My head has been hoisted. At second glance, the Java Outline Editor is a nice outliner.

I used the program to write my latest Java Matters column for Linux Magazine and I've been writing a lot of Radio UserLand Kick Start with Radio's outliner. I'm coming around to the idea that an outliner is a superior writing environment to word-processing software.

I assemble these 2,000- to 2,500-word columns over several days with a lot of jumping between a Web browser, Java editor, command line, and the piece. I'm frequently moving things around within the same basic structure: heading, lead, introduction, implementation, examples, and conclusion.

Being able to expand and collapse portions of the document as I work, drag things around, and take focused views of particular portions saves a considerable amount of time and helps impose some genuine organization on my thoughts.

Though I ended up with a few places that needed to be fixed because I wrote them in staccato cadence like Joe Friday interrogating a suspect, on the whole it was a promising experience. Next I'm going to see how well it handles entire books. [Workbench] 
3:44:30 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Bill Kearney: "You could use my personal list functions on Syndic8. The lists can be downloaded in OCS, RSS and OPML formats. You can upload/edit the lists via XMLRPC calls. Lists can be public or private." [Scripting News] 
6:14:05 AM      comment []   trackback []  



JavaScript and ActionScript. JavaScript and ActionScript share a syntactical core - ECMAScript edition 2. This gives JavaScript coders a leg up on using one of the most popular animation formats - Flash .SWF files. By Jacques Surveyor 0702 [WebReference News] 
6:07:35 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Use XML-RPC.

It was disheartening to learn (via Brent, via Dave) that Blogger is planning on moving away from XML-RPC in favor of SOAP:

We are moving away from XML-RPC. If you choose to take advantage of the capabilities of the new API, you will need to use SOAP instead of XML-RPC. This was a difficult decision (made collectively by the designers of Echo), because there is a lot of investment in XML-RPC in the blogging tool space, and it is great for getting things done quickly. But we felt the technical advantages offered by SOAP were worth the effort. [their emphasis]

Here's my take on what this means for Blogger developers:

1. Everyone who wants to talk to the new API will have to find or write a SOAP implementation that works in the development environment they're using for their application.
2. Applications will have to be adapted to call through the new interfaces using SOAP rather than XML-RPC
3. Lots of interop testing will have to be done. This takes lots of time, which is expensive. I know from personal experience.
4. The capabilities (and usability) of available SOAP toolkits may vary widely. Whether the limitations of various SOAP toolkits will become apparent in the (N)Echo API remains to be seen, but my past experience tells me that there's often a lot more work involved in calling APIs using SOAP than might be apparent on the surface.
5. For the unfortuante developers who'll have to come up with their own SOAP implementation, there's an enormous barrier to entry, which will be especially difficult if not impossible for independent developers -- who if I understand correctly were supposed to be the very developers that the (N)Echo effort is trying to help the most.
6. Users will have to upgrade their applications to the new versions. In all likelihood, there will be bugs and some users will lose data. Who will take the blame for this? The developers.

Will it be worth it? Will what we have at the end of this process be better than what we already have? I don't have a crystal ball, but my fear is that we developers will have a large amount of work to do if we want to support this decision, and that the benefit to our users will be negligable.

A few other comments...

There are four reasons cited in the (N)Echo Wiki for not using XML-RPC. I'll go through them one-by-one:

1. "Serious historical confusion about whether string types supported encodings other than just ASCII."
   
   As noted in the Wiki, this has been resolved. As best I can tell, it was a non-issue from the beginning, and as on 6/30/03 Dave updated the XML-RPC spec to clarify that XML-RPC supports any string encoding that's valid XML.
   
   
2. "Doesn't support SSL. (HTTPS is not identified as a valid transport mechanism in the spec)."
   
   Dave says in the Wiki, "if you asked me if you can use HTTPS to transport XML-RPC I would say yes. HTTPS is HTTP." See also this message on the XML-RPC discussion group.
   
   
3. "Doesn't support timezones."
   
   As I noted in my comment in the Wiki, there's no reason that this problem isn't really easy to solve. Just express dates in GMT.
   
