Maxwell's Silver Hammer: RDFa and HTML5's Microdata

Shelley Sat, 08/22/2009 - 14:48

Being a Beatles fan, I must admit to being intrigued about the new Beatles box set that will be available in September. I have several Beatles albums, but not all. None of the CDs I own have been re-mastered or re-mixed, including one of my favorite songs, from Abby Road: Maxwell's Silver Hammer:

Joan was quizzical; Studied pataphysical
Science in the home.
Late nights all alone with a test tube.
Oh, oh, oh, oh.

Maxwell Edison, majoring in medicine,
Calls her on the phone.
"Can I take you out to the pictures,
Joa, oa, oa, oan?"

But as she's getting ready to go,
A knock comes on the door.

Bang! Bang! Maxwell's silver hammer
Came down upon her head.
Bang! Bang! Maxwell's silver hammer
Made sure that she was dead.

I love the chorus, Bang! Bang! Maxwell's silver hammer came down upon her head...

Speaking of Bang! Bang! Jeni Tennison returned from vacation, surveyed the ongoing, and seemingly unending, discussion on RDFa as compared to HTML5's Microdata, and wrote HTML5/RDFa Arguments. It's a well written look at some of the issues, primarily from the viewpoint of a heavy RDFa user, working to understand the perspective of an HTML5 advocate.

Jeni lists all of the pushback against RDFa that I'm aware of, including the reluctance to use namespacing, because of copy and paste issues, as well as the use of prefixes, such as FOAF, rather than just spelling out the FOAF URI. Jeni also mentions the issue about how namespaces are handled differently in the DOM (Document Object Model) when the document is served as HTML, rather than XHTML.

The whole namespace issue goes beyond just RDFa, and touches on the broader issue of distributed extensibility, which will, in my opinion, probably push back the Last Call date for HTML5. It may seem like accessibility issues are the real kicker, but that's primarily because no one wants to look at the elephant in the corner that is extensibility. Right now, Microsoft is tasked to provide a proposal for this issue—yes, you read that right, Microsoft. When that happens, interesting discussion will ensue. And unlike other issues, whatever happens will take more than a few hours to integrate into HTML5.

The Tweet Stuff: When it absolutely positively has to get there

Shelley Sat, 08/08/2009 - 18:18

If we've learned one thing from this week's massive attack against the very fabric of our social connectivity, it's that clouds don't make the best stuff on which to build.

Twitter, in particular, has shown how very vulnerable it is—a vulnerability we share as we become more dependent on Twitter for most of our communication with each other. Oddly enough, I needed to contact someone about a business opportunity just as Twitter universe began to crumble, but all I had was her Twitter name—I couldn't find her email address. Since Twitter was down, I couldn't connect up with her for hours.

Of course, massive DDoS isn't all that common, but Twitter still hasn't recovered from the attack. As I've been playing with new Twitter accounts this week, I found varying degrees of responsiveness across the accounts, probably based on how busy they are; possibly based on how many followers a person has. None of the accounts would allow me to change most profile information, including the design. As you can see with my new integrated @shelleypowers Twitter account, I haven't been able to change the picture, or to delete or add a new background image. I've had varying success with just posting a new message.

I have never liked centralized systems, though I understand their appeal and worth. It always seems, though, that just when you start to depend on the centralized service something happens to it.

Yahoo is now out of the search engine business, and with its new business partnership with Microsoft, its side applications like delicious are now vulnerable. I've managed to replace delicious with Scuttle, though I no longer have the social aspect of delicious. However, my Scuttle implementation does an excellent job with bookmarks, which is what I needed.