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# 30 Mar 2003 22:47:22 Re: Tag du jour: <xhtml:body>. Now what? |
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internal tags don't need the prefix, they need the namespace.
By setting the default namespace locally on the xhtml:body (or xhtml:div if we all change to that), then no extra characters are required.
See my http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/index.rss2 for an example. |
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| # 30 Mar 2003 22:13:35 Tag du jour: <xhtml:body>. Now what? |
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The poor brain boggles. Let's see if I can make sense of this...
First Don Box switches his RSS feed to support <content:encoded> (which is what I did from early on, BTW). Then Sam Ruby gently chides him for that, proposing the use of <xhtml:body> instead, a form which I hadn't read about previously.
Then, Don immediately agrees and posts examples - curiously enough, they mess up his <content:encoded> RSS feed to illegibility (at least in NetNewsWire). Looking at the source, I see nested <content:encoded>s and CDATAs, and many unescaped tag delimiters; all this may possibly be syntactically valid, but it's extremely confusing; I tried to hand-parse it and didn't go very far. FWIW NetNewsWire seems to agree with me  ... my own feed never nests these things. Don promised to fix this by Monday.
Comments at Sam Ruby's post soon discuss details and a few samples appear. Sam himself updates his own feed to <xhtml:body>, saying it's "more bandwidth friendly" than <content:encoded>, which probably won't be true if all internal tags must also contain the xhtml: prefix, as some argue.
Meanwhile, Jorgen Thelin asks for more stability, arguing that such fast changes in the interpretation of RSS makes compliance impossible. The comments to that by Sam and Don are very thought-provoking, and I'll read them again carefully tomorrow, before I make any changes to my feed.
Sjoerd Visscher, in the meantime, proposes using <xhtml:div> instead of <xhtml:body>; Don disagrees, saying this would not convey the meaning that this tag brackets the real content. Sam arguments that the purpose of the whole exercise is avoid making the structure of the comment opaque; he also changes his own feed to the new scheme. NetNewsWire apparently doesn't understand it, and falls back to using the <description>.
It'll be interesting to see what newsreader authors say about this. Greg Reinacker says he's already made the necessary changes in NewsGator. Purely from a newsreader's perspective, I'm not sure if Sam's comments about opaqueness apply; newsreader software always has to try to show something, even if the feed is malformed. I suppose NetNewsWire, for instance, whenever it sees a <content:encoded> tag it just shoves the contents into the lower-right pane, trusting the built-in HTML parser to do the right thing. And once Brent switches over to Apple's upcoming WebCore, he'll have even less to worry about. Meanwhile, I'm not sure supporting xhtml: prefixes in NetNewsWire will be trivial; he'll probably have to prescan and take them out...
On the other hand, I agree that making the contents more structured may help Feedster and similar efforts.
Regarding the <xhtml:div> vs. <xhtml:body> question, my (probably naïve) first reaction is that <xhtml:div> will make things easier for browser-based aggregators, as the contents will be easily insertable into another page; whereas <xhtml:body> tags will have to be removed or converted, and also must contain block elements... isn't it easier to treat the contents as a div and add an implicit body around it whenever necessary? For my weblog at least, a post is never displayed separately on a page, so my feed reflects exactly my top page, as a list of over a dozen posts. Perhaps both options should be allowed?
I'm looking forward to learning more about XML, XHTML and RSS from this discussion. Thanks, everybody! |
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| # 28 Mar 2003 20:43:17 Time Traveler makes millions on the stock market |
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No kidding; here are details: | Quote: | Sources at the Security and Exchange Commission confirm that 44-year-old Andrew Carlssin offered the bizarre explanation for his uncanny success in the stock market after being led off in handcuffs on January 28...
"...the fact is, with an initial investment of only $800, in two weeks' time he had a portfolio valued at over $350 million. Every trade he made capitalized on unexpected business developments, which simply can't be pure luck."
...Carlssin declared that he had traveled back in time from over 200 years in the future, when it is common knowledge that our era experienced one of the worst stock plunges in history.
..."No one can find any record of any Andrew Carlssin existing anywhere before December 2002." |
Stay tuned for developments!
