Tag: standards

Tag soup is not healthy

Let’s have a look at one other bit of the markup:
…&lt:/p&gt:
&lt:p class=MsoNormalgt;&lt:![if !supportEmptyParas]&gt: &lt:![endif]&gt:&lt:o:p&gt:&lt:/o:p&gt:&lt:/p&gt:
&lt:p class=”MsoNormal”&gt:…
Say what? Let’s ignore the utter invalidity of this line for one minute and focus on what it is trying to do… Increase the margin of the surrounding paragraphs. I think I can see the reasoning behind this (it almost certainly involved someone in a meeting one day saying “roundtripping is more important than cleanliness”) but still, it should have been replaced by simply placing class “thematic-break” on the following element and then adding the following style rule, surely:
.thematic-break { margin-top: 2em; }

and yet, there are people dreaming about the PSVI. a slap in the face as i actually said to eric today, i wonder when we can cut back on the regexp in our daily chores.

design reuse

being open source is not enough. for a small startup like wyona, it is important to grow a community around our project. apache lenya is standards-driven, probably more so then most content management systems. but why stop at the plumbing level? for all users care, having your data in xml and your framework open source doesn’t give them immediate benefits.
this is where reuse at the site level comes in. real problems are not solved by frameworks per se, but rather with concrete uses of the framework on a real site. we therefore encourage the sharing of and collaboration on complete sites, with navigation, information architecture, workflows..
in due time, it should be possible to capture best practice in sample publications, and thus distribute improvements to these default publications to all our customers.

Xaraya

I tested the new smartphones last night. I had to check into this site, of course, and it rendered not bad at all. I’m inclined to do a simpler, one column layout without the sidebars if I ever decide to buy one of those. I still think their GUI sucks ass (its based on tiny buttons with illogical function mapping). I’d much rather have a phone with a touch screen, but they are very bulky. So I guess I will skip this generation of mobiles. The picture is almost original size. It’s highly alarming that every mobile device is demoed with sports scores. Who gives a fuck about sports scores?


2002-11-05: Xaraya is now public. Initial reactions are very positive. I’m glad we didn’t do any forums, because forums attract scum. In other news I did an interview with internet intern, a german mass market internet rag (some 400k circulation). I talked about the reasons behind Xaraya and why Xaraya will succeed where other php cms will fail:

  • skilled developers
  • a real architecture
  • no incompetent advocates

The article should be up in 2 weeks.
2002-11-09: I opened a whoopass can’o’worms when I outlined my plans to implement workflow for Xaraya early next year. I want to start very simple (actually the work would be done for a client project) because I knew from preparing the web services talks that workflows are a very complex topic. Gary suggested I look into wfmc which is the industry standard for workflows. Very nice, but I guess implementing it would keep me busy for a year. Workflows might be a topic for oscom too. Both wyona and zope already implement some support for xml-defined workflows.
2002-11-28: I created my first WSDL file today, with the help of some tools. I’m pretty sure my WSDL is invalid. Scripting languages with their weak type systems and WSDL don’t exactly mix well. I hope to eventually enable web services to call into the APIs that Xaraya offers. At this stage, it is merely a nice idea, but I’m slowly making progress.
2003-01-25: I took the plunge, and am now running a current Xaraya snapshot again. Lots of new toys to play with 🙂

Yeah I know I have been slow with updates, but a) live has been hectic b) Xaraya is not yet very convenient for blogging.

On the bright side, comments should now be fully functional, with a nice tree view.
2003-02-12: Another one joins the MT love. Marcel is a buddy from the Xaraya PMC, and the 2 of us should really be using our own dogfood, but alas it is not there yet re: blogging comfort. One day soon, though.
2003-02-12: Xaraya Usability Recommendations is probably one of the more extensive studies about usability in the open source field. And we are not even at 1.0 yet. Kudos to Doug and Drew for this fine doc. If we follow through with this one, good things are in store for the web layman.
2003-02-21: This feed validates as RSS. I took the plunge, and fixed the RSS feed for Xaraya. Unlike postnuke, Xaraya will ship with a rich feed that makes use of the 2.0 format. We now also have SOAP support. Mike pushed a changeset that enables to call Xaraya API methods over SOAP. Here is the relevant part from the WSDL.
<wsdl:arrayType=”xsd:string[]” />
<xsd:complexType name=”wsModAPIFuncRequest”>
<xsd:sequence>
<xsd:element name=”module” type=”xsd:string” />
<xsd:element name=”func” type=”xsd:string” />
<xsd:element name=”type” type=”xsd:string” />
<xsd:element name=”args” type=”xsd:xsdl:myelement0″ />
</xsd:sequence>
</xsd:complexType>

2003-02-27: Aye, Kevin, we will work extra hard on usability.

