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Permanent link to archive for Monday, September 10, 2001. Monday, September 10, 2001

DaveNet: Open Source in 2001.

InfoWorld's CTO: "When I grow confused about what Web services means, I read the XML-RPC spec and it makes sense again." Sweet!

WSJ: Microsoft drafts settlement proposal.

The Syndication mail list is starting to address the core issue of RSS: The link-title-description model doesn't work well for weblogs. Not only can weblog items contain more than one link per item (like this item), they can also reasonably contain markup. It's a written medium. In writing sometimes you want to italicize for emphasis, or to add a new voice, there are even formal rules that some publications follow to the letter. Further, many weblog items don't have an easily discernable title. RSS defines a rigid publication style, weblogs are less formal. Anyway, it's great to see the community get past the respect issues. I'm not sure where it's going, but the most important thing is that people are addressing each other as adults. With that, problems can be solved, and perhaps new formats and services designed and deployed. Mazel tov to the members of the Syndication community.

Correction: The Allman Brothers came from Florida, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Georgia. I know why I got confused, two of the brothers died in consecutive years in Macon. And they had a big album called Eat A Peach. (Georgia is the Peach State.)

Steve Goodman is looking for a job.

More Love Manila Month features & fixes on Frontier News.

News.Com: "Great Bridge, a company that had hoped open-source software would allow it to take on database giants such as Oracle, has expired after failing to find investors or a company to acquire it."

John Robb started a weblog for Singularity, whatever that is.

Jeff Barr has some new RSS sources this morning.

Peter Saint-Andre: "What is a technology revolution?"

Dylan Tweney: How to Beat Corporate Alzheimer's.

How to get Dubya's attention.

Ken Dow does his part for Love Manila Month. My comment. People always ask for a one-step home page flip, but as a software designer this burns my braincells. A big step like that requires confirmation. There's no way to undo an accidental flip. But the feature shows up on the lists every time. What's a developer to do?

Yeah-yeah, everyone says Do Undo. Uh huh. And where would you put the Undo command in a Web app so that people would actually see it and use it? It's not so simple folks. I'm just a little smarter than I look.

Steve Ivy has the best suggestion so far. Do the confirmation in Javascript, and avoid a roundtrip to the server. This probably is the best compromise. It doesn't require a new subsystem in Manila, and gives Ken and others the performance improvement that they want.

A new Bryan Bell feature request for Manila.

NY Times: AOL Pursuing AT&T's Cable Unit.

The first Talking Moose parody site. "Ask him if he would rather pay for content management software now or a psychologist and mood altering drugs later."

On the XML-DEV list a debate is going on about whether or not MSIE 6 is an XML parser. Another how many angels fit on the head of a pin hair split. MSIE 6 is breaking the rules that Microsoft agreed to re conformance in XML, which was a very good idea. Now the Microsoft rep is spinning that it was never intended to be an XML parser. Hmmm. Next time a Microsoft exec gets up and says We Love XML you should be sure to ask which XML it is that they love so much.

The problems with MSIE and XML that sparked the debate were reported by Elliotte Rusty Harold on his Cafe con Leche website. He doesn't maintain permalinked archives on his blog, so I can't point to his specific comments. He's a harsh critic for sure, uses too many adjectives, and impugns their motives (falling for the MS flamebait) but he's on the money this time. Microsoft can't have it both ways, say they support XML, and then ignore the core thing about XML -- it's absolute insistence on processors not accepting any variability in what XML is. This is the lesson of HTML that XML tries to learn, now with little hope of success, thanks to Microsoft.

Also I know there are professional and thoughtful people at Microsoft. So why do they send their professional wrestler to talk with the people on the XML-DEV list? Could they possibly care less about interop? Questions questions.

Nicholas Petreley: "Since it's a foregone conclusion that Microsoft will be littering its XML with pointers to Win32-based components, the best that can be said about its adoption of XML is that it will make it easier for browsers and applications on non-Windows platforms to understand which parts of the document it must ignore."

Today's song: "Every other Christmas I would practice good behavior."

     

Last update: Monday, September 10, 2001 at 9:31 PM Eastern.

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