   
4. The fourth reason has been deleted from the Wiki since I started writing this. Basically it said that if the (N)Echo API were to send posts back and forth as XML, then they would have to be entity-enocded if it were to use XML-RPC, and that this isn't an issue with SOAP.
   
   I don't think the reasoning here is totally sound, which is probably why it was removed from the page. If SOAP is used for passing posts back and forth as XML, then they'd still have to be encoded. As I recall, SOAP does have a provision for transporting XML documents, but I'd venture to guess that support for this feature is not available in many of the current implementations, and even then, there are probably huge interop issues looming, since it's one of the more advanced features of the SOAP specification.

Evan cites Ben Trott's "Why we need Echo" reasoning for not using XML-RPC. Ben has updated the page since it was originally posted, with a note that the internationalization issue has been resolved -- basically the same resolution now listed in the Wiki's first reason for not using XML-RPC. As far as I can tell, this is Evan's only reason for using SOAP over XML-RPC, and it's a red herring.

Lastly, Evan notes parenthetically that the decision to use SOAP over XML-RPC was "made collectively by the designers of Echo". As far as I can tell, no such consensus has yet been reached, and SOAP isn't even the only alternative to XML-RPC. To say now that Blogger will favor SOAP over XML-RPC is at least jumping the gun.

I wonder what other motivations are behind this statement. We know that Google has SOAP server-side tools, since the GoogleAPI uses SOAP. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Google's engineers have done a lot of fine-tuning on their SOAP implementation. Could this have had any influence on Blogger's decision to move to SOAP?

[Jake's Radio 'Blog] 
6:01:13 AM      comment []   trackback []  



On Social Software. A must read by Clay on how blogs and wikis differ as tools for getting things done, using the Echo wiki as an ex... [thomas n. burg | randgänge] 
5:59:12 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Intellectual Blindness.

How we interpret what we read is subject to our biases.  At the extreme, total blindness occurs, fabricating something entirely different.  I am no exception and had many embarrasing moments when such blindness strikes.

Yesterday, it happened to Sam Ruby.  Upon reading Rogers Cadenhead's description of SSF activities in which he wrote that his goal was to develop a new specification from scratch, Sam concluded that Roger was developing a new protocol from scratch even after going back and checking to make sure.

Human mind continues to amaze me in how it works and I am left to wonder what evolutionary purpose these type of blindness serves.  Other than suffering from occasional intellectual blindness like Sam, I suffer from inability to see things right in front of me.  It usually happens when I open the refrigerator looking for something to eat.

Another weird thing is that I seem to organize things far differently than my wife.  She likes to store things in pre-assigned locations.  I tend to just remember the location where I see things last.  This train of thought begs me to ask this question:

Will there be Men and Women versions of Longhorn?

Update: This is my theory on the differences in the way men and women organize things: women change location, men remembers location.  When luxurious caves were popular, women usually stayed near the cave and stored food in the cave.  Since caves are finite in space, they had to organize storage efficiently.

Meanwhile, men had to travel long distances to catch animals which means travelling lightly and having to memorize locations and distinguish directions reliably.  So, women move things to organize while men just notes where things are and move on.  Is this too simple?

[Don Park's Blog] 
5:58:20 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Limpet, a subscription exporter for NetNewsWire. Limpet by Dave Taylor is a small C app that generates an OPML file of NetNewsWire’s subscriptions. This is useful for folks who like to automate such things. (Here’s Dave’s weblog.) [ranchero.com] 
5:50:04 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Validator documentation. It seems the W3C have made some changes to their beta validator's XML output option. The bad news is that this has (temporarily) broken my web service interface, but the good news is that the feature is now documented on the W3C's site. Hopefully I'll get a chance to fix the web service interface in the near future, but it will remain a toy rather... [Artima Web Services Buzz] 
5:44:18 AM      comment []   trackback []  



XML-RPC, SOAP, and/or REST. Dave Winer: Here's the Wiki page where people are deciding whether to use XML-RPC and/or SOAP. You can express your opinion if you like. That's how it works. Excellent! Now lets see if we can have a respectful dialog on the subject? ... [Sam Ruby] 
5:42:58 AM      comment []   trackback []  



