March 2011
2 posts
Badass JavaScript: JavaScript Garden: Documenting... →
badassjs:
Good JavaScript documentation is extremely important, and through efforts like Promote JS, we have seen awareness of good documentation through sites like the Mozilla Dev Center increase, and sites like W3Schools, which provide old and often incorrect information, decrease through efforts…
Creative developer based in the UK: Rendering:... →
restlessmedia:
Wow. How did I miss this incredible article on the basics of how a browser renders a page.
The rendering process
Different browsers work differently, but the following diagram gives a general idea of what happens, more or less consistently across browsers, once they’ve downloaded the code…
February 2010
1 post
Five years of Ajax →
September 2009
1 post
3 tags
Google's Rich Snippets Testing Tool
Finally, a big win for the Semantic Web. Google recognises the value of Microformats and RDFa for search results, especially for business contacts, personal information, product details and reviews.
Rich Snippet allows you to enhance your Google search results by marking up web pages with Microformats or RDFa.
Well, it had been known for a while, it’s just that now they provide their own...
May 2009
1 post
5 tags
Playing with YQL
Note: this is an edited repost from Halans.com. Have been playing with Yahoo!’s YQL this weekend, querying the Sydney Ferries website. Pretty amazing what it allows you to do, though the Sydney Ferries site wasn’t the best site to start playing with I guess. I did have a need to have the ferry timetable on my iPhone (especially the Neutral Bay service), so that’s why I put...
January 2009
4 posts
6 tags
Yahoo queries microformats
Yahoo’s YQL query language, a SQL-style query language for the web, now supports microformat queries. A given example is finding the address for an event on Upcoming (a Yahoo service), not using the Upcoming API, but using a YQL query to retrieve a vCard microformat in either XML or JSON, using a REST call. But it’s not limited to Yahoo services only! It works on any website with...
1 tag
CSS Counters
Over at SitePoint, Meitar Moscovitz writes about “A Little-known Way to Replace Some Scripts with CSS Counters”, a great example on using CSS and a page’s markup as an API:
… this is a powerful demonstration of how you can use your markup as an API to let the advancing capabilities of CSS do things you could once only do with client- or server-side scripting. Now that’s...
2 tags
Google developments
Google had some interesting, newsworthy developments last week:
ReadWriteWeb points out triples in Google’s search results, an interesting SemWeb development at Google Search;
Google helps Data Portability move forward with some open source python scripts, with the Google Blog Converter for AppEngine: “Converters to/from various blog formats hosted on Google App Engine.”;
A...
2 tags
Semantics in HTML 5
John Allsopp writes about the need for mechanisms in HTML that clearly and unambiguously enable developers to add richer, more meaningful semantics, beyond pseudo semantics like microformats, and HTML 5’s new elements which are not backwards compatible. Check out the article and its comments over at A List Apart.
December 2008
2 posts
Microformat tools
Over at Sitepoint Meitar Moscovitz writes up “4 Easy-to-Use Microformat Tools to Beef Up Your Site” using minimal effort, including my favorite, Mapanui. ;-) To get us in the Christmas spirit, over at 24 Ways, Elliot Jay Stocks shows us how to set up an Christmas hCard in “A Christmas hCard From Me To You”. If you’re looking for a simpler (non-chrismas-y)...
Top 10 of Semantic Web 2008
ReadWriteWeb has published their Top 10 for 2008 of Semantic Web products. The list includes Yahoo SearchMonkey, Open Calais, Powerset,… Looking at the list, I’m not too impressed. Searchmonkey is cool, but all the others are rather gimmicky. They are all semantic web for semantic webs sake. When will we see integrated solutions, like SearchMonkey?
November 2008
1 post
2 tags
Mapanui
Have been plugging Mapanui a bit at Webjam8 (September), Ignite Spatial and Sydney Barcamp. Fun and interesting feedback.
October 2008
1 post
2 tags
Microsoft and microformats
Good to see another big player (finally) jumping on the microformats bandwagon, joining Yahoo! Microsoft introduces Oomph, a microformats toolkit, which includes an IE plugin and server-side javascript. Not sure about the name though. Additionally IE8 will support a feature called WebSlice, which is an hAtom based (MS propriatory) microformat. Additionally, John Allsopp has a great introductory...
September 2008
1 post
2 tags
Google X
Google turned 10 this week, from a simple university search project to a 20.000 employees strong company. Google also seem to have come full circle by introducing their own (open source) browser this week, Google Chrome:
Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier. Read about why we built a browser.
They...