The PN user registration process is plain silly. It is one of the things that I was hoping to see the last of in eventually moving to Xaraya. I have a suggestion for anyone working on the end-user (non-admin) aspects of the core modules. Pretend that the typical user is my mother who gets very flustered when web site processes aren’t as easy and straightforward as possible. And Mom cries when she gets flustered. Please folks … don’t make my Mom cry.

2003-04-21: congrats team.

It is my pleasure to announce the first Beta Release of Xaraya (.900). This release is the culmination of nearly a year’s worth of hard work and undying dedication to creating. All of the developers on the project have devoted many hours to reach where we are today. The first Beta release for Xaraya is intended to capture a baseline of what needs to be accomplished before the final release. This is merely another step in the long journey that began with PHP Nuke, and then PostNuke for many of us.

2003-06-25: My friend John Cox is being interviewed about Xaraya:

With the articles system combined with the dynamic data system (both written by Michel), a webmaster no longer has to wait for developers to dream up new modules. All a webmaster has to do is dream up what they want to display, and from there it’s just a matter of adding 2 templates into the system and creating a new publication type to gather the data.

I just installed Xaraya again after neglecting it for a while, and I must say, very impressive. Time to mop up the nuke market with their silly systems.
2003-06-30: Looks like everyone and his dog is converging on XML pipeline processors these days. With more powerful XSLT editors, maybe the time for these technologies to appeal to a more mainstream audience has come.

2003-07-02:

KAYWA
No anagrams found.
WYONA
AN YOW
NOWAY
NAY OW
ANY OW
YAW ON
YAW NO
WAY ON
WAY NO
XARAYA
A RAY AX
LENYA
LAY NE
LAY EN
AN LEY
AN ELY
AN LYE
ANY EL
NAY EL

2003-07-20: Xaraya goes new ways again. They now use phing, a php clone of ant, to maintain build files for the distribution. Very neat. The more standardization, the better. Apache Lenya is using ant more and more for various scripting tasks too. This nicely leverages the very good ant documentation and literature, and means you have to learn fewer concepts.
2003-08-02: Xaraya is now bitkeeper project #6 by number of change sets.
2003-11-04:

Trolling through the Bitkeeper tree on the site, looking at the change sets, the different names, the comments, it just sort of occurred to me this is beginning to look like a factory, chugging merrily along I’m noticing more and more people on the public mailing lists wanting to take the bk plunge. The collective consciousness has apparently reached a critical mass conclusion and internalized that this is the normal way of life around here. Quick rewind to 8 months ago, when most everyone (me especially) were still trying to figure out how to do a merge… You’ve come a long way, baby.Marc

I am very happy that we made the decision to establish sound processes, use bitkeeper instead of cvs, and aim for quality. It took longer than the usual crappy php project, but then again it is of much higher quality. We are now the number 3 user of bitkeeper, only surpassed by MySQL and the Linux kernel. Amazing.
2003-12-12: This post led to an avalanche. Wow, 19 months later, the repercussions are still working its way through the php cms community 🙂
2007-06-20: linux.com is now running on Xaraya, a CMS I co-founded

WebDAV and CMS

henri makes some interesting observations about webdav, and how they could be used in cms:

WebDAV could also be used as an interop protocol for exchanging content between different CMS systems. The problem is that there would need to be a common data model for this. Options include adopting DocBook or Zope CMF as the common data model. Having Dublin Core properties for all resources in a common namespace would also be a possibility. HTTP error codes should be used for providing information on failed or succeeded creates and updates. The DeltaV specification also defines an XML format for the body of the error reports (mgd_errstr, etc).

generating webdav views from dynamic cms content will not be without difficulties, but will lift open source cms to a whole different level.

Weblogs & jabber

jogger is a new service by jabber.org that lets you update a weblog from within a jabber client. it will be interesting to watch as they release their XML-RPC API. with some work, it could probably be adapted to my favorite weblog system, postnuke it would be great if the different weblogs would align their API.

Reliable HTTP

A bit unclear why this is needed:

Reliable HTTP (HTTPR) is a new protocol that offers the reliable delivery of HTTP packets between the server and client. This solves a number of issues that are evident in current HTTP and opens the way to reliable messaging between Web services.