Ranting and Roaring

Notes:

• 4 day vacations rock
• Carmel sucks; all the locals are run out by art galleries. I think it’s off the list.
• Land utilization sucks in Silicon Valley; if there’s a shortage of living space there, it’s entirely man made in a political sense.
• Napa rocks. Mustard’s restuarant rocks. The main problem is there’s no downtime at restaurants, so you can’t chat with the staff. There’s line ups at 4 in the afternoon.
• The Red Eye flight from SFO, arriving 6:00 AM sucks.
• One hour to get all the baggage of a fligh sucks. Common Air Canada, you can do better than this.

Happy Halloween!

Momma Bear has died.

If you know me even a little, you know I’m no wide eyed hippie idealist. However, if there’s a serious avian flu epidemic in Canada, I hope there’s no real debate or not whether Canada should “break” the patent of Tamiflu if Hoffmann-La Roche is incapable of providing sufficient quantities when need is predicted. We’re talking about potentially tens of thousands of Canadian lives here; the Swiss can go f*ck themselves. I’m sure a cash payout after breakout fizzes out will calm their feelings.

• Globe and Mail pro-argument
• Globe and Mail anti-argument
• Google News hack

Normally I don’t blog about my trips before I go on them, but since we have someone staying at our house, I’ll spill the beans earlier.

Myself, Joanne and Trinity-Anne are going to California for the weekend. On the schedule (maybe):

• YYZ->SFO Thursday morning
• The Monterey Bay Aquarium in the afternoon
• Carmel-by-the-Sea in the evening (Clint Eastwood, former mayor)
• Silicon Valley area, Friday
• TagCamp, Friday night
• Mustard’s, lunch Saturday Someone should be fired for that “web site”—dpj].
• A winery tour in Sonoma county, Saturday afternoon
• Calistoga, Saturday night
• Henry’s High Life in San Jose, late Sunday afternoon
• SFO->YYZ late Sunday night

Here’s another “post”:http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2005-October/001196.html I made to the Microformats list.

This makes me think about the mechanism by which syndication feeds were adopted by the blogosphere. Most of you folks come from the tech world, so the need for syndication probably wasn’t a great leap. When I first started reading blogs in 2001, most tech blogs that I read provided syndication feeds; conversely, many or most blogs from the political side of things (for example, the ‘warbloggers’) did not.

I started BlogMatrix in 2001 as way of scraping blogs without syndication to produce feeds for them (as well as a few other things, such as tracking discussions). By late 2003, this service was almost entirely pointless.

What changed?

First, the sheer utility of syndication—the ability of one’s readers to use feed readers—meant that content providers (i.e. bloggers) demanded that their software be capable of providing some sort of syndication feed. The common case was a ‘blogspot’ user which required only the adding of a template; further our, users of software such as GreyMatter simply moved on to something else, such as MT. Secondly (and related), major CMS providers—blogger (later on) and MT (from the beginning)—realized the utility of syndication and offered it as a standard feature.

This is almost exactly analogous to what’s happening to microformats right now; we are just at the earliest stages of adoption. There’s a small number of technology-savvy passionate users generating content (for example) and there’s a number of (admit it) privative tools consuming that content. One can easily imagine much more powerful tools consuming this information—for example, IMDB (for example) collecting reviews from the Internet in general rather than from “Usenet”.

The low barrier to producing microformat content [it’s just a little more markup] and the low barrier to consuming it [it’s just a little parsing] identifies the classic virtuous cycle. And once the ball starts rolling, how much trouble is it for blogger.com to add ‘hcard’ to their user profiles or some “web 2.0” site it easy to produce a calendar entry that can be inserted directly into a blog entry?

And I can’t stress enough the “little more”/“little effort” part that makes this whole thing work. (IMHO) FOAF will be as useful in 3 years time as NAPLPS, the ISO/OSI model, or X.400; it will be steam-rollered by things people actually do, as opposed to speced.

Also: Danny Ayers and Phil Jones comment

I’m off to Halifax for two nights. My sister’s moving back to St. John’s so it seemed like a good opportunity. I’ll be probably be meeting Mike tomorrow too!

I’m starting to worry that Bene Diction has taken a fall over the last few months and bumped his head rather hard. For example, today we read about the US Religious Right:

And don’t speak truth or opinion to or about that power. The loyalty to the [Republican] party is fealty, zeal, patriotism and allegiance. Dissent and disagreement is met aggressively, contempt of the other is expressed in the moral rhetoric. Does that approach give loyalists a sense of power?

Strangely, this person asking for more tolerance is the same Bene Diction who approvingly posted a link to this, the general gist of which is that Republicans are immoral gun-shooting retarded subhumans. Did I miss something?

Little Tobacco writes:

The PM has a legal opinion that tells him that he will have to pay David Dingwall, who resigned under a cloud of corruption from the Canadian Mint, severance. It is easy to say you have an opinion, but I would suggest that someone should get a look at the opinion. The payment of severance may be in Dingwall’s contract. There may be some legal precedent for this. I do not know of one off the top of my head. Resignation to avoid dismissal does not usually garner severance unless the parties have agreed to the same in the contract or subsequently.

