Web Directions
North
Denver Feb 2009
Postscript: feedback tagged #wdn09 in twitter, summary item in Raible Designs, Web Standards Gone Wild
How long will it be before China catches up to the E.U. in total economic might? Less than a generation, that much is pretty certain.
The End of an Age by David Wood, March 2006
image source: wikipedia
main() { printf("hello, world"); }
Meanwhile: let's consider how languages are created and changed and taught and learned...
Kyle and the new (to us) piano, Jan 2006
Sheet music in western music notation.
screenshot by Alphast
issues around music markup in the Web:
The extraction of data created in GarageBand does not appear to be an easy task. -- Dent du Midi FAQ
InstantGig at the Royal Casino hotel in France, March 2004.
% intro [V:1]| z12| [V:2]| DAd DAd DAd DAd |
See also Jan 2006 in the MIT DIG Breadcrumbs blog item, Arpeggio in D, a little three chord ditty, on improvisation and sharing musical knowlege.
"The Gambler" Rogers chords
usually works
G G You got to know when to hold 'em, C G Know when to fold 'em, C G Know when to walk away G D And know when to run.
Technology deployment rides on the practice of sharing media, culture...
- Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
- The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
- Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
- Ours is less and less a free society.
what have you done about it?
In 1991, some places would fire you for looking at code from the Net; not this group:
Tom Christiansen is one of the core perl developers; Martin Streicher went on to become editor of Linux Magazine.
Computer Science students and hackers learn BNF and parse trees:
expression ::= atom | list atom ::= number | symbol number ::= [+-]?['0'-'9']+ symbol ::= ['A'-'Z''a'-'z'].* list ::= '(' expression* '
SGML is a little funny looking, but works mostly like BNF:
<!ENTITY % heading "H1|H2|H3|H4|H5|H6" > <!ENTITY % list " UL | OL | DIR | MENU "> <!ENTITY % literal " XMP | LISTING ">>
Feedback loop:
At Hal in Austin in 1994, while adding HTML support in products:
First editor, then chair:
Netscape's blink element and Microsoft's marquee element were omitted due to a mutual agreement between the two companies.
Fun stuff, but...
XHTML is not the solution to a problem that concerns anybody except the guys who have to write parsers that convert markup into DOM trees. It turns out that XHTML put the validation on the wrong end of the network. It turned out that the market didn't put much value in a document delivery system that could decide to not display the document because there was an unrecognized attribute on an invisible meta tag. -- Doug Crockford Jan 2008
The software world currently corresponds to the Pre-Director stage in movie-making (1893-1904). During those years, when short films were already being shown in theaters, the job of making the movie was given to the cameraman—because he knew how to work the equipment.
That is how it is with software today. Today's software designers are those who only understand the technicalities, and not—with rare exceptions—those who understand how to integrate the presentation of ideas to the mind and heart.
The Future of Information by Ted Nelson, 1997
Innovative use of W3C process invites hundreds of participants starting March 2007:
Some don't respond to annual renewal invitation.
co-chairs:
Chris Wilson (Microsoft), Sam Ruby (IBM)
with W3C staff support from Mike Smith, Dan Connolly
Some ideas from a CSS validator roadmap:
Your ideas?
See also Valid sites work better(?) for discussion.
HTML 5 Receives Support for Authoring Materials
2009-02-02: Dan Connolly, an active member of the HTML community for many years, has received support from Adobe to work on HTML 5 materials for authors. The HTML Working Group Chairs have requested additional resources to ensure that HTML 5 meets the needs of authors and browser developers alike. As a provider of Web development and authoring tools, W3C Member Adobe is not only participating in the Working Group, they have also provided financial support for the open standards process.
Client who saves $5,000 buying cut-rate non-semantic HTML will later spend $25,000 on SEO consultant to compensate.
zeldman 4:14 PM Jan 21st
There's still something to the notion behind XHTML+CSS Web design.
p.s. Kudos to whoever designed the Kansas tax web site.
See also Valid sites work better(?) for discussion.
To a computer, then, the web is a flat, boring world devoid of meaning...This is a pity, as in fact documents on the web describe real objects and imaginary concepts, and give particular relationships between them.
Tim Berners-Lee at the 1st Web Conference in 1994
March 2006 Microformats panel at W3C Technical Plenary
April 2006 collaboration on microformats tests
Tantek Çelik, June 2006: XML formats in the long run are no better than proprietary binary formats.
And if longevity is not a goal, try JSON. Yum.
The bane of my existence is doing things I know the computer could do for me.
The XML Revolution, Nature Web Matters Oct 1998
What makes the Internet so valuable to everyday people is that you can reach anyone, on ANY email system, through it. There were many email systems before the Internet, but they didn't catch the broad public interest. If we continue the current process of anti-spam-driven Balkanization (I can send email to Joe, and he can send to Nancy, but I can't send to Nancy myself, because Nancy's ISP is filtering me), we will destroy the value that we created when we linked all these networks with a common email protocol. We might as well go back to having separate un-linked networks, like MCI Mail and Compuserve and AOL and UUCP and BITNET and FidoNet. You'd just have to become a customer of that provider, and use its idiosyncratic interface, if you want to send mail to its customers. Remember that world? If not, you're lucky.
John Gilmore, 2002
There is no way to overstate what the dismemberment of The Star means, adversely, to this metropolitan area.
Sadly, this event is of historic proportions
By: Steve Rose, Publisher, KCCommunityNews.com Sep 3, 2008
Popular community web site Craigslist, which launched in the mid-1990s, has cost newspapers in the San Francisco Bay area from $50 million to $65 million in employment advertising revenue.
InformationWeek Dec 27 2004
See also: Journalism Will Survive the Death of Its Institutions Knight 2007 News Challenge Winner Lisa Williams Apr 15 2008
Be careful not to delegate too much to machines!
Three dozen companies, representing more than $1 trillion of market value, have joined the SEC's test group
SEC Interactive Data 2005-2008
Follow-up resources: