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<dateCreated>Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:06:54 GMT</dateCreated>
<dateModified>Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:29:50 GMT</dateModified>
<ownerName>Tom Morris</ownerName>
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<outline text="Abusing MIME types: the Universal Edit Button" created="Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:06:55 GMT"><outline text="Recently, there has been a fair bit of hype around a new Firefox extension called the &lt;a href=&quot;http://universaleditbutton.org/Universal_Edit_Button&quot;&gt;Universal Edit Button&lt;/a&gt;. I strongly advise against using it. It &lt;em&gt;misuses&lt;/em&gt; the semantics of the link element in &lt;acronym title=&quot;HyperText Markup Language&quot;&gt;HTML&lt;/acronym&gt;. And not just a little bit, like really the sort of bad usage that makes one's eyeballs spin like a slot machine type bad.&#13;" created="Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:06:55 GMT"/><outline text="Get this. It uses rel=&quot;alternate&quot;, and type=&quot;application/wiki&quot; - oh, but because that's not a proper MIME type, they ask people to use type=&quot;application/x-wiki&quot;. Because, you know, when you edit a wiki page, instead of getting an &lt;acronym&gt;HTML&lt;/acronym&gt; document back containing a form, you get back an &quot;application/x-wiki&quot; document. I am &lt;a href=&quot;http://universaleditbutton.org/Add_The_Link&quot;&gt;not kidding about this&lt;/a&gt;.&#13;" created="Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:06:55 GMT"/><outline text="There's a really simple solution to this - just make it so that it is rel=&quot;editable&quot; (or a similar rel value). And why even bother having it in the head? Have it on the actual link to the editable version.&#13;" created="Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:06:55 GMT"/><outline text="I strongly advise owners of wiki systems and other collaborative systems to not implement this until it stops sucking. You may want to &lt;a href=&quot;http://universaleditbutton.org/Suggestions&quot;&gt;go and suggest this on their wiki&lt;/a&gt;." created="Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:06:55 GMT"/></outline><outline text="CWL: elaborate W3C joke or real standard in the making?" created="Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:29:49 GMT"><outline text="Just catching up with my newsfeeds, and I see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.w3.org/News/2008#item115&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; story from the W3C. It's an announcement of the &quot;Common Web Language (CWL) Evaluation and Installation Incubator Group&quot;. Only problem is that it seems to be almost completely opaque to anybody outside of it. The XG &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/cwl-ei/charter&quot;&gt;charter&lt;/a&gt; describes CWL as &lt;q&gt;a graphic language of semantic network with hyper node and is used to describe contents and meta-data of web pages in three different type of form such as UNL, CDL and &lt;acronym title=&quot;Resource Description Framework&quot;&gt;RDF&lt;/acronym&gt;&lt;/q&gt;. Anyone understand that? I don't. I get why one might want to describe content and meta-data of a web page in &lt;acronym&gt;RDF&lt;/acronym&gt; - but why do I need to use UNL or CDL? That was my initial reaction.&#13;" created="Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:29:49 GMT"/><outline text="But then I read this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/cwl/XGR-cwl/&quot;&gt;XG Report&lt;/a&gt; about the Common Web Language. And, my, that is really quite &lt;em&gt;bonkers&lt;/em&gt;. It's Esperanto-over-&lt;acronym title=&quot;HyperText Transfer Protocol&quot;&gt;HTTP&lt;/acronym&gt;! Finally, we have people who are barmier than us!&#13;" created="Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:29:49 GMT"/><outline text="From what I can gather, the UNL/CDL effort is trying to map a fairly large set of human language into a limited vocabulary which is easier for machines to translate, and then using RDF to attach metadata. Instead of sitting down and writing in English or Japanese or German, one sits down and writes &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; UNL. Then, the browser has a UNL reader built in which automatically translates the UNL into the relevant local language. In short: machine readable Esperanto with &lt;acronym&gt;RDF&lt;/acronym&gt; and &lt;abbr title=&quot;Web Ontology Language&quot;&gt;OWL&lt;/abbr&gt; annotations. Right, own up: who at the W3C has been smoking crack? At least it makes us &quot;HTML, microformats, RDF, SPARQL and a bit of OWL&quot; pragmatic pick-and-mix types look completely sane in comparison. I don't want to go all negative-nancy on anyone, but anyone want to bet that this will actually take off? Have I got it all wrong - and we'll all be writing CWL instead of HTML and XML in five years time?&#13;" created="Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:29:49 GMT"/><outline text="Oh my, here is their example of the beauty of the UNL syntax. Here's the English: &lt;q&gt;Long ago, in the city of Babylon, people begun to build a huge tower, which seemed about to reach the heavens&lt;/q&gt;. And here it is rewritten in UNL: &lt;code&gt;begin.entry.past-- tim-&amp;gt;long ago --plc-&amp;gt;city.def --agt-&amp;gt;people.def --obj-&amp;gt;build.past--obj-&amp;gt; tower&amp;lt;- aoj--huge&amp;lt;- seem.past --obj-&amp;gt;reach.bigin.soon--obj-&amp;gt;tower --gol-&amp;gt;heaven.def.pl&lt;/code&gt;&#13;" created="Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:29:49 GMT"/><outline text="I propose a new rule of thumb, which I shall egotistically call Morris' Law of Standards: &lt;strong&gt;however fucked up and crazy something is, someone, somewhere in a standards body is writing a parser, schema or proposal for it&lt;/strong&gt;. CWL proves that. It really is machine readable Esperanto over HTTP. At least they (claim) to use N-Triples in their paper (it's not, but don't worry about it) - Esperanto re-expressed in RDF/XML would quite probably make my brain asplode." created="Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:29:49 GMT"/></outline></body>
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