Jon Phipps' NSDL Weblog
Good stuff that NSDLers might find interesting, and an experiment in using weblogs for community building and knowledge transfer.





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Wednesday, May 14, 2003
 

"Having read Google Cache Hacking it occured to me how useful such a thing would be if it were built into the browser. So instead of simply returning an error when it canâ019t find a page it actually goes and sees if google (or any other archive type site) has a copy in their database somewhere, and shows me that. Would be nice touch. Also, having tried to get the bookmarklet to work and failed miserably I went and put my own together. Google Cache Lookerupper"
9:32:48 PM    comment []

"When Google offered its SOAP API, REST proponents argued that it had, in some sense, seceded from the Web. "[Google] deprived the Web of approximately a billion useful XML URIs," wrote REST proponent Paul Prescod. What ought Google have done to satisfy the naysayers? One undocumented solution, since discontinued, was to support URLs such as http://google.com/xml?q=roy+fielding, so that a simple HTTP GET request would return a package of XML data. Does this kind of thing qualify as a Web service? Absolutely. To see why, consider how a similar kind of service, news syndication based on the RSS (Rich Site Summary) format, has fared..."
8:57:04 PM    comment []

"I just had a look at draft-hollenbeck-ietf-xml-guidelines-04. Section 4.6 says "XML Schema should be used as the formalism in the absence of clearly stated reasons to choose another." I strongly disagree with this recommendation. I believe RELAX NG is preferable in many situations to XML Schema and should receive at least equal billing. Concretely, I propose in the sentence above changing "XML Schema" to "XML Schema or RELAX NG"."
8:54:23 PM    comment []

OK. Here's something worth thinking about. With all of the pie-in-the-sky 'blather' we create around here, here's something I noticed 8 years ago and I can't believe nobody's soleved this problem either...

"An oft-heard rallying cry against the annotation methods peculiar to the Semantic Web is “But nobody ever does that!”

True or not, I don’t think countering this viewpoint is productive. I honestly don’t.

“Nobody does real metadata! Nobody does annotation!” howls the geek, as he goes to his bookshelf, picks out his latest computer book, and thumbs through the index.

“Everyone must do metadata!” cries the semanticist, picking up an unindexed book of poetry.

I tell all y’all what. Leave out the modals, the “must” and “should.” Leave out the indefinite pronouns, the “nobody” and “everyone.” Then go out and find the very real people who do do metadata and annotation. Learn what they do.

I mean, with all of this Semantic Web blather, not a single solitary soul has come up with a decent UI for an indexing app for marked-up text. NOBODY. NOBODY!"


3:46:08 PM    comment []


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