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I still haven't forgiven Adobe for this.

Excellent SVG authoring program (from the same folks who produced PaintShop Pro), purchased by Corel (motherfuckers), re-sold to Adobe (motherfuckers squared), and shut down.

If Trajectory had been permitted to mature, Flash would have been all but dead and forgotten at least 5 years ago.

If you want something to really get hopping mad about, terminals that can do this have been around for years. Ages, in fact.

Nice to know that xmlterm is still remembered (author). There is now an updated version, called GraphTerm, which is similar in some respects to Terminology but is written in python works completely within the browser.

If you want something to really get hopping mad about, terminals that can do this have been around for years. Ages, in fact.

I like GOTOs... and so does this this guy, and this guy and the book on writing Linux devices drivers

Can you take your dogma out back and shoot it? 8-)

Talking about those who do not know history, XMLTerm in 1999.

Here is the more Geek-centric info on the XML itself (schema info, key info, etc).

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/11/03/itunes.html

VERY useful site if you're interested in tweaking the XML directly.

I've been worried about Flash security for a long time now. I'd like to point out three features of Flash that bother me.

First, Flash allows a web application to paste data to the clipboard even if the browser itself forbids this. Of the major browsers, only IE allows applications to directly set the clipboard content.

Second, Flash has an XMLHttpRequest equivalent with a lax security policy. Cross-domain retrieval is controlled by an XML control file listing permissible origins.

Finally, Flash has its own cookie system. These Flash cookies are hidden from the user, and require special tools to remove.

These features are secure in themselves, but are enablers: they give attackers the means to exploit other vulnerabilities.

Unfortunately, this cavalier attitude fits Adobe's business model. Lax security is as much a feature of Flash as its vector graphics. Flash allows web developers "get shit done" with no regard for the security of the web ecosystem as a whole. Web developers then come to rely on Flash, which increases the adoption of Flash Player among users, which in turn increases the value of Adobe's authoring tools. Being insecure is lucrative, up to the point that the vulnerabilities become so egregious that users disable Flash.

On the other hand, browser vendors seem to take a mostly-conservative approach to security (don't laugh yet): consider XMLHttpRequest: sure, its same-origin restriction on the target URL is inconvenient, and the restriction might have been loosened while remaining secure. But this same prudent restriction has also prevented many attacks. Browser vendors have the right incentives because users have a realistic choice of browsers. Flash is an all-or-nothing affair.

I wish I had an answer. Hopefully, HTML 5 will become widely supported enough that websites won't feel compelled to use Flash for graphics and storage, and eventually Flash's market penetration will sink below the point that web developers can consider it a viable way to circumvent browser security.

Useless is the wrong word. It took 15 lines of python wrapping xpdf for me to get a working system for dumping the transactions out of the last 6 years of my credit card statements.
It's ugly, but it works just fin

That would be because that particular PDF happened to accidentally be wrapping ASCII or ISO-8859 or UTF-8 or UTF-16 instead of some image format. Even then, that was just screen-scraping like can be done with old terminal sessions. It can be done, sometimes.

Keep the data in machine readable formats, not a terminal format like PDF or paper.

How about something like this?
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/02/07/openoffice.html

Dated February 07, 2001. States that OpenOffice (its first release as open source) already uses the format and goes on to explain some of the XML used.

XML is absolutely definitely a format -- eXtensible Markup Language.

XML is a system of grammar that is used to create defined formats.

You can't use XML to markup data. You have to use a defined grammar to create a format. You might say that this is an issue of semantics but that is the point. If your only use/understanding of XML is as a static data format then your doing it [XML/XSLT/..] wrong.

XML is crappy tool for static storage. If the data is being read/written by the same program there are faster/simpler was to encode that data. But that isn't what XML is meant for. To repeat my previous post; XML documents are abstracted semantic models that are designed to be transformed and dynamically interpreted.

Here is a link to an example of how XML/XSLT can be used to extend and enhance an existing XML based web service [Generating RSS with XSLT and Amazon ECS]. This a perfect example of the agnostic client scenario that XML was designed for (ie: the service could care less how the data is represented or transformed).