Update: Well, this story now claims the whole thing is a freshly-minted urban myth. A pity; any other outcome would have been more interesting...
Last edited by Rainer Brockerhoff on 29 Mar 2003 22:38:45; edited 1 time in total |
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| # 26 Mar 2003 17:45:53 Re: Solipsism Gradient |
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For several reasons I decided to rename this weblog "Solipsism Gradient". Blame it on having reread all of Iain M. Banks's Culture novels in a row...
...on the practical side, it's shorter and easier to remember than "Stochastic Aleatory Ontological Expostulations", or whatever it was before. At least for me. :cheesy:
Now, can someone explain to me why weblogs are traditionally named like rock bands? (Or Culture starships, for that matter?) |
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| # 26 Mar 2003 16:43:11 Re: Anti-links, vote-links, value-links |
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| x AKA M. wrote: | | I had missed the point being to communicate with spiders. It became more clear due to Kevins patient explanation at Joi Ito's blog in this thread. I thought it was so people could vote on links, not spiders. |
Yes, Kevin's explanations are great. However, just for whoever else's reading this, I'd like to make clear that people (or at least whoever puts the links on the site) do vote on the links, but it's the spiders (not other people) who count the votes.
| Quote: | | I had not thought about, spiders, bots, and engines out there secretly logging your activities and words and generating Whuffie points. Cool thought. |
Exactly, having an attribute would make all that much easier; see how TechnoRati and Google have to jump through hoops to do their rankings, and still they have no clue whether my links are meant to be positive or negative. Also, votes will not depend on anything whatsoever being installed on the site being voted on, which is extremely important. |
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| # 26 Mar 2003 10:58:14 Re: Anti-links, vote-links, value-links |
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I had missed the point being to communicate with spiders. It became more clear due to Kevins patient explanation at Joi Ito's blog in this thread. I thought it was so people could vote on links, not spiders. My bad. It does bring up a thought closer to the heart of the Whuffie concept: Automated Whuffie. Though Doctorow's book is not that clear on how one's Whuffie is built, (or torn down for that matter), thus far the discussions I have had (OK I admit they are with myself most of the time) have pointed to merit being added by people. I had not thought about, spiders, bots, and engines out there secretly logging your activities and words and generating Whuffie points. Cool thought.
Ciao |
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| # 25 Mar 2003 21:04:25 Re: Catching up... |
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Here's more from John Perry Barlow, talking at ilaw in Rio: | Quote: | It's time to re-envision how we should get paid for the works of our minds. I believe that Brazil has a unique opportunity to help us all re-imagine this. I've observed that Brazilians have a strong sense that music is shared property... It is the joint property of Brazilian society. So I propose that this is a good place to take a stand against the corporate copyright holders.
...Giving music away does work... I have suggested to Minister [Gilberto] Gil that Brazilian music be put on the Internet; this would create a worldwide flowering of creatvity inspired by this music. |
And earlier, talking about the Digital Divide: | Quote: | Brazil is the greatest inside joke that I've ever seen. This creates a kind of digital divide between Brazil and the rest of the world. This is a unique problem that has to be addressed.
I used to think that the use of English on the Internet was no big deal; after my experiences here, especially, I've changed my mind. I spent a month here feeling like a stroke victim. It's a good thing that many of you are very good at communicating with body language. |
An interchange with Charles Nesson and an audience member: | Quote: | Charlie: Audience--why isn't deregulating telecom more important to this audience than other things on the list?
Audience: It's funny when we talk about IP and protection--the fight against piracy. This is the view of the company, of the US. We are a poor country; our priorities are different. It surprises me that the US is surprised that we have a problem with piracy. Of course we do: people want access to the software; they simply cannot buy it.
The discussion of this piracy is therefore empty, useless.
Curiously enough, the cost of participating in the next ILAW at Stanford makes it so no one from Brazil will come. |
I'm following Donna Wentworth's reports from the conference, at Copyfight, with great interest. Let's hope that full transcripts will be available later.
Update: Here's Lawrence Lessig's comment on the encounter between Barlow and Gilberto Gil. |
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