dive into mark

No, really. My sinus infection, which appeared to be gone, flared up again over the weekend in the nastiest way, and I am now coughing up dark mucus and doing other things that probably don’t bear repeating in a public forum. I have the 10:15 doctor’s appointment that I should have made last round, had I not convinced myself that it’s not that bad and trudged through it all without prescription drugs. I’m not making the same mistake this time. I’ll be back this afternoon.

My email problems of yesterday have been resolved. You can once again reach me at my normal address, f8dy@diveintomark.org.

Kevin Burton emailed me with another way to link to a FOAF file from my RSS feed. It looks easier than previous suggestions, and it has the advantage of being able to use it from an RSS 1.0 or 2.0 feed, but I worry about all these variations. Just as in real life, where people can use different words that mean essentially the same thing, in the Semantic Web programs can use different vocabularies to express the same statements. That’s great for producers, not so great for consumers who have to make sense of it all.

For each domain (RSS feeds, FOAF files, whatever), somebody (or some group) needs to come along and document best practices. We need better goal-oriented documentation. We have a lot of reference documentation, task-oriented documentation, but very little that documents that larger picture and answers questions written in English. How do I include personal information in my RSS feed? is a goal-oriented question. Create a FOAF file using this tool and then insert this line at this location in your RSS feed (with as many examples as necessary) is a goal-oriented answer. Anything less is like trying to master a foreign language by reading a dictionary.

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