That XMLterm.org page looks kind of evil. I think it may actually be a spam-blog that rips stuff from here. It's just a little bit hard to credit some of the stuff they link to as official Mozilla sites given their propensity to misspelling Firefox, and the fact that the download buttons are blank. Also, I strongly doubt that the people who wrote XMLterm were peddling some of the crap that blog links to. Alas, it may be more dead than you think.

I wonder when the XHTML hippies will realise that XHTML is dead, and never was a good idea. Did you actually take the time to read the XHTML2 specification? It's a mess.

http://www.spartanicus.utvinternet.ie/no-xhtml.htm
http://www.autisticcuckoo.net/archive.php?id=2005/ 03/14/xhtml-is-dead
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/03/19/dive-into-xml. html

This brings up an important question: what's the legal status of XMLTV? The Zap2IT license seems to be broad enough to allow for it.
While you may interact with or download a single copy of any portion of the Content for your own personal, non-commercial entertainment, information or use, you may not and may not authorize others to reproduce, sell, publish, distribute, modify, display, repost or otherwise use any portion of the Content in any other way or for any other purpose without the prior written consent of TMS. Requests regarding use of the Content for any purpose other than personal, non-commercial use should be directed to Feedback at Zap2it.com.

There is always FOAF...

Yes, either individual organizations, or ISPs, or consortia could cache DTDs and XML Schemas and such - there are several pretty mature (although not well understood or used in many IT Spaces) catalog providers for XML parsers. The obvious place is for a few major corporations or open source houses to setup internal systems like this, and publish how they did it.

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/03/03/catalogs.html and plenty of other places can tell you how to use a catlog resolver of your very own.

In terms of standards organizations - who's to say that a W3C server is more likely to stay up forever holding some chunk of DTD/Schemas than a Netscape server? It's not a question of finding the One True Universewide Schema Server - it's more about spreading around the information and routing around damaged sections of the net (to overuse and stretch an old meme).

Of course they have SGML/XML support -- and XSLT means supporting XPath. But they weren't happy about it.

Google, "Formatting Objects considered harmful"
http://www.biglist.com/lists/xsl-list/archives/199 905/msg00495.html
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/01/19/print.html

I actually did publish a book that I authored in HTML. More precisely, we used HTML run through a really ugly preprocessor that one of the original authors of the book created while she was teaching herself Perl.

Fortunately, our publisher found an SGML/XML wizard who did a very good job of converting the HTML to XML, which then got converted PDF using an off-the-shelf XSL-FO processor. I was very impressed with his work, without which the conversion would have been a total nightmare. It was still very tedious, though, because HTML is not a true structured format, and you cannot completely automate its conversion.

It would, of course, have been much more efficient to have authored the document in XML in the first place. I remember this actually being proposed back in 1998 for an earlier version of the book. (I was not a co-author back then, but I was working for the department that owned the content.) The manager who responsible for this had zero interest: HTML got the job done, she didn't have the resources to do a big XML conversion. Never mind the huge inefficiency of authoring that book, and a lot of other content related to the Java SE platform, in plain HTML. Only now, after this manager has left the company and it has become painfully obvious that they can no longer afford to hack such a huge mountain of HTML code, is the company getting round to making the conversion.

HTML is just not a good format. It's barely adequate for creating web pages, and totally useless for anything else.

The original RSS, version 0.90, was designed by Netscape as a format for building portals of headlines to mainstream news sites. It was deemed overly complex for its goals; a simpler version, 0.91, was proposed and subsequently dropped when Netscape lost interest in the portal-making business. But 0.91 was picked up by another vendor, UserLand Software [i.e. Dave Winer], which intended to use it as the basis of its weblogging products and other web-based writing software.

Relax NG is a great example of the triumph of Design-by-Inspired-Individuals vs. Design-by-Committee.

In The State of XML, Edd Dumbill explains the secret behind the success of Relax NG:

Incidentally the RELAX NG success can equally well be framed as a case of design-by-inspired-individuals vs. design-by-committee as much as it can be seen as a OASIS vs. W3C thing.

-Don

Yet if they don't get it into print, it can't be used in a classroom setting.

I could have sworn that about five years ago I stumbled across a Linux project like this, but I didn't download it or bookmark it, and I never found it again.

I think you are searching for XMLTerm.

when reading a document like ODF (and anything based on XML) you have to read the whole file in to understand any of it

And your proof for this assertion is...what?

