Lost BoyA journal of no fixed aims or direction, by Leigh Dodds

I spoke at the XML UK Optimal XML event in Cambridge yesterday under the topic of “Scanning the Horizon: What’s Hot in Upcoming XML Technologies”. The talk seemed to go well, which I was quite pleased about. Lots of questions at the end which I usually take to be a good sign that people were interested enough to pay attention!

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First Eric van der Vlist makes his RELAX NG book freely available, and now Micah Dubinko has done the same with XForms Essentials. (found via Cafe con Leche). Excellent. Is this a new trend for O’Reilly I wonder?
I’ve been specifying a number of XML APIs (RESTful of course) recently and it’d be nice to front those as easily as possible. I’ve played with various Java toolkits that render UIs from XML descriptions already (e.g. Thinlets) it’s high time I took a closer look at XForms, especially if I can generate both a browser and desktop based UI. (Anyone used Xybrix?).
Micah has previously suggested that it’d be relatively easy to create the FOAF-a-Matic using XForms. That might make an interesting test bed.
Anyway definitely more Xmas reading for yours truly.

Great post from Dorothea on requirements for good markup tools.
I agree with everything she says, and follow a few of the habits she lists myself: I tend to write an article and then markup it up, unless its only a very very short piece; and always fill in my URLs after the fact. I also hate tree based views, I only find them even vaguely useful when I’m writing XSLT.
That said I do personally find Wiki markup pretty unencumbering so do tend to markup as I write when editing a Wiki. But thats mainly because Wiki markup generally involves the same “gesture” (to borrow Dorotheas term) at the beginning and end.

New Tools and Old Habits

I’ve been working with FOAF a bit recently which has entailed a fair amount of reading through the FOAF namespace document. Doing a “View Source” on that page is also useful as you can then examine the embedded RDF Schema that describes the FOAF vocabulary; there’s a lot more in the schema than is visible in the HTML.
But this soon got frustrating so I gave some thought to a better approach.

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Whilst digging around during the implementation of my FOAF Bookmarklet I came across a number of interesting bookmarklet techniques and examples.
I’ve started documenting some of these in wordtin. See Bookmarklet for an entry point. The Bookmarklet Bootloader is a very interesting technique.
I started writing up some notes on the techniques for using bookmarklets as service intermediaries last night, but have refrained from posting them yet until I’ve edited it a bit. This could well turn into a more fully-fledged tutorial as there are a lot of options.
Fun geeky stuff.

There are a few web applications available for displaying FOAF files in a human-friendly format. For example there’s FOAF Web View, FOAFnaut, and FOAF Explorer.
A number of folk have also started using FOAF autodiscovery to LINK to their own FOAF descriptions. This uses the same principle as RSS autodiscovery.
I thought that it’d be useful to tie these together, and create a FOAF autodiscovery bookmarklet. So, here’s a first crack at it.
Drag the following to your toolbar: FOAF Explorer.
You should now be able to click that link and be automatically routed to FOAF Explorer if the current page references a FOAF description in the correct way.
This page has one, as does hackdiary, Semantic Weblog, and dive into mark to name but a few.
I have encountered some problems with the bookmarklet in Mozilla 1.0, although the same pages work fine in IE 5. If there are any javascript experts out there I’d appreciate a pointer or two if you can see anything wrong with the code.. Morten Frederikson has fixed the bookmarklet and incorporated it into FOAF Explorer, so the bookmarklet should now work in all browsers. The link is basically just a hacked version of Mark Pilgrim’s RSS autodisovery bookmarklet, with the addition of a check for relative FOAF file locations as sported by Internet Alchemy. A quick test of the original RSS bookmarklet showed the same problem, so hopefully its not just me being dull (but don’t rule it out).
Thats my sad friday night tinkering done with for another week!

I’m interested in building a list of “Link Dropper” sites and would welcome
suggestions if you have any.
What do I mean by a Link Dropper? Basically a site that will drop some data into your existing webpage using a scripting language, e.g. Javascript or PHP.
My canonical example is the Meerkat Javascript Source flavour which drops RSS news feeds into your webapage. This was the first example of this kind of integration that I’d seen at the time. If you know of an earlier example then let me know.
Other examples of Link Droppers include blogrolling.com (list of blogs) and All Consuming (lists of books).
I’m interested partly because I’d like to see what kind of “annotations” I can add to this blog, but also because I’m interested in seeing what people are doing with this kind of loose integration.

There’s usually more than one way to get something on the net. There are dozens of online bookstores, search engines, new sites, document repositories, etc, etc. And we all have different preferences. Even for sites like Google and Amazon there is room for choice, e.g. different Google mirrors or regional Amazon sites.
Yet when we construct links we are always linking to a single one of those resources. In some cases that is because of an explicit recommendation. We know that one site is cheaper, has better information/context, etc. In others its simply because that’s the first place we looked at in order to be able to link a reader to the resource we’re talking about.
But why not give the user more choice, and let them decide the destination?

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