Glen Scott - Keeping it simple » standards

Obama versus McCain: Web Standards

Glen — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 08:02:01 +0000

Despite his carefully cultivated â€œmaverickâ€ image, McCain is playing it traditional and conservative by using HTML 4.01, the W3C spec from 1999. Obama shows himself to be much more progressive, adopting the 21st century XHTML 1.0 transitional standard.

Obama is RESTful » Idol Hands: Days in the Life of an Alpha Geek

I’ve used Rails. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Glen — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 00:11:20 +0000

Interesting article on how Rails features can be more of a hindrance than a help in many situations. Compared here with Django, which can be cleaner and more lightweight.

Some of the bits and pieces that come bundled with Rails are just plain wrong, the Javascript helpers being one example. The abuse of HTTP by default in some of the scaffolding code being another. Oh, and the markup coming out of various helpers as well. In trying to help the application developer Rails gets in the way of the professional webstandards types.

Morethanseven Â» Why the webstandards world appears to be choosing Django

Facebook, MySpace et al : Open up or die

Glen — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:45:30 +0000

Interesting article from The Economist on how social networks may be falling into the same trap that AOL and Compuserve have done in the past.

Two of the biggest online phenomena of the past couple of yearsâ€”social networks such as Facebook, and virtual worlds such as Second Lifeâ€”look an awful lot like AOL did in 1994. They are closed worlds based on proprietary standards. You cannot easily move information in and out of them: try shifting your Facebook profile to MySpace, or moving a piece of clothing or furniture from Second Life to Entropia Universe.

Ringside Networks are addressing this problem with the “first open source platform” for social networks, Ringside Social Application Server.

Focus your RSS Feeds with Feed Rinse

Glen — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:19:52 +0000

If you ever have subscribed to an RSS feed and then subsequently been overwhelmed by irrelevant content, then Feed Rinse might be for you. It allows you to filter feeds based on keywords, meaning that you can be a lot more specific about the content arriving in your feed reader.

Feed Rinse

Yahoo! joins OpenSocial

Glen — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:15:16 +0000

Last November, OpenSocial was created to help build infrastructure for the social web. OpenSocial provides a common mechanism for developers to easily hook into many different social networks and extend their functionality.

Official Google Blog: OpenSocial continues to grow: Welcome, Yahoo!

The Yahoo! Search Open Ecosystem

Glen — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 08:56:09 +0000

A few weeks ago, we began talking about the new Yahoo! Search open platform. Today, we’re releasing more details about two important components of the initiative — the developer platform as well as our support of a number of semantic web standards.

Yahoo! Search Blog: The Yahoo! Search Open Ecosystem

W3C Validator Gets a Facelift

Glen — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 22:49:45 +0000

Haven’t used the validator for a long time, I must confess, so was pleasantly surprised when I visited today and noticed a revamp:

The W3C Markup Validator Service

Instant Messaging 2.0

Glen — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:36:54 +0000

An interesting post on how different IM providers are embracing open standards:

Consider that everyone IMs. Websites come and go – but IM remains. Whatâ€™s important about that is that your social network persists over many, many years. My friendster buddy list is essentially useless – since I no longer use that site. But my AIM buddy list, which I still use, has been around for over 10 years. And with XMPP, itâ€™s now reusable. It could become the standard machine-readable way to represent a social network.

IM 2.0