Saturday, April 26, 2003

A warning to others [dive into mark] "I was hoping to also announce that I was now gzip-compressing all my pages, but I havenâ019t heard back from my system administrator yet (and I canâ019t fake it with PHP headers, since Iâ019m not using PHP). What, whatâ019s that you say? Why, itâ019s mod_gzip, of course, the answer to all your bandwidth problems. Marked up text (such as HTML, or RSS, or even RDF) generally compresses down to 1/3 of its original size. Web browsers have supported this transparently for years. Hixieâ019s Natural Log sends pages gzip-compressed to any client who claims (via the HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING header) to be able to handle it. It sure would be nice if more sites used it (check whether yours does), and even nicer if desktop news aggregators supported it. Itâ019s not hard; hereâ019s a 7-line Python function that correctly reads both normal and gzip-compressed web pages. That would include RSS feeds." 10:38:27 AM    comment [] XHTML media type test - results Useful check of browser support for xhtml 10:34:22 AM    comment [] scalable APIs "I believe instead in an approach of producing scalable APIs. The API should scale from the begining scenario up to the expert. The API should reward people that learn the inner workings of it. In the same way that a user of EMACS can become 10X more efficient by learning all the archaic commands, so should an API provide unlimited headroom (ok, maybe i'm going a little off the deep end here...) When designing APIs people should think - How will this be exposed in a tool? How will developers discover the features? What features are the 80% case, and how can I make that simpler? How can a developer progress from the simplest scenario into the full features of the API? Good API design is tough. It is a skill. To you project managers out there: Good API design costs money. Pay up or the developers will stop using your technology - no matter how good it is" 10:12:10 AM    comment [] Boxes and Arrows: Building a Metadata-Based Website "The online world has been flooded in recent years with talk of metadata, structured authoring, cascading style sheets (CSS). These ideas have at their core the idea of standardizing document creation by separating content from display. Additionally, the idea of a semantic web, consisting of ontologies and controlled vocabularies is gaining momentum. These ideas are about representing knowledge so that machine agents can understand them. At the confluence of these two broad categories of activity, new models of websites are emerging that can be as easily navigable by humans as maintained by rigorous processes. The goal of this article is to help readers develop an understanding of core and supporting metadata and the benefits of using it to build a website..." 8:40:10 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 Jon Phipps. Last update: 6/10/2003; 8:53:00 PM.