RESTLog. Joe Gregorio's RESTLog is a fascinating piece of technology and a great example of the RESTian model of web service in action. Everything is built on XML and HTTP - new blog entries are POSTed to the index page as RSS 2.0 item elements, edits are done with the little-used HTTP PUT method and the DELETE method can be used to delete items. Content... [Artima Web Services Buzz] 
5:36:18 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Stuart's pingback roundup. Stuart has a good summary of the recent advances being made in the Pingback/Trackback implementation sphere. [Artima Web Services Buzz] 
5:35:16 AM      comment []   trackback []  



You know me. Dave Winer: The "You Know Me" Button. Dave hates posting comments on blogs and then having to check back constantly to see if anyone has replied (I do too). Sam Ruby's solution is to provide the comments as a separate RSS feed for each of his entries, but Dave wants something more automatic that won't clog up his aggregator. Dave's new proposal is... [Artima Web Services Buzz] 
5:34:22 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Pingback redux. I think I've worked out a way of implementing Pingback (or a Pingback-like system) without any need for XML-RPC, elements or custom HTTP headers. There are three principle reasons for using Pingback to "detect" a link to a page rather than relying on referrals: A referral from a blog is likely to come from that blog's front page,... [Artima Web Services Buzz] 
5:33:28 AM      comment []   trackback []  



A plea for pings. Blogs I would read a lot more often if only they pinged weblogs.com when they updated: Decafbad Stop Design Keith Devens Tony Bowden afongen Brent Ashley The Web Standards Project Without pings, they languish at the bottom of my blogroll where I won't notice or visit them. My blogroll is my only mechanism for keeping track of the blogs... [Artima Web Services Buzz] 
5:32:31 AM      comment []   trackback []  



The CSS Zen Garden. This is something we've needed for a long time. The CSS Zen Garden demonstrates CSS as used by graphic designers, and is a truly beautiful sight to behold. It currently showcases 5 radically different designs all using exactly the same markup, and invites further contributions from other designers. Finally, a proper demonstration that standards... [Artima Web Buzz] 
5:31:03 AM      comment []   trackback []  



From HTML to CSS. Tom Gilder: "I did this in HTML, how do I do it in CSS?". A collection of tips for replicating visual formatting effects in old-style HTML with their CSS equivalents. A good resource for people just getting started with CSS. [Artima Web Buzz] 
5:30:06 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Javascript, the DOM and application/xhtml. One of the side-effects of switching my blog to serving pages as application/xhtml+xml to browsers that support it (mainly Gecko engine browsers) was that my blockquote citations script simply stopped working in those browsers. The reason this happened is touched upon by Mark Pilgrim in The Road to XHTML 2.0: MIME Types: essentially, when dealing... [Artima Web Buzz] 
5:29:21 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Eric Meyer Redesigns. Eric Meyer has released a new selection of designs over on Meyerweb. The designs are inspiring, and Eric's CSS is well worth perusing for style tips and insights in to reliable methods of creating relatively complex layouts. [Artima Web Buzz] 
5:28:49 AM      comment []   trackback []  



More practical benefits of web standards. D. Keith Robinson recently launched the redesigned website for the Washington State Drowning Prevention Network. He has written a fascinating account of the development process used for the site, which validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional and uses CSS for layout. The following extract in particular caught my eye: These major changes and layout... [Artima Web Buzz] 
5:28:21 AM      comment []   trackback []  



The Way Forward. Dave Shea: The Way Forward: HTML will die. Today's internet is obsolete, and anyone still coding in HTML 4 is planning the obsolescence of their own code. The big picture says that if, and this is a big if, but if we can move to an XML-based internet, then revisions to markup languages, existing and new, don't require browser updates. Once we... [Artima Web Buzz] 
5:25:07 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Gallic Flash. The French Flash Festival website provides an introduction to many francophone flash treats such as a visit to the surreal Rolitoland, the fun sound experiments at Audiogame, the endearing Plok! or the strange goings on at Incorect. Lots more to explore on the festival site (click on 'preselections' for the shortlist) [MetaFilter] 
5:14:32 AM      comment []   trackback []