techmeme about weblogging tool as social networking platform, based on Six Apart's release of Movable Type Pro 4.2. The announcement was still wet from its birth when the Wordpress folks started touting BuddyPress, a variation of social networking based on Wordpress.

Among the social networking requirements for a weblogging tool are:

Support for FriendFeed and other feed aggregation
Support for Twitter
Forum support
Creating user accounts, with profiles and avatars
Enabling community-driven content
Content voting, ala Digg

I waited for the Drupal folks to tick off each of these, as this type of behavior is already built into Drupal, or provided via plug-in. For instance, support for the just given list can be met by Drupal via the following:

Aggregation support is a module included with the Drupal installation. In addition, the FriendFeed Drupal module provides two-way FriendFeed communication.
Ditto with the Twitter Drupal Module
Forum support is another module included with the Drupal installation, though it doesn't have a traditional forum look and feel. The upcoming Advanced Forum module supposedly provides the missing pieces for a standalone forum.
All of the user functionality is also built-in, or provided as installation module, including adding users, profiles (with avatars), as well as being able to create user profiles with differing permissions. For instance, registered users to this site who I know are given a "Trusted user role" wherein they can post comments without the comment going into moderation. I could also allow users to post photos, in addition to posts of their own — it's all role-based.
You can use the Voting API module with Drupal for content voting, and there have been other efforts to create a Digg-like functionality, though there just doesn't seem to be much interest in this within the Drupal community.

In fact, Drupal began its life as a bulletin-board system, adding weblogging functionality at a latter time. It is "community-based" from the ground up. Knowing all of these, I watched Planet Drupal for someone to mention about all of this already existing capability in Drupal. And I watched. And I watched.

Nothing. Not a word. Oh, there may be those who are in the process of writing about Drupal's capability, as compared with the new Movable Type/Wordpress initiatives, but the interest has been more about the upcoming DrupalCon, upgrading to the newest releases, and various other activities; providing yet another demonstration of the differences in communities surrounding Silicon Valley based applications, and an application with beginnings not only outside California, but also outside the United States. Differences that not only don't include that sense of competition that seems to exist with both MT and Wordpress, but that also represent a general lack of interest in becoming part of whatever new movement is currently deemed to be it. it for the moment, that is.

(A difference I've not, yet, come to absorb, being still imbued with the vestigial impulse to validate my choice of tools by pointing out We are first! We are better!, and hence, my earlier paragraphs. )

However, to be fair to the vast majority of MT and WP users, there isn't that much communication in the general Wordpress or MT communities, either, about the newest social networking "needs" that seem to be the driving force behind these new tool developments. Regardless of tools used, I find it unlikely that most people are interested in much of the social networking capability that is now being touted as "necessary".

In her post at ReadWriteWeb related to the release of the new version of MT, Sarah Perez asks, Is this the future of blogging? Or is this the future of web publishing altogether? I think we'll find, ultimately that the answer is no. The Silicon Valley mindset, for wont of a better term, wants social networks, and assumes the rest of must want the same thing. However, I think we'll find that most of us just want a web that's both open and accessible, and there is a vast difference between an open web and a social network.

In an open web, we may try to annotate our writings with metadata, so that the information described in this metadata could be merged by other applications. We work to ensure our work is easily accessible, and (though not always), try to engage our readers. We hope that the site is viewable by a variety of devices. To facilitate these interests, we've added syndication feeds and comments, some use of microformats, semantic markup, and even, on rare occasion, RDF, and perhaps a feed aggregator or photo feed in the sidebar. We try to create valid web pages, and use CSS to add a little of our own personality to the site's look. At a stretch, we may include FriendFeed or Twitter postings, too, but I think interest in these is rarer than one would expect by the cacophony of noise that seems to accompany both services.

An open web, however, does not demand a web whereby the line of demarcation between the writer and the reader becomes blurred, and the reader is assumed to not only be reader, but writer, editor, and critic too— becoming one of many, which seemingly are then used to not only prove the popularity of the site, but also help monetize it.

Specifically, the success of our spaces is not a measure of noise but of satisfaction. What's happened, though, is that to the Silicon Valley mindset, noise is a measure of satisfaction, so the more accouterments enabling noise, the better.

Posting writings and allowing comments are not enough: we must also give people profiles, with avatars and ranking systems, and the ability to vote comments up and down. By providing multiple levels at which our readers can engage, we create that noise that is seemingly so important in order to justify the worth of our spaces. What we're finding, though, is that based on such activity, the noise level may increase, but it increases as noise, rather than the thoughtful comments that inspired our original interest, years ago.

As we invite the readers to become more involved, we probably will increase the popularity of our sites, but at what cost? We lose the ability to own our own spaces; to be able to suddenly switch one day from writing about HTML5 to writing about art. Even having comments means we give up some control over what we do in our spaces. All too often when I visit tech web sites and the author is writing on some other topic, I read in comments: "That's not why I read your site, I don't care about foo. I want to read about bar"? Or the newer complaint many of us have begun receiving since the advent of Twitter: "*This post is too long to read."

Voting up and down may increase the number of visitors, and they may feel increasingly engaged, but look at what happens at sites like Digg. Though interesting stories may appear in the front page, such as the one about CAPTCHA technology being improved with the help of old manuscripts, many more are based on the amount of controversy associated with the topic, and not whether the topic is useful, or even relevant. More importantly, popular sites proliferate in popularity driven listings while less popular sites are pushed to the back, making it that much more difficult to find not only new and interesting information, but new and interesting sites. The reader becomes not only writer, editor, and critic, but also gatekeeper.

I'm not writing this to be critical of Six Apart's new Movable Type social networking software, or the upcoming BuddyPress by Wordpress—more power to **both groups in working to expand their offerings. To extrapolate, though, from these new offerings to a whole new web is typical of a mindset that is becoming increasingly isolated in how it views the web and how the web should be.

More importantly, to extrapolate one small group's determination of what's necessary in order to be "successful", to the broader population can actively hurt rather than help the web. Do we really want a web without nooks and crannies, small voices, quiet places, and serendipitous finds? That's not the web I want. To say that we're all becoming increasingly narcissistic, is to say that one group's self-obsession is shared by all, and I don't think that's true.

*And I include this post among those considered "too long to read".

**But Drupal was first.

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Son of Blob

2008-07-01T14:25:31+01:00

Adobe has decided to partner with Yahoo and Google, specifically, in order to enable search engine access to Flash contents. In other words, web builders that use bad web practices have been rewarded, and can continue to use Flash to completely build their sites, without regard for accessibility or an open web. The site designers do not have to worry their pretty little heads any longer, because the big boys have come to an "arrangement of mutual benefit", and have decided that no, their shit does not stink.

I'd like to think that one reason Adobe is making this move is because it feels threatened from competition by SVG, but even a fangirl like myself has to acknowledge that much of this is probably related to recent moves into the animation and rich content field by other not-to-be named competitors. Besides, what chance does an open sourced, and openly accessible, technology have against such attractively packaged vendor lock-in? I mean, Google, Adobe: what more would we want?

We should just quit work on HTML5, right now. RDFa, too, not to mention microformats. Forget that semantic markup stuff, and the debate over ABBR. Who needs SVG, anyway? We have Flash, and Flash can be searched. The web has arrived.

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