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Permanent link to archive for Wednesday, June 28, 2000. Wednesday, June 28, 2000

World Outline 

The new project we're working on is going forward full steam.

Now that 6.2 has shipped, I'm allocating more of UserLand's resources to this project.

At its core, we're defining an XMLization for outlines. That's the central thing to this project. There's also a public storage system, along the lines of the XML Store that Microsoft defined in its Dot-Net announcements. And an HTML browser for the outline structures (which can be linked, in very interesting ways), and an outliner browser and authoring tool.

Here's a very early outline that conforms to the existing spec, which is being rewritten practically on a daily basis. Rather than expose people to the gyrations, we're holding it back until we feel it's well-designed and won't need a rewrite before wide deployment.

I'm learning a lot doing this project. I'll write more later. But here's an interesting conclusion. If TBL had designed the Web around a writing tool it would have been Two-Way from the start. After six years of trying to come up with a writing tool that perfectly fits the HTML Web, now I realize that the only way to get there is to start with a writing tool and add networking to it. It makes perfect sense now, but of course it didn't even just a few weeks ago.

Postscript: I got an email reminding me that TBL's first Web browser was a writing tool. I'll have to think about this some more. There's something else going on here. Not sure exactly how to describe it yet.

Thinking project: DMOZ to <outlineDocument>?

Frontier 6.2 fixes 

Shipping a new major release is always followed by bug fixes and limits extended or worked around.

Frontier 6.2 is no different.

Still diggin!

New Themes 

Three new themes from Bryan Bell. Hazard Area, Hazard Area Revisited and Soni.

Gary Brickman 

O'Reilly's David Sims honors Gary Brickman, who passed away at 38.

Larry Ellison investigates 

I tuned into CNN to see if Elian got home OK, and happened to see an interview with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison about the detective firm he hired to sort through lobbyist trash in Washington.

(He called this exposing covert activities.)

Ellison calls for full disclosure. Hmmm.

Why didn't he disclose that he hired a detective to read their garbage?

"I just found about it yesterday."

Oh, OK. Got it. (Sarcasm.)

PacBell sucks (always) 

BirdBrain: "As my friend E. used to say, 'You have to manage your expectations.'"

Microsoft C# Docs 

They posted the C# docs in HTML.

Money or Music? 

News.Com: Online trading volume sinks.

"After surging 70 percent in the first quarter, the number of online transactions handled by online brokers is expected to decline by 33 percent in the second quarter."

I have a theory about this.

Everyone's playing with Napster now.

Opera 4.0/Win 

Download: Opera 4.0/Win.

Screen shot.

Outliner user on the Web 

Laszlo Dienes, a real outliner user, wants to know about generating HTML from his MORE outlines, and has lots of questions about WebArranger from CE Software, written by Scott Wiener (also developer of FullWrite and FullPaint, early Mac classics).

XML-hack hack hack hack 

Oy I could see this coming a mile away.

I don't like namespaces. This is based on my own confusion when I see all those esoteric labels all over XML documents. I've been very clear about this all along. Well, anyway, a group of developers wants to bring namespaces into RSS. That's gotta be OK, even if I don't like it. I won't stand in their way. If it gains support from content developers then we have to work with it.

A fork? Possibly. It's neither threatening or cold. A difference of opinion on how we should go forward with RSS. What to do? I'm not going to say I like namespaces when I don't.

Anyway, read what Eric van der Vlist has to say, it's a good summary of the discussion, with links, but please understand it's just one point of view.

Blue arrows for everyone 

A new feature on UserLand-hosted Manila sites.

See the blue arrows on each top-level heading?

If you use Pike to edit your home page (or a compatible outliner), you can have them too.

There's a new rule, <internalLink>. Its value is the URL of the archives page for the page you're editing.

Here's a screen shot of yesterday's Scripting News outline, as I was editing it.

eGroups acquired by Yahoo 

Reuters: Yahoo to buy eGroups.

An email sent to eGroups moderators, early this morning.

eGroups does a great job, it plays a role in a lot of the work we do. Congratulations on cashing out (presumably) and here's hoping that the great performance continues.

Today's song 

There's more than one song for today.

In fact there's a playlist.

It's an outline, of course.



     

Last update: Wednesday, June 28, 2000 at 7:53 PM Eastern.

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