Where I’m @

20031022

XForms Full Ahead
The W3C’s XForms recommendation has been out for long enough now that we have had time to read through it on the train, and we really like what we read. Besides that the W3C has managed to mature quite a bit in its recommendation-writing abilities, XForms seems to be a good step in the right direction and may even be a good midway destination for web markup.

XForms incorporates part or all of several other W3C recommendations such as XML Events and XPath, is designed to integrate with existing markup languages such as XHTML, and is itself a conforming subset of XML 1.0.

Our level of semantic awareness and our ability to comprehend all implications of this text are limited, to be generous. But we can see already the way that we might be able to replace existing forms with XForms. As well, it’s nice to see an organization continuing the effort to see aspects of web semantics and data storage and data transfer for the separate entities that they are, rather than the big mush of them that something like HTML and .NET makes. Where XForms is based on functionality of elements such as “something that makes things happen on the page without touching a server” as distinguished from “send this form data to the server”, .NET sticks to the old-fashioned HTML model of viewing things by their GUI nature and dealing with their functionality in attributes.

While we are big believers in the usefulness of attributes, when attributes become first-order semantics, something is wrong. We’ve seen this issue reflected in the great self-aware blog debate of some time back regarding standardization of blogging structures (whose location we cannot currently locate). Our current opinion is that elements describe functions on the page, attributes merely describe the elements’ characters, for lack of a better term.

20031015

Mozilla’s Latest
In glancing at the Mozilla Foundation’s upcoming site redesign (to which we were directed by Sam Latchman via webdesign-l), we noticed that Mozilla Firebird (f/k/a Phoenix) has a new point release out, 0.7. Getchers today!

20031010

Vague and Grey
We’ve been quiet for some time, only in part due to lack of interesting news or anything other to say than “Me too.” We’ve also been busy with the .NET stuff at work, none of which lends itself to our small mind to blog about.

Through repeated use (kinda like hitting yourself on the forehead with a hammer) we’ve grown rather accustomed to .NET and its accompanying IDE, VisualStudio.NET. Unfamiliar with JSP, we can’t compare them with other OO web-applicable IDEs and platforms. At the end of the day we have to admin reluctantly that .NET has a lot to recommend it. We can’t write the purple prose that should be used here to talk about type safety and RAD, we just find that we are able to do some pretty good customization and powerful processing without a schooling in CS or OO. We have a side project on the back burner that is in PHP, and we'll see how we do with going over/back to a much looser language.