August 2008
2 posts
3 tags
Mozilla Ubiquity 0.1
Aza Raskin of Mozilla introduces a new experimental (alpha 0.1) project, called Ubiquity, a power user’s CLI extension for Firefox. It integrates Google Maps/Translate/Gmail, Twitter, Digg, Wikipedia, TinyURL,… and allows the user to mashup content himself, through a command line. It’s very similar to PodiPodi, Catalog/Devo extension, but being developed backed by the Mozilla...
2 tags
Yahoo SearchMonkey Apps online
Yahoo earlier (in March) proclaimed to embrace the Semantic web:
LinkedIn is to mark up user profile pages with microformats. Yahoo search could then understand the content and relationships between pieces of content and present that data in an intelligent way in Yahoo search.
Last week then Yahoo introduced a number of changes to its default search experience to add more structured data to...
July 2008
3 posts
3 tags
On Portable Social Networks
Ben Ward from Yahoo! Brickhouse writes about Portable Social Networks over at Digital Web Magazine. It talks about Identity, Personality and Profile, using Microformats like XFN and hCard.
6 tags
Custom non-visible data in HTML 5
Short and sweet: HTML 5 offers custom data attributes on HTML elements, intended to store custom data, which can then be handled on-page by JavaScript, or off-page by other (web-)applications. John Resig discusses a number of useful benefits.
3 tags
HealthMap and Pluribo
A couple of new, cool examples of SemWeb applications: Pluribo, a Firefox plugin which creates instant summaries of Amazon user reviews. Some Amazon products have 10-100’s of reviews. Pluribo gives a summary by analyzing all these reviews. Currently only available for Amazon, you could see more, potential interactions with other web applications, think StructuredBlogging, or a summery of...
June 2008
3 posts
2 tags
On why the BBC removed the hCalendar microformat
“Why the BBC removed microformat DateTime patterns from bbc.co.uk and what we are doing to bring them back.”
4 tags
BBC removes hCalendar Microformat from programmes...
The BBC is removing its Microformats support from its programmes page as they are having a number of concerns over hCalendar’s use of the abbreviation design pattern in regard to accessibility. But at the same time they are also looking into RDFa as a future replacement.
3 tags
PodiPodi/Catalog web-based CLI
PodiPodi is a web-based command line interface like Quicksilver (on Mac) or Enso (on Win) for the desktop:
“A special widget which integrates a smart command line interface and a bunch of additional services directly into your website to perform common web-tasks”
PodiPodi offers an alternative UI to your website for power-users. By hitting a shortcut like Ctrl+z you get a jQuery...
March 2008
1 post
6 tags
Yahoo! Search understands semantics
Yahoo! Search announced that it will support semantic web standards, like Microformats, RDFa and Dublin Core:
By supporting semantic web standards, Yahoo! Search and site owners can bring a far richer and more useful search experience to consumers. For example, by marking up its profile pages with microformats, LinkedIn can allow Yahoo! Search and others to understand the semantic content and the...
February 2008
1 post
4 tags
The practice of POSH
POSH stands for Plain Old Semantic HTML, and lets face it, POSH sounds better than semantic HTML. Check out the POSH checklist. Poshformats on the other hand are various data formats constructed by using common, semantic class names, which are less formal than microformats. Whenever some one or some organisation creates a common class name, this is considered a ‘poshformat’, like for...
October 2007
2 posts
7 tags
Markup as an API - preso
Smarten up your markup and publish once, publish anywhere:
| View | Upload your own
5 tags
Markup as an API
HTML describes documents, and the link between documents.
We read these documents, we print them, bookmark them for later retrieval. We might copy/paste content into another document, constructing a new one.
If we wanted to automate this, we’d resort tot screen scraping. But this easily breaks, as there’s no standard or “contract” between the original site and the screen...
September 2007
1 post
6 tags
Scraping HTML with innerHTML or jQuery
A couple of nice write-ups on how to scrape HTML using innerHTML at Pathfinder Development:
A common solution has been to proxy and scrape an application with a combination of XQuery and TagSoup (to fix the ugly, broken HTML, dontcha know), but it is possible to do this purely in the browser.
or with jQuery, as Jan Varwig describes:
Fortunately, just the day before, I discovered jQuery, a...
August 2007
1 post
4 tags
Hello world! This is MAAA!
This is a blog covering the use of hyper text markup as an API, meaning making your webpage smarter by adding additional information, meta data, data about the data. The presentation stays the same, but the content is being described, so smart browsers, browser extentions or web services can read your data and glean additional meaning from it, and reuse your data.
I keep a look out for new...