Counter-proof: pull parsers and StAX.

with a binary format like a doc file.. what you need first is first..

And your proof for this assertion is...what?

Counter-proof: ZIP files have their table-of-contents at the end of the file.

you can understand a section by jumping to it and geting just that portion instead of the whole thing

And your proof for this assertion is...what?

it is the same with saving.. updating portions of the file instead of the whole thing.

And your proof for this assertion is...what?

And please don't cite that RAR vs. Solid RAR nonsense from your previous post. Your analysis of RAR vs. Solid RAR is spot-on, but you have not demonstrated how either RAR's or Solid RAR's performance can be used as a predictor of the performance of .doc or ODF or hamster wheels or anything else.

I think before calling authors names like "sophomore pimply FOSS-monkey intern" you ought to at least do a search on the author's name. http://www.xml.com/pub/au/Dumbill_Edd Edd Dumbill is a very respected guy in his field and has some very serious Ruby on Rails projects behind his belt. He is neither "sophomore" nor "pimply" and has quite a bit of integrity.

They're saying a binary file, with a header and fixed data structures, are alot easier to read & parse than an XML file, which consists of structures of variable length, needs to be interpreted, etc etc etc. This is a problem with XML.

Except that in this application, the user data is never going to be fixed length. Font names aren't fixed length. Sentences, paragraphs and lines aren't fixed length. Style names aren't fixed length. Even if your encapsulation uses fixed length delimiters, there's inherently going to be a lot of scanning and interpreting of variable length data.

Plus, think about the OS platform as a whole. Microsoft need to have an XML reader in the OS, for things like web feeds, web page parsing, and so on. If they're smart, they'll throw a bunch of engineers at that XML parser and optimize the hell out of it. With OpenDocument, they can use that highly optimized parser for their office documents too.

But no, they seem to be saying that it's better to write, maintain and optimize a second parser just for Office documents. Well, I don't buy it.

The main reason I don't is that XML parsing is damn fast. I took a copy of Ulysses in HTML, and parsed the entire thing. It takes about 1 second per MB, and that's for an XML parser written in one of the slower purely interpreted languages. A C language parser like Expat is about 50-100x faster (based on other people's benchmarks). So for a bloated presentation file, we're talking about maybe 1 second of parsing. That's simply not a performance bottleneck.

I'm not a Microsoft fanboy, but their InfoCard system is clearly the right answer for Firefox. InfoCard built into Firefox would not only put it on equal ground with Vista/IE 7, it would provide a consistent user experience and user control over identity when visiting web sites, and most importantly would offer bulletproof protection against phishing.

InfoCard would accomplish this by using the OASIS-ratified WS-Trust protocol to pass tokens generated from InfoCard meta-data through an identity selector that positively identifies web sites running instances of a security token service that signs the tokens using a public/private key pair. If the InfoCard-enabled user visits a web site that is masquerading as a valid web site, the identity selector on the local machine pops up a dialog box informing the user that the keys don't match and gives the user a choice whether to divulge his/her identity.

This is strong-ass protection against phishing, and InfoCard/STS/WS-Trust/IE7 will ship with every copy of Vista, quickly becoming a de facto standard as Vista takes hold. If Firefox wants to play with the next generation of Internet identity and security, it needs InfoCard support, period. The only hangup is that InfoCard is proprietary to Microsoft, but I'm sure someone will get around to building an open source reference implementation for Firefox . . . I can think of a group who is up to the task.

........ kris

I take him seriously. Edd Dumbill is an Editor at Large for O'Reilly Network, an author of three books for O'Reilly, and a GNOME contributor, and an excellent tech weblogger, among other things.

Due to the nature of XML, a parser which will accept malformed XML is a potential nightmare.

Badly formed HTML isn't a big deal, but badly formed XML is potentially hazardous to data integrity.

As for Apples situation with Photocasting and RSS, this whole situation is blown entirely out of proportion.

I went looking into namespace issues relating to XML last week for a project I'm working on. I wanted to verify that my purpose for the namespace wasn't in violation of any intents; what I found was rather interesting and highlights the reason why Apple made the mistake they did.

