Sunday, June 29, 2003

Fixing RSS's public-relations problem Yesterday I spoke with two acquaintances, both of whom have decades-long track records in the high-tech biz, and neither of whom has ever used an RSS newsreader. When I mentioned RSS as an alternative to mailing lists, both said the same thing: "But I don't have time to visit 30 different websites in order to find things out." Of course, that is exactly the problem that RSS solves. And has been solving, for me, since 1999... [Jon's Radio] Funny, I was just making this point to my brother last week, who still isn't hooked on RSS :-( 8:42:40 PM

The Blogcount Estimate Date Estimate (millions of active weblogs) Source 2003-6 2.4 to 2.9 Phil Wolff, blogcount.com [blogcount] what can we speculate about the number of readers of weblogs? 8:36:08 PM

Ben Trott: Why We Need Echo... The Echo Project is a new movement within the blogosphere to redo the RSS spec and the weblog-editor API to be more in sync with each other. Instead of revving the RSS spec(s), many in the community have elected to start fresh with Echo. Sam Ruby seems to be the center point for this. Why start over? Ben Trott: Why We Need Echo. [Scripting News] The short list is this: The RSS spec does not say how to encode content. XML-RPC is severely lacking in internationalization (I18N) support Content is represented differently in an API than it is in a syndicated feed Confusion over elements No universally-supported and -defined extensions 8:17:12 PM

Nested Tabs in Panther One of the more interesting GUI design challenges is nesting tabs within tabs. Panther seems to other a nice solution, where the well for each child set of tabs is slightly darker than its parent well. Here's the Speech Preference panel from Panther. Notice how the wells within wells works so well? (Couldn't resist!) The image is scaled down, and the darkening of the background pattern becomes more pronounced, better to illustrate my point. This visual nesting appearance finally clears up a a long-standing ambiguity of how tabs within tabs are logically related. I can see revisiting a number of previous projects to make this GUI change. 3:20:50 PM