dive into mark

• Scott Rahin: Some Dogs I Have Known, and How They Died. You might say that a dog named after a Styx song deserved death, but we cannot choose our origins, and Robot had a fine way of nuzzling your palm while you slept on the couch which made his name forgivable.
• Dean Allen: Concentric. Thanks for testing my software, I shall now disappear completely.
• Wired: Immortal code. Reusing pieces of code is like picking off sentences from other people’s stories and trying to make a magazine article.
• Joe Gregorio: Positive Feedback Loops and XML. So do I want a return to the good/bad old days of HTML? Not really. What I do want is the good parts of old HTML along with the experience of Well-Formed XML to strongly influence and inform the development of XML’s successor.
• Ben Trott: Fun with FOAF. There’s been a lot of discussion lately about using FOAF to provide a secure, cross-site identity system. People have been discussing this for days. Why did I link to Ben? Because he provides working code.
• Gimp-Print 4.2.5 is out, and supports over 500 printers. Install it on your Mac OS X box and simply select the printer driver in Print Center. In the last OS X class I taught, we had an old Epson printer which was unsupported by the built-in drivers, but fully supported by Gimp-Print, so I got to demo it. It truly rocks.
• effbot.exe, an up and coming news aggregator for Windows, has an interesting plug-in architecture for reading sites that don’t provide RSS feeds. Basically each plug-in is a Python script that does all the parsing and pushes the parsed data back to the framework effbot provides. (Example 1. Example 2.) I do a similar thing for my own homegrown aggregator to read a few stubborn sites, but Fredrik’s architecture is more elegant. I predicted this would happen; if you want control over your syndicated feeds, now would be a good time to start providing your own. Otherwise people will just route around you.
• Dave Winer: People say, But it’s a table; that’s what tables are for. All usability issues are religious issues. All markup issues are religious issues. Simon Willison mocked up a prototype anyway. Boy, with high-speed cable access, 137K table-based layouts don’t really affect me… until I’m surfing from my parent’s house… on their 200 MHz PowerMac 4400… with a 33.6 kb software-based GeoModem… and (wait for it) Netscape 4. Then I care a great deal. I forget my point.
• jwz: the CSS peanut gallery. Hell, it’s not even like this CSS crap is any easier. It’s just differently complex.
• Matthew Smith: CSS on demand. CSS On Demand is a Perl solution that provides CSS on-the-fly, based on user preferences.
• Portable Perl-compatible regular expressions for Common Lisp. I don’t speak Perl, and I don’t speak Lisp, but you gotta admit that’s cool.
• Nathan Jacobs: diveintomarkov. Best. Title. Ever. I can’t believe I missed it. I hope to some day reach the point where you can’t tell whether my posts are auto-generated or not.
• A message to clueless website authors. With an honest-to-God working hit counter at the bottom. And not a trace of irony.

• PerfectXML.com: 100 XML Acronyms. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t meant to be funny. Take, for example, #83, X-KISS, which I naively assumed stood for XML: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

  83. X-KISS: XML Key Information Service Specification

  The X-KISS specification defines a protocol for a Trust service that resolves public key information contained in XML-SIGelements. The X-KISS protocol allows a client of such a service to delegate part or all of the tasks required to process elements. A key objective of the protocol design is to minimize the complexity of application implementations by allowing them to become clients and thereby to be shielded from the complexity and syntax of the underlying PKI used to establish trust relationships. The underlying PKI may be based upon a different specification such as X.509/PKIX, SPKI or PGP.

  X-KISS is defined in terms of structures expressed in the XML Schema Language, protocols employing the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) v1.1 and relationships among messages defined by the Web Services Definition Language v1.0.

  Irony is apparently in short supply these days.

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1. Joshua Kaufman (trackback)

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