Some people think a tag should inherit the name space of it's parent, while others disagree; there are even flags for identifying the behavior in some XML parsers so they can handle it either way. (See: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/08/22/deviant.html)
Apple's mistake in this regard is rather minor, as it is almost impossible to incorrectly parse the XML and do anything with it; inspite of it being bad form. (It IS legal syntax in XML, it is NOT legal syntax in RSS).

As for their mishandling of namespace it looks like it was a quick and dirty hack for testing purposes, and somebody rushed it out the door. The date field which is 'incorrectly' formatted is the date field that should be identified as being in Apples specified namespace. Which means it's format is NOT incorrect; it can be anything Apple says it is, only it's namespace is incorrect.

RSS is a convoluted historical artifact, while version 2 looks quite simple, the overall history of RSS is disturbing in that something so poorly conceived should function at all. There are many quirks and special handling of the older variants and, contrary to the opinion of some, there is only self appointed authoritative references for any of it.

Google Suggest and Google Maps are two examples of a new approach to web applications that we at Adaptive Path have been calling Ajax. The name is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and it represents a fundamental shift in what's possible on the Web.

Ajax isn't a technology. It's really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:

• standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
• dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
• data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
• asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
• and JavaScript binding everything together.

As others have noted, a shorthand term comprised of the intials of a series of words, and is itself pronounable as a word, is an acronym. Revisionist hostory not withstanding.

The XML part is typically ignored in AJAX discussions, either because people find XML all scary and complex (and so use html/tag-soup), or because they do not understand the inplications for character encoding and internationalization.

This fallacy is revealed in I, Pencil - My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read which explains that while not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make a pencil , pencils nonetheless exist in abundance.

The Reality of Markets by Russell Roberts speaks of "phenomena that are the product of human action but not of human design": examples include language, economies and the WWW, all which work with neither oversight nor designer.

In contrast many designed systems (CORBA, The Semantic Web, RDF, Ontologies) remain stunted and show little progress. Clay Shirky's writings: Web Services: It's So Crazy, It Just Might Not Work and The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview provide illuminating insight into why.

My big complaint about OpenDocument Schemas are that they rely on RelaxNG that has poor support in developer tools. It also adds another layer of confusion for customers who are veeery reluctant to accept non-W3C standards.

Indeed, see Tim Bray's comments on Why XML Doesn't Suck for some great insight.

Really, the problem many people have had with XML is that the tools aren't always up to par. But new ways of doing things come around to fix things, such as pull parsers, which simplifies XML parsing without having to resort to regular expression tricks like Tim Bray was talking about in XML Is Too Hard For Programmers.

Eric
HTTP header viewer

Up until now to create a simple web CRUDS (Create, Read, Update, Delete, Search) application you had to know HTML, SQL and {PHP|PERL|JAVA), etc.!

And even if you know what you're doing it still takes time and money to get CRUDS done right.

Google Base is going to change that radically. It reduces the cost of CRUDS to ZERO.

Some of the consequences will be:

• Demand for small custom webapps will go down, or have to move to a new Google Base environment.
• Web sites that already provide similiar services like http://server.com/ and http://myweblists.com/test will likely die.

Increased competition with MSFT because they want these applications on the desktop using Office 12.

Google Base may be leading us to the universal ATOM store. More info. at http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/09/21/atom-store-web -database.html

Sorry for the crappy formatting, but I couldn't figure out how to associate text with the URLs.

From http://www.xml.com/pub/a/w3j/s3.paoli.html:

"Microsoft cofounded the XML working group at the W3C in July 96 and actively participated in the definition of the standard."

This was used in IE4.00 for their Channel Definition File (used to schedule "Pull" of channels, an idea that's largely died). I was implementing CDF files at Scala in '96/97. The patent was filed in '97.

IDE is an inferior subset of SCSI. Any device would be nicer if it implemented the whole set.

Me, "DMA would not be so painful if Intel was not doggedly supporting Microsoft's legacy crap."

You: WTF are you talking about ? DMA is only painful on broken hardware like VIA chipsets. On decent hardware, it's been common and trivial to use for a decade or more.

Common with an SDK but not trial or decent. Superior platforms, such as Alpha, were crushed to eliminate a potential competitive threat to Microsoft. The technical details are easy. With those understood, you might connect the dots to understand the "business" decisions and how they screwed you and me. See "Direct Memory Access and Bus Mastering" here.

