Month: June 2003

What Tim Said

No matter which side of the fence you are on the funky issue, you will enjoy Tim Bray's I like Pie post.  It is another Tim Bray classic that leave you chuckling and nodding.  Like me, he likes Sam Ruby's effort to define a new syndication format from scratch.  Here is the bit I enjoyed the most.

"I regularly get pissed-off at Dave but I really truly do think he’s trying to Do The Right Thing; but there are many people out there who can't get past being pissed off. This is what life is like."

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p dir=”ltr”>I will be happy to see this constructive effort gain momentum although I can only hope that Sam is wise enough to navigate around sensitive spots like RDF and Dublin Core.

HTML With Just Five Tags and CSS

Read about Don Ulrich's adventure into HTML and CSS jungle that resulted in a client-side XSL stylesheet able to render his XML documents into fast loading HTML pages using just five tags: <div>, <span>, <a>, <img>, and <hr>.  His XSL stylesheet is here (.XSL).  Neato.

"A while back you pointed to Adventcode and myself [Fireball as a Candle]. You spoke of CSS style coflicting with CSS design. The conversation was about CSS Zen Garden and the inability to read it. I took what you said as a challange to use CSS a tool for construct while maintaining style. AdventCode now uses just 5 HTML tags and CSS to control the XML/XSL output. It is very fast. Using a minimum of HTML tags also allowed me to tighten up the content. Thank You for the encourgement. Yes CSS can do more than look pretty. It can also control content." – Don Ulrich by e-mail.

Funkyness Illustrated

This is an attempt to remove the ongoing confusion over the funkyness I have accused MT and Six Apart of perpetuating.  I hope these examples will dispell any FUD hanging over us.

NOT-FUNKY RSS FEEDS:

       

FUNKY RSS FEEDS:

       

As you can see in these examples, funky RSS feeds replace common RSS tags with RSS 1.0 extensions.

Destruction is not extension nor innovation!

MT's default template generates these sort of funky RSS feeds.  If they didn't realize the problem before, they should have fixed it by now.  All they have done so far are public silences.

After watching Dave Winer and others struggle politely, I have used nastyness as a cutting edge to rip through the FUD and harmful silences.  Some might say my post was irresponsible, but I believe it served a purpose.  This problem can easily be fixed by Six Apart so I am still hopimg for peace breaking out soon.

Good Grief, Charlie Brown

This afternoon, I ranted on Funky and then started to fiddle with it.  I sometimes do this when a post doesn't feel right.  After sitting on it over the evening, I decided to post it as is because I couldn't figure out a way to say things better.

Apparently, Dave thought so too.  While it is true that I don't need the grief, I don't need the stress of holding back what I think either.  It's not courage, it's being chickenshit about the health of my own mind at the expense of disturbing everyone else.  Six Apart is doing same thing except what they are doing can't be ignored like you can with me.

To put it in a confusing way, I don't care if the world ends or not, but I do care about my doing nothing about it.

BTW, try some NyQuil Dave.  Only thing bad about it is that you need a good excuse to drink it. <wink/>

Funky

Although I agree with Dave on the issue of funky RSS, I think he is misusing the word funky. When someone say something is funky, it means it is good in a weird way. Dave is using the word to mean weird in a bad way to be polite.  Here are some straight fast balls to clear up the confusion: RDF is f**ked up, MT is f**ked up, Six Apart is f**ked up.

Setting aside the question of who started what or where respect is due, causing unnecessary mess for others out of some political and idealogical reasons is f**ked up. Ultimately, blog readers don't give a hoot whether the blog feed is in RDF or RSS 2.0. Blog developers *do* care about how many *evolving* formats they have to support. You give me unasked for headaches, I give you my middle-finger salute.

IMHO, RSS 2.0 is not going to go away and RDF is far from being finished nor popularized. Aside from all this, Dave deserve far more respect than some script jockeys who prefers to argue like sea-lawyers while blinded to the fact that truth is not always at the end of a string of arguments and that most ideas, regardless of their beauty or simplicity, can't be stretched enough to match the complexity of reality over time.

Update: I just put stars (*) around the word 'evolving' to emphasize the seriousness of the differences yet to come and the price blog developers will have to pay each and every step of the way.  Eventually, some of us will refuse to pay that price and result in fractures that will penalize users as well.  *Urgh*  I just remembered that I still have a Sony Betamax recorder in the garage that my wife asks me about everytime she cleans the garage.

[See Funkyness Illustrated]  [Responses via Technorati]

Funky

Although I agree with Dave on the issue of funky RSS, I think he is misusing the word funky.  When someone say something is funky, it means it is good in a weird way.  Dave is using the word to mean weird in a  bad way to be polite.  Here is are some straight fast balls: RDF is fucked up, MT is fucked up, Six Apart is fucked up.

Setting aside the question of who started what or where respect is due,  anyone who causes unnecessary mess for others out of some political and idealogical reasons deserve to get yelled at.  Ultimately, blog readers don't give a hoot whether the blog feed is in RDF or RSS 2.0, but blog developers *do* care about how many evolving formats they have to support.  IMHO, RSS 2.0 is not going to go away and RDF is far from being finished nor popularized.

Dave also deserve far more respect than some script jockeys who prefers to argue like sea-lawyers while being blinded to the fact that truth is not always at the end of a string of arguments and that most ideas, regardless of their beauty or simpliticy, can't be stretched enough to match the complexity of reality over time.

Aggregator Echo in Technorati and Blog Search Engines

I am not sure if others have noticed this as well, but I am seeing 'echo' in Technorati and Feedster results from server-side news aggregation.

For example, AbstractDynamics goes beyond blogroll by displaying recent posts from each blogs on the blogroll.  While this feature is probably helpful to AbstractDynamics readers, it does confuse Technorati enough to mistakenly conclude that AbstractDynamics posted a response to each of the listed articles from the blogroll.  Likewise, news aggregated by myRSS shows up in Feedster.

While the problem is not serious yet, I think it is a problem that has to be addressed soon or later.  I believe that, just as ability to distinguish object from subject in Google is important, ability to distinguish references from aggregation in BlogLand is important.  Solutions like Universal Robots Tag might help, but they are meaningless without awareness and cooperation from bloggers.

Jython Resurge

Jython's star is rising again, evolving from an interesting tool to a useful tool.  Here are some recent testimonials.

Here are some Jython books:

Jython hasn't been updated in a while but, thanks to the renewed interest, I think the chance of work on Jython resuming is good.  I use Jython whenever I am either *too lazy* or *too busy*.  I recommend Jython to all Java programmers.