A short snapper from c|net: Standards body tries to improve on URLs 8JAN03 […] “OASIS said it has formed a technical committee to work out how resources–such as data and services–can be placed and found on a network without their being tied to a URL on a specific machine. To do this, the committee is designing the OASIS Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI) […] ”XRI syntax will be fully federated, the way DNS (domain name system) and IP (Internet Protocol) addressing are today””
Archive for January 19th, 2003
Many Services, Many Platforms
Reading a piece by Tim Appnel [hereafter tima] “RESTful API wanted. Apply within” from 13DEC02 got me thinking I should spend more time on this topic, especially reading “It seems if ever there was a tool/medium that needed a RESTful API it’s weblogging.” (With thanks to tima, I’ve screen-scrapped / plagiarized his item for the following material. Please read his full version, his item from today (“Cohesion. TrackBack. More”), and “A RESTful Publishing API” / 25NOV02 as well.)
Ben Trott summarizes the issues and writes “in the case of Movable Type, “… our interest in this matter is in hoping that tools originally built for the Blogger API can be also used for MT-powered blogs without the loss in functionality that currently exists” and, in a later post, comments further with notice of the Blogger 2 API effort.
Elsewhere Sam Ruby says “Sigh. It looks like the future of blogging clients and servers is to have more code in if/switch/case statements and configuration options than actual logic. […] the only real guarantee you will have is that vendor A’s clients will work with vendor A’s servers.” Sam later comments on ”vendor lock-in”.
Joe Gregorio has opened The Well-Formed Web and is developing a prototype with such an API. Joe explains the RESTful approach in context of Ben Trott’s concerns.
tima writes: “Rather then debate amongst ourselves, Joe and I opened a mailing list … Some examples of existing initiatives … RESTLog, Extremely Simple Syndication (XSS) format and TrackBack. All are welcome and encouraged to join the discussion.”
I’ll leave off here with two last rounds from hiss blog: A Birthday Web Service from Jon Udell and Web Services We’d Like To See.
Imported from MozDawg without title
The ever-fresh quality of new economics arise in this 21FEB01 Palo Alto Online profile of Douglas Engelbart; “Computer visionary seeks to boost people’s collective ability to confront complex problems coming at a faster pace”
“Dr. Engelbart lays his hope for managing the compute future in the concept of bootstrapping — derived from the metaphor of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. “As soon as we make headway, we should be able to improve the improvement process. That is, the better I get, the better I get at getting better,” Dr. Engelbart says. “It’sccompound interest; it’s positive feedback.”
“We’re going full speed ahead with no headlights,” is the way his daughter Christina Engelbart puts it. “To solve the problems of today and the future, organizations need better ways to work together.”
Imported from MozDawg without title
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.
Skins, Themes, and Functionality
Refering to sources such as Cornell University’s Ergonomic Guidelines for User Interface Design, in OS Themes Are Only Skin Deep, Kelly McNeill of Platypus Creations and osOpinion.com (“Tech Opinion | Commentary For the People, By the People”) wades into that whole skins thang:
“Unfortunately, the latest trend in “user-friendliness” is allowing users to modify the interface of an operating system extensively by applying “skins” or “themes.”
McNeill wraps with a great line:
“Superior interface is defined not as that which gets one’s attention, but instead as that which keeps attention focused on the computing task at hand.”
Maybe browsing for fun is about entertainment, pleasant distraction … and maybe that’s got precious little to do with facilitating focussed productivity … maybe.
Service VS Software as Profit Center
In a column dated 27OCT02, Tim O’Reilly makes and expands a whole series of good points on the subject of Successful Free Software Businesses. (He also includes a selection of pointers to other threads.)
“I’ve been saying for years that the shift towards commodity software (whether free or just open standards) would lead towards a new paradigm in which money was increasingly made on services. (At one point I was calling it infoware, now I’m saying web services and ‘the internet operating system’, but the point is similar. People don’t pay for the software, but for the services the software delivers.)