The relavant parts are:

"DMA is the hardware mechanism that allows peripheral components to transfer their I/O data directly to and from main memory without the need for the system processor to be involved in the transfer. Use of this mechanism can greatly increase throughput to and from a device, because a great deal of computational overhead is eliminated."

"Unfortunately, because of its hardware nature, DMA is very system dependent."

"IA-32 (x86)
MIPS
PowerPC
ARM

These platforms support the PCI DMA interface, but it is mostly a false front. There are no mapping registers in the bus interface, so scatterlists cannot be combined and virtual addresses cannot be used. There is no bounce buffer support, so mapping of high-memory addresses cannot be done. The mapping functions on the ARM architecture can sleep, which is not the case for the other platforms.

IA-64

The Itanium architecture also lacks mapping registers. This 64-bit architecture can easily generate addresses that PCI peripherals cannot use, though. The PCI interface on this platform thus implements bounce buffers, allowing any address to be (seemingly) used for DMA operations.

Alpha
MIPS64
SPARC

These architectures support an I/O memory management unit. As of 2.4.0, the MIPS64 port does not actually make use of this capability, so its PCI DMA implementation looks like that of the IA-32. The Alpha and SPARC ports, though, can do full-buffer mapping with proper scatter-gather support."

Unless you were sleeping, you noticed the death of Alpha at the hands of Intel and Microsoft. The final crushing blow came after the Compaq HP merger when tests which showed Alpha performed better than IA64 were suppressed and Alpha was terminated.

I consider that an anti-competitive screw. Alpha, MIPS or Spac could all be produced just as cheaply as any Intel junk. There would be a market if it were not for court proven Microsoft vendor manipulation. If you are happy using binary drivers tied to an OS with a 12 minute halflife on any network, you might not consider yourself screwed. As someone who has to put up spam and DoS from that OS, I consider myself doubly screwed.

Me paraniod? Not enough.

You do realize that was, like, eight years ago, right? And then they fixed it ("months"? Good lord!). Are there hiccups? I'm sure there are. But in practice, very few people moan about incompatibility issues.

It was November/December of 1997, so yes about 8 years ago. And I was working at a Fortune 500 company who's Executive VP (pre-CIO days) insisted on immediately upgrading half the company to Office 97 to "standardize". That was 3,000+ desktops on one version and 3,000+ on the older version. It was a damn nightmare for almost a year and that experience stuck with me. :-)

It also stuck with Microsoft, because the Office 97, 2000, XP and 2003 formats are the same and didn't change. Yes, they introduced XML capabilities in 2003 but the default format was the 97/2000/XP one.

Now they're going to change again, this time to XML, and are making the same promises they did in 1997.

Since they are changing, now is the perfect time to try and force an open document solution. Better now than before getting locked into the next cycle.

But in practice, very few people moan about incompatibility issues.

Look harder. Google is your friend.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1631430,00.as p
http://office-watch.com/office/archtemplate.asp?v9 -n05 (Scroll down to #4, about half-way.)

"...neurobiologist seeking data from the Viking probes sent by the United States to Mars in the mid-1970s was told by the US space agency that software to read the 25-year-old computer tapes no longer existed, and "the programmers who knew it had died," according to the scientist."
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=3902& Cr=unesco&Cr1=

And to top it off, Office 2003 has no less that six(!) different versions, of which only the top-end 2 can create XML formats. http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/04/23/deviant.html

People don't care about philosophy until it happens to them. Most are apathetic with the attitude "yeah, but what are the odds of that happening to me?" That attitude can NOT be let to rule the day.

Hell, my dad still has the disks he wrote his first book on. TRS-80 Model III, 5 1/4" floppies. And no earthly idea how to get the data off them, much less what format it is in.

Some manufacturing equipment is still controlled by software on OS/9000-based machines. Yes, they can read and write DOS-format floppies now. Of course, the driver for that is $2,500 per node-locked machine...

Sorry for the rant, but this is an important subject I've been burned by before.

  -Charles

WRONG ! Semantic Web expects minimal agreement within communities and domains, for example all camera companies agree on a 'camera ontology' and TV companies create a 'TV ontology', such domain specific ontologies may or may not be linked to a 'master ontology'.
SW is very much out there.. and is already weaved in to the Web of today..

