Gnodal Journal

Responding to Dave Winer’s “First Essay of the Year”, Jeremy Allaire asked himself, “whether weblogging as we know it will truly become a mainstream form of personal communications and sharing, rather than it’s current perceived niche as form of personal or independent Internet journalism.” His musings raise two major characteristics of blogs:

Interesting that the first paragraph thetwowayweb.com‘s homepage quotes Tim Berners-Lee, who said in December 1997: “The intuitive editing interfaces which make authoring a natural part of daily life are still maturing.” I’m pretty happy with BlogBuddy, but the frankly the actuality is just as the site’s title puts it: “We’re working on it!”

Davenet: The Two Way Web is a good backgrounder on this.

In his 2003/01/14, Tantek Çelik rolls out his view on XHTML. (thanks to Jeffrey/for this one.)
Also, in his 2003/01/06/ Tantek points to”Simon Willison: … semantic XHTML provides a powerful and well defined format for storing content in a way that is both future proof and instantly accessible.

Calling “Adaptive design for weblog software” “a great chewy chunk of stuff”, Matt Jones comments, “Welcome to the New Cambrian.”. Well, thanks, Matt!

“The spectrum of software development has two ends. On one end is the push model (yes, I’m going to lapse into the push/pull dichotomy again), which is the model where you set your sights on a goal, and build a tower to get there (like Windows). On the other end is the pull model, which is more like an ecology. Tiny steps, filling niches, each new piece of development just taking advantage of what’s already there, and creating new capabilities — like, life creates conditions conducive to life, in everything that it does . But it’s undirected, not goal oriented, and slow. It can’t be forced. “

Yaa yaa, nice pages that don’t use tables … shurr. No, don’t get me wrong, I’m headed there, but don’t expect me to say To Hell With Bad Browsers … I probably spend half my time using NS4.X, for a number of reasons (none having to do with pretty pages, of course). Any design domain that thinks of three columns as the “holy grail” has got some serious thinking to do. With a good bit of sloppiness, I got this page to display what I wanted: 2 columns, menu right, where the menu is not 100% height. Is that so much to ask? really!

must read: Box Lessons … there be dragons, indeed!

At c|net news, Paul Festa writes Dancing around Web services, which focuses on this little storm cloud:

“There’s this division of labor that’s emerging between those who can develop (Web) services and those that can put them together to make an application,” said Eric Newcomer, chief technology officer at Iona Technologies and a member of the W3C’s Web Services Architecture committee. “Choreography (is) about getting business analysts to put Web services together to build an application.”
But questions about the intentions of some high-profile W3C members–Microsoft, IBM and BEA Systems–threaten to derail the possibility of an industrywide standard, said analysts and other observers.”

Standards are bullshit. XHTML is a crock. The W3C is irrelevant. yaa yaa yaa …

Dan Bricklin and the SMBmeta project should be interested in this: SKICal – Structured Knowledge Initiative – Calendar

“The Structured Knowledge Initiative Calendar – SKICal – aims to improve the information infrastructure concerned with public events (concerts, sports competitions, conferences etc.)
SKICal is working towards this goal by promoting the new international standard specification for the exchange of calendar information which is known as iCalendar.
SKICal work is coordinated by Metamatrix in Stockholm, which has recieved sponsorship from NUTEK – Sweden`s central public authority for matters concerning the growth and renewal of industry.”

Anything new under the sun? This certainly isn’t the dustiest document I’ve found this evening, but still … it’s at least 6 years old … and it still rings sweet! From UMichDearborn, by Marcy Bauman: Networked Hypertext (reads in part) “This essay is an attempt to answer those questions. It is my central contention that the writing being done in new environments — on listservs, MUDs and MOOs, and the world wide web — is essentially a new form of hypertext …”