The government is claiming that the Privacy Act does not allow them to release information. Perhaps this is correct, but they could release the clause of the contract dealing with severance and they could point us to the actual legal precedents that they are using. This would allow others to offer a concurring or dissenting opinion. The failure to do so does the administration of justice no good and is an affront to Parliament.

The legal opinion is being held up like an invisible shield, deflecting the blame on the courts and the lawyers instead of where it really belongs, on Dingwall and the Government.

Old Joe is misunderstanding the meaning of the word “precedent” here—that is, the implications of not handing a large cash settlement out to Dingwall for resigning from his job/place that paid for his entertainment budget. Someday, this could be any other Liberal: it’s a Dingwall today, but tomorrow it could be a McCallum, an Emerson, a Dryden or gods forbid, even a Martin denied a massive cash payout at taxpayer expense. And that’s not the kind of precedent this government wants to establish.

Answering the question “what problem is trying to be solved by microformats?” requires taking a step and asking “what are microfomats?”. The website [1] provides a number of answers to this question, but I prefer to answer: microformats provide a consistent vocabulary for expressing semantic information commonly found in HTML documents; they are discovered as much as they are created.

There is no “change the world” philosophy behind microformats; they are layered into existing structures and behaviors of content creators. The gap between HTML for presentation and HTML+microformats for semantics is very very small; the narrowness of this gap is what will drive microformat adoption. We’ve seen this sort of thing before: it wasn’t large leap from “CMS generates HTML” to “CMS also generates RSS”; and suddenly the web is connected and bound in way that was hardly imagined 5 years ago.

The question of what type of application and/or service will use microformats isn’t that important. Why? Because if the microformat approach to the web is as powerful as many of us think it is, the applications that will be using it in two, five or ten years time will surprise or even amaze us, just like TCP/IP, RFC822, HTTP+HTML and RSS did over time. Hopefully like these standards, there is something elemental about microformats.

Of course, it may not be and we’ll all look back on this in a couple of years and grimace or laugh. But I doubt it.

The following post is something I sent to the microformats mailing list in support of the following statement by Tantek Çelik:

Not everyone has figured out that “plain” XML has failed (with the
exceptions of RSS and XHTML) on the Web, and thus on its way down
and out as something that is seriously considered, expect to see more and more
desperate “last ditch” efforts to promote it like this article,
and in fact, there will always be a few individuals pushing it.

I have one XML book at home: The XML Companion by Neil Bradley published in 1998—not that long ago. Here’s a few choice paragraphs

XML is an ideal data format for storing structured and semi-structured
text intended for dissemenation and ultimate publication, perhaps on a
variety of media.

Fair enough. What’s going to happen to HTML then from the perspective of a 1998 XML-fan?

HTML has some unique features that XML does not aim to replicate. It
is particularly suited to form based interactions. In addition, the
built-in HTML rendering capability of popular browsers is greater than
that of the most popular style sheet mechanism (CSS). But when
powerful stylesheet mechanisms are more widely available, there will
be nothing to prevent a future version of HTML from becoming an
application of XML…

That is HTML was going to become a niche application of XML but XML is where the action was going to be—XML + stylesheets = the new web. The rest of the book continues with this type of… stuff

<chapter>
<title>An example of an XML fragment</title>
<note>
<para>bla bla bla</para>
<para>The second paragraph</para>
</note>
</chapter>

The web is going to be arbitrary formatted XML documents, supposedly chock full of semantic goodness [because computers know what <para> is, as opposed to <p>?—dpj] and whipped into presentation format by stylesheets.

This was the future of the web in 1998; find almost any other XML-phile from the same period and you’ll find more of the same. Where did we end up? HTML has been restated as an XML application—by the W3C, but not because stylesheets made this possible. There’s a couple of high profile well-defined (or “well-defined”) XML applications out there, RSS being the most notable. There’s a bunch of niche XML applications that you never see, written one-off for particular applications that want to enjoy a text based file format.

But a web full of XML documents of arbitrary application; “plain XML”? That future never happened.

Yesterday, I picked up Zoolander at Costco; it was on sale for 9 bucks. Since I’ve seen Zoolander a bunch of times, I decided I’d skim through the Globe and Mail at the same time on the off chance there was something interesting this weekend. Here’s what I read:

One month after the bodies of two male strippers [widely reported as “models”—dpj] from the United States were found in a Montreal-area quarry, unleashing continent-wide speculation over what went wrong, police believe the deaths may have been due to an unpaid taxi fare.

Surveillance tape screened by police shows the two getting out of a taxi near an all-night rave club. A few moments later, Mark Kraynak and Steve Wright are seen running away. The taxi is captured on tape pursuing them down a back alley.

Police investigating the unsolved deaths say the pair jumped a fence surrounding a quarry near the club. Unbeknownst to them—it was pitch black—only 20 feet separate the fence from the quarry’s abyss.

“We think the two wanted to run away without paying,” said Constable Guy Lajeunesse, a spokesman for the police in Laval, where the two died. “It was very dark when they got to the quarry. They might have thought after they jumped the fence that they were in the bushes.”

Instead, they plunged some 60 feet to their deaths. “They may have died over a $40 cab fare.”