Well again these may sound just 'specifications' and less of an 'ontology'.. then look in to the rapidly growing billion dollar industry.. bio-chem-pharmaco informatics.. ontologies are becoming backbone of their entire computing, data collection and analysis infrastructure..

Whats more..
Flip through last month's Nature Biotech and you ll find articles talking about ontologies, RDF & Semantic Web.. Yes, its already here
Remember, these Biologist are those people who finished the Genome project 2-3yrs earlier than it was orignally planned.. They are very good at collaboration, strong proponents of open-source and very hard workers.. Semantic Web is the right platform for them that gives them tools and a standard to share data seamlessly.. Lets just wait and watch what these people do with it...

AND...yes there's more.. 5 days ago NIH approved a 20million grant to group at Stanford to create a NATIONAL CENTER for BIOMEDICAL ONTOLOGY. Its the same group which developed the only OWL editor (Protege) available out there !
I just hope that those guys at NIH are not fools to give away hard earned tax payers money on something thats not gonna work

This is the longest rant I think I've ever seen that was composed based on zero knowledge of the technical subject at hand, but rather on some kind of on-the-fly interpretation of the three words "service" "oriented" and "architecture" used in juxtaposition.

Your points:

1. [...]being "service oriented" is roughly as new as dirt.

   See above.

2. how in the world this would relate to software reuse

   SOA makes software reuse not only easy but unavoidable - through tooling. See my other posts here for other thoughts in this vein, including use of ESB (Enterprise Service Bus).

3. ...they haven't really told you anything about how to facilitate reuse in general, or how SOA is supposed to contribute to that...

   Interesting. What else have you tried to read besides this sales-oriented (I call it marketecture ) web page? Any actual technical articles?

"Oh, and be sure and check out the big kids: Haystack, SIMILE's Piggybank, etc."

Protege

SWOOP

PhotoStuff

Ontology Tools Survey, Revisited

" Ontologies are a way of specifying the structure of domain knowledge in a formal logic designed for machine processing. The effect on information technology (IT) is to shift the burden of capturing the meaning of data content from the procedural operations of algorithms and rules to the representation of the data itself."

there have been svg browser plugins for some time; now native svg is included with firefox on ms-windows, and scheduled for inclusion with firefox and mozilla. here are some SVG and SVG animation links for you:

• Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 Specification - w3c 2003
• Mozilla SVG Project
• SVG Animation Tutorial - dated 2002, i'm sure you can find something more recent

It's almost like we need some sort of standard for templating content.

Even just a year ago, I'd totally agree with you... but the big shift that makes JavaScript valuable is the AJAX paradigm for web applications, which is esssentially the strategy of using XmlHttpRequest objects to send requests that allow you to update snippets of the resident document.

The difference is that I have Snownews installed on my OpenBSD box. I am now able to, in a few minuts and in a format that I really like, get my news from just about anyplace on the planet.

It makes getting news in 5 minutes at a kiosk in Narita or Changi dead easy and much faster than looking at the sites in question.

That and last I looked you could not do fun things like this with the old push stuff either.

So yeah it may be a similar idea but the big difference is that this time implemantions don't suck.

This wiki misses the fact that RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 are competing formats, not progressive versions of the same standard.

RSS 1.0 is RDF-based like the original Netscape version of RSS, and is more extensible and structured than RSS 2.0 or Atom.

Annoyingly, neither camp wants to let go of the name "RSS" because they both lay claim to it, but it does actually stand for different things ("RDF Site Summary" / "Really Simple Syndication").

Readers would get more value from pages such as these:
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/07/23/rssone.html
http://www.burningdoor.com/eric/archives/000239.ht ml
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2000/08/25 /magazine/rss_tut.html
http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/

The funny thing is that in most cases AJAX is built on and largely relies in a proprietary Microsoft invented extension to DHTML. The XMLHttpRequest object.

See: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/02/09/xml-http-reque st.html

XMLHttpRequest is not part of any standard, and their is no real standards defined method of doing the equivalent.

