Apparently, the Monastic one (a.k.a., my personal albatross) seems some value in a data binding package, and he correctly points out that validation may not be necessary part of the equation.  I'll take what I can get.

Meanwhile he states surprise, not once but twice, that I would be willing to go all the way to web services and all the way to SOAP in order to achieve this.

So, I felt it instructive to explore exactly how far that is.  This resulted in a new essay, entitled, Soap By Example.  Enjoy.

  5:28:40 PM   Comment 

Dave Winer: Sam Ruby will probably appreciate this loose definition of continuity in software standards from this day in Y2K.  I do.  See also functionally stabilized.

  11:07:55 AM   Comment 

I just committed code which validates the new creativeCommons rss module.  What this entails is the following:

• Ensuring that the value of the license element is a fully qualified (i.e., non-relative) rfc2396 URI.
• Warning if the creativeCommons prefix is used to indicate any namespace other than http://backend.userland.com/creativeCommonsRssModule.
• Warning if both the creativeCommons:license and cc:license elements are used.

This continues the effort to codify RSS Best Practices.  The first bullet above is the same concern as the one expressed on <a> and <img> tags previously.  The second is to avoid confusion.  The third is because while the following are both valid RSS 2.0, there is no precidence rule used to arbitrate between them should they differ:

  9:06:12 AM   Comment 

• Contracts: agreeing on formats
• Tool building: know what the data will be before the first instance shows up
  • Database integration
  • User interface tools
  • Programming language bindings
• Validation: make sure we got what we expected

  7:28:36 AM   Comment 

In response to Matt, there are lots of Open Source licenses.  I suspect that many of the CC licenses will qualify.  And, yes, Jon Udell recently released some software under a license that some would have you believe was anti-competitive and a cancer.

The key difference between by-sa and GPL is one of marketing genious.

Had Jon merely copyrighted his work, you could have copied it had you asked for and obtained Jon's permission.  All Jon has done is let you know in advance under what conditions you are not even required to ask.

Update: Lawrence Lessig says that CC licenses won't interact with software licenses.  This ignores the fact that they already have.  The most he can say is that his energies are focused elsewhere, which is fair enough.

  7:19:06 AM   Comment