Also consider the size of their contributions to those projects and how important stuff like OpenOffice.org is. Then you have Sun's history of supporting open standards and publishing a lot of their research like their Sparc cpu which allowed others to build sparc cpu's and systems (while IBM was trying to close off their pc architecture with things like MBus to prevent OEMs), their work with xml including sponsoring the working group that created it, publishing reasearch like on The Slab Allocator which was used in Linux, even OpenSolaris has been helpful to Linux Kernel developers, and there's more I don't have the time or energy to search for.

I've been doing this for a while:

Hacking OpenOffice.org

Yawn. This is a great idea, but not anything new. Microsoft should have done this years ago, as there is an obvious benefit to their customers and innovation is obviously moving to open formats. They would have done it earlier if they didn't need so depserately competition to spur them into action. IE7, XML Office ... what's next? Bash at the Windows DOS prompt?

I don't think the evidence on RDF mailing list supports that opinion. Look at the literature in the bookstores about semantic web. If anything, it is full of confusion and the specification is poorly written compared to the HTML and XML specification.

Triplet does not equal (Subject verb object). What the RDF spec describes is closer to Natural Language parsing concepts. There are many similarities between what the RDF describes as RDF Model graph and dependency grammar techniques http://w3.msi.vxu.se/~nivre/research/sdg.html.

The fact is RDF is really just triplet. Not surprising that it can be represented in N3 (where 3 stands for triplet). Take a look at this example taken from wikipedia :

http://en.wikipedia.org/Tony_Benn> http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title> "Tony Benn" . http://en.wikipedia.org/Tony_Benn> http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/publisher> "Wikipedia" .

<rdf:RDF
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax -ns#"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
<rdf :Description rdf:about="http://en.wikipedia.org/Tony_Benn">
<dc:title>Tony Benn</dc:title>
<dc:publisher>Wikipedia</dc:publisher>
</rdf:Desc ription>
</rdf:RDF>

So take another look at RDF, you'll be surprised.

Semantic web is not something you can thing of as a concrete application nor we can consider it mature. As you surely read, semantic web is an extention of the current web. So I can link you to firefox or some HTML editor. Joke aside, it is more complicated than that and if you want to embrass semantic web you should get to know XML, RDF and OWL (in this order). In fact, if you are not working to build sw, you should consider another approach. I suggest you to look at RSS there and foaf which are IMHO concrete, but limited, examples of semantic web working examples.

As a web developper... try to generate web pages from RDF (mindswap as some tools) or XML (ala gentoo) source.

For me, the crux of the usefulness and eventual adoption and finally complete embracing of AJAX lies in the article's paragraph:

Some of the buzz surrounding AJAX has been generated by Web designers as well as programmers. AJAX?s flexibility is invigorating for Web designers because JavaScript can control any aspect of any images or type on a page. Fonts can grow or shrink. Tables can add or lose lines. Colors can change. Although none of these capabilities are new to programmers accustomed to building client applications -- or, for that matter, Java applets -- they are novelties to Web designers who would otherwise be forced to rely on Macromedia (Profile, Products, Articles) Flash.

I've seen what Google has done with AJAX (e.g., Google suggest), and it's stuff I never imagined could be so repsonsive in a web context. For me it starts to make programming fun again, and web programming an acceptable form of application development.

When browsers and web first emerged I could see the writing on the wall, but I wasn't happy about it. Browser application writing from the programming perspective was probably the single most giant leap backwards in technology for me (not including technologies introduced by Microsoft)....: you mean, all the years I've spent honing skills writing applications no longer apply? You mean I no longer have "state" as a tool for maintaining sanity in my application???? Hwaahhh??? I have to do what to change the web page???

While there have been some technologies (ASP, JSP, etc) to help with these issues, none have addressed the responsiveness issue with the web page round trip message loop. AJAX comes close. Now all I have to do is learn it.

For a great example of the responsive nature of this (I've referenced this before), go to Google Personal Home, set up your own home page, and play... Configure your modules by dragging them around... open and close your g-mail previews. This all starts looking alot like programs actually running locally on your own machine. (I'm assuming all are familiar with and have played similarly with Google Maps.)

Additionally, here are some very good resources to learn more about AJAX:

• Very Dynamic Web Interfaces
• XMLHttpRequest Introduction
• An example
• Using the XML HTTP Request object
• Dynamic HTML and XML
• XMLHttpRequest API madness
• Sarissa
• JavaScript: The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language
• What kind of language is XSLT?